Through its admitted inability (or unadmitted unwillingness) to protect Israeli soccer fans from being attacked by violent antisemites, the United Kingdom is announcing to the world that it is no longer a functioning first-world nation.
Aston Villa is set to play Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League, an annual soccer competition between top European teams across multiple European leagues. The Birmingham City Council has chosen to ban fans of Maccabi under the pretense that their safety could not be guaranteed, an argument being made by both police and members of Parliament. The actual goal here is to punish Israeli soccer fans by banning them from the game because of the “genocide” in Gaza, with one member of Parliament outright stating that we must “ban all Israeli teams” because “We cannot have normalization with genocide and apartheid.”
MANCHESTER ATTACKER CALLED POLICE TO BRAG ABOUT MURDERS AND PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO ISLAMIC STATE GROUP
If indeed it were true that British police could not protect Israeli soccer fans from violent hordes of antisemites in the streets of Birmingham, it is an admission that the rule of law is gone in the U.K. British left-wingers do not believe they can offer the most basic protection that the government is supposed to provide, and thus would rather ban sports fans from going out in public.
Of course, British authorities could very easily protect these soccer fans. My colleague Tom Rogan detailed additional enforcement measures they could rely on and the added resources available from other police departments in the country, as well as the British government. This is a conscious choice by Birmingham and British authorities further up the ladder to allow a mob of Islamist, antisemitic fanatics to use the threat of violence to prevent sports fans from attending a game.
IN THE FIGHT AGAINST ISLAMISM AND ANTISEMITISM, THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT HAS PICKED THE WRONG SIDE
Once again, this is not how a first-world country operates. Even Qatar managed to protect Israeli soccer fans at the World Cup in 2022, permitting direct flights from Tel Aviv despite having no diplomatic relations with Israel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer can pretend he cares about the scourge of antisemitism all he wants, but he is also making a conscious choice to do nothing but whine on social media about this decision. Violent mobs of antisemites are dictating how public life goes in the United Kingdom, and Starmer doesn’t care enough to do anything about it.
Much of the continent of Europe is high on Palestinian propaganda and social media censorship, policing free speech while allowing violent antisemites to do what they wish in public. The United Kingdom has become one of the worst offenders. This move proves that, through either its inability or unwillingness to protect people from violence in the streets, the United Kingdom can no longer be considered a first-world country.