Did you know that George Floyd was a criminal? In fact, Floyd had been to prison multiple times for a range of offences, the most serious being a violent robbery in which he held a woman at gunpoint in her apartment during an armed robbery. Drug offences, robbery, trespassing – this was George Floyd’s past, these are facts.
These facts were the favoured talking points of American white supremacists following Floyd’s now infamous murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. For all intents and purposes, these weren’t lies – they were and are facts. However, the repeated promotion of these “facts” was widely understood to be a concerted attempt by anti-black racists to justify Floyd’s murder and to divert conversation away from the very serious and real problem of systemic anti-black racism and police brutality in the US.
Did you also know that in England, attacks on Muslim communities in certain parts of the country have been based on the fact that there have been multiple grooming scandals involving predominantly Muslim men? A report for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue stated that “Cases of ‘grooming gangs’ in the UK attributed to the perpetrators’ Pakistani heritage…has served as mobilisation for various demonstrations, as well as the foundation for violent attacks against Muslims”. You’ll often hear far-right bigots justifying attacks on Mosques or Muslim women by citing the “fact” that Muslim men have engaged in child sexual abuse.
Indeed, in medieval England the allegation that Jews engaged in coin clipping was often the basis for antisemitic violence and persecution. Was it happening? In many cases, yes – it was a fact. But it was also being done by Christians and was a widespread practice of the time.
Deploying “facts” to justify and excuse hatred against minorities is often the favoured tactic of the far-right, yet when it comes to Jews, in steps the far left. The violent attacks on Jews and Israelis in Amsterdam were met by an avalanche of whataboutery and fact-checking. Of course, the truth is important - however racists have long attempted to provide cover for their bigotry by simply stating the “facts”, no matter the wider context.
We’ve seen numerous left-wing activists and social media grifters pouring over the events in Amsterdam last week. In their minds they’re simply reporting the facts and telling the truth. But what they are also doing is deploying the exact same tactics as the far right in attempting to divert attention away from racist violence. That by providing isolated and uncontextualised explanations of the terrible and often racist behaviour of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, their audiences are allowed to conclude that the violent antisemitism that followed is somehow perhaps more understandable and even justified.
This episode serves as a worrying case for where we are and where we are heading. It shows what we can expect if we see further antisemitic violence, especially in the form of anti-Jewish terrorism. What happens if a synagogue or a kosher supermarket are attacked, and people are killed? Will these same activists be combing through the social media of the victims to see if they’re Zionists? Will they be checking if the synagogue had previously raised funds for Israel or the IDF? After all, they may just be the facts.
Danny Morris is OSINT and Tech Policy Manager at CST
