How an Antisemitic Rampage near the Anne Frank Museum Got Normalized

Antisemitism is the Never-Ending Evil

Remembering Anne Frank

The city that killed Anne Frank is now beating up Jews in antisemitic attacks. Most of us think of Amsterdam in the Netherlands as a kind of hipster paradise, a beautiful old city that combines Old World architecture, charming canals, liberal politics, a legal red-light district, and lots of drugs into a lefty utopia.

What people forget is that Anne Frank went into hiding in this city in the 1940s when the Nazis came to deport the Jews. Her father, Otto Frank, was a wealthy man and had already moved his family out of Germany into Holland in an effort to find safer ground. The half-measure (he should have just hot-footed it to South America) worked only for a short time. Otto Frank ran a big spice factory in Amsterdam and when the orders came that his oldest daughter Margot was to be “deported” (the euphemism for “sent to a concentration camp”), the Franks went on the lam.

They moved into living accommodations in the attic space above Otto Frank’s factory. The factory remained in operation, even after Otto Frank, the owner, “disappeared.” A lot of Jewish people disappeared in the 1940s in Europe and nobody raised much of an eyebrow. What was not known at the time was that Otto Frank and his family along with other friends went into hiding. The attic residents had to be quiet by day when the factory was open, but when the workers went home, the people in the attic could make some noise, talk, walk around. A benevolent Christian soul named Miep Gies knew what was going on and regularly brought food and other supplies to the hide-aways. Miep (real first name Hermine) was the best known of the several people helping the Franks on the quiet.

Dutch national Miep Gies had a job in the factory and worked throughout World War II. In fact, she was working on August 4, 1944 at her desk when the police burst in, told her to be quiet, and ran upstairs to arrest the Jews in the attic. They were hauled off to concentration camps, where Anne Frank and her sister both perished. Actually, everyone but Otto Frank died in a concentration camp in the ensuing weeks. Otto Frank returned to the attic after the war and found—and published—his younger daughter’s now famous diary about the years she spent in hiding. Miep died in 1994 after having received the highest award that Israel can bestow on a Gentile. It’s called the “Righteous Among the Nations” honor which she got in 1972.

You can visit “attic” where the Franks hid out. It’s spacious enough until you realize 8 people lived there for almost two years. Six non-Jews who had affiliations to Otto Frank’s factory helped them in various ways. Miep Gies was their lifeline, but the Franks survived with the help of a tiny network of people willing to risk their lives for those eight souls in the attic. One day, somebody found out about the secret annex and it got reported to the police who rounded up the hide-aways. To this day, no one knows who found out the secret, but we know that all of them except for Otto Frank would die within months of being discovered under the most unspeakable of conditions.

The Amsterdam Pogrom in 2024

That’s why it’s so shocking that Amsterdam on November 7, 2024 experienced numerous and seemingly well organized attacks on Jews. Geert Wilders, the Dutch populist leader of the country, called it a pogrom. Many of the Jews attacked were tourists, in town to watch a soccer game. Attackers—choreographed thanks to social media channels— chased the Jewish soccer fans, beating them brutally if they could catch them. Other Jews were just harassed. Some were thrown into the iconic Amsterdam canals, and at least one Jew jumped into a canal to escape being beaten.

The soccer game—not that anybody follows soccer—pitted the team called Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv against the local Ajax team from Amsterdam. Ajax won the match. It was a scheduled, sanctioned, normal event. The attack had nothing to do with who won or lost the game (not that it would make that less reprehensible), it was against the Jews. After all, Amsterdam won the soccer game.

Wilders even used X to state, “We have become the Gaza of Europe.” The attacks reportedly sent 10 Israeli tourists to the hospital with injuries. The attack is being blamed on local Muslims.

It could have been much worse, Dutch authorities said in their own lame self-defense, but many Israelis hid in their hotel rooms while the riots were going on. Ironic. Not the first time Jews had to hide in Amsterdam. It’s sort of perverse that Dutch authorities would praise Jews for hiding in Amsterdam.

The Prime Minister of Holland is a guy named Dick Schoof and he called the violence “unacceptable.”  Wow, somebody buy that man a thesaurus. “Unacceptable” is when you throw your gum wrapper on the street. Evil, reprehensible, wicked … those are what you call a systematic attack on Jews in a civilized country.

Schoof has also been on the phone with Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Netanyahu tends to mean business about stuff like this.

The U.S. Ambassador to Holland is a Jewish woman named Deborah Lipstadt and she was “horrified.”  She also noted that the Dutch authorities allowed the attacks to continue for a long time without intervention. But did we do anything? Lipstadt didn’t even bother to write a strong worded letter.

News reports conflict a bit, so it’s interesting that Lipstadt weighed in on the side of law enforcement neglect. Some reports say that Dutch police tried to intervene right at the start, but things got away from them. Eye witnesses tend to report that the Dutch cops just stood around nonchalantly and observed the brutality—if they showed up at all. If Jews were hoping that Amsterdam authorities would protect them, they were sadly mistaken.

So how did all of this happen? European news services claim that pro-Palestinian groups used WhatsApp and Telegram to coordinate the attacks after the soccer game. Ironically, some of the attacks occurred just yards from the Anne Frank museum. And the attacks had to have been planned well in advance, knowing that there would be many Jewish people in Amsterdam for the soccer match. The social media posts allegedly were trying to get antisemites to join them on what they so revoltingly called a “Jew hunt.”

Holland has a king (who knew?), a low-profile royal type named King Willem-Alexander. Here’s his picture; he has a bit of a J.D. Vance air about him. He said publicly that Holland had once again let down the Jews, just as Holland failed the Jews in World War II. I don’t normally applaud monarchs, but King Willem-Alexander had the most on-target response to date.

Some of the antisemitic thugs (that may be an oxymoron) offered to let Jews go free if they would shout pro-Palestinian slogans. A disturbing video from the event (which may be gone by now) shows a Jewish man on the ground, begging for mercy and trying to protect his head, only for attackers to punch him so hard in the head that he lost consciousness. Thanks to the smartphone era, these things all get recorded.

Meanwhile, Jewish people likewise took to WhatsApp and started to mobilize a network to bring injured Jews to safe houses for first aid and to grant shelter to those just trying to escape the mayhem. It is important to note that it was the Jews themselves who provided rescue and safety for those attacked, not the Amsterdam police or officials. Some reports say it was hours after the attacks commenced that the police even seemed to notice.

One anonymous commentator told the local news that even during the attack, police drove by the riots and failed to render aid.

Amsterdam has a large immigrant population, including many Jewish residents and many Muslims. Dutch Muslims mainly but not exclusively hail from Morocco. While there are reports of stabbings and brutal beatings, no fatalities were reported. Sixty-two people were arrested, although those numbers are likely to fluctuate as the dust settles.

The most telling remark came from a Jewish soccer fan who got caught up in the riot. “If there had been internet in 1938, that’s what Kristallnacht would have looked like,” he told the Times of Israel.

Even President Biden was awakened from his 20-hour daily nap and condemned the Amsterdam events, calling them “despicable.”

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry on November 8, 2024, was quick to condemn the “anti-Arab chants” and “attacks” on the flag of Palestine, demanding that the Dutch government investigate these heinous crimes and protect the Palestinians. That’s right, the antisemites believe they are the ones who deserve the help. That reminds me of that old Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the Devil. Sorry, antisemites, we’re fresh out of sympathy, empathy, and compassion for the “Jew hunters.”

Things got so bad that Netanyahu sent out two special planes to Amsterdam to help get its citizens back to the safety of Israel, which, as we all know, gets bombed often. Imagine a situation so bad you have to return to a war zone to be safe.

Let’s Call It What It Is: Antisemitism

So what’s going on? A violent assault against Jews in a modern seemingly civilized European city is barely a blip in the news cycle.

• Are we normalizing antisemitism?

• Are European police so demoralized by woke politics that they stand back rather than act, or were they told to stand down?

• Are leaders just going to issue lame statements or is anybody besides Netanyahu going to actually do something?

• Is anyone on the Squad going to speak out for the victims? Or do they think that the only way you can be a victim is not be Jewish?

Antisemitism is more than just racism, although it’s a terrible malignant form of pure racism. Antisemitism is an attack on Jewish people, who, according to Scripture, are God’s chosen people. They are called the “apple of His eye” and “beloved,” although the Bible also points to their many flaws, namely that they are a “stubborn and stiff-necked people” who have many times been unfaithful to their religion and sinned egregiously. But you have to see the demonic element in all of this. These savage attackers—who did not even know who they were trying to kill only that they were Jewish people in town for a soccer game—were driven to murder. The people didn’t matter, it was just the Jewishness that mattered.

It's demonic stuff. And it’s time we stop normalizing it. Normalizing antisemitism is like opening the doors to the demonic realm and rolling out the red carpet. The prophet Isaiah once wrote that it was a terrible thing when people called good evil and evil good. Yet that’s what antisemitism is. It’s what just happened in Amsterdam.

Why is the news media ignoring this? The New York Times reported not so much that horrific attacks occurred, they reported that Amsterdam “banned protests.” In other words, as in years gone by, The New York Times tacitly endorsed antisemitism by praising European governments that first allowed and later only weakly condemned anti-Jewish attacks.

You want to see hell on earth? Then let the antisemites have power.