Soccer, more appropriately named football (soccer players actually use their feet), is very important to the English people and the United Kingdom at large. But if the Birmingham City Council in England refuses to reverse its decision banning fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending their team’s Nov. 6 Europa League game against English Premier League club Aston Villa, tournament supervising body UEFA should suspend Aston Villa from the tournament.
Welcoming the current decision to ban away fans, one member of parliament for Birmingham, Ayoub Khan, stated, “From the moment that the match was announced, it was clear that there were latent safety risks that even our capable security and police authorities would not be able to fully manage.”
Khan is a fanatic and a liar. He is taking this position not because it represents any prudent judgment but rather because he obviously hates Israelis and, based on his prior questioning that 1,000 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, apparently also hates Jews. Sadly, Prime Minister Keir Starmer appears unwilling to stand up against this member of his Labour Party. Starmer told Jewish News on Thursday that “we will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets … action is what matters, and we’re absolutely committed to that.”
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Sadly, Starmer’s only response so far has been to call for the decision to be reversed. He should be taking a far more robust stance. Because most officials in Birmingham clearly believe they are in Islamabad. Consider that West Midlands Police has also thrown its support behind the council’s decision. The force says it “supports the decision to prohibit away supporters from attending … based on our professional judgement, we believe this measure will help mitigate risks to public safety. We remain steadfast in our support of all affected communities, and reaffirm our zero-tolerance stance on hate crime in all its forms.”
Give me a break.
There is simply no question that West Midlands Police has the professional experience and capability to successfully police this event. The force has extensive experience in policing football matches, including between bitter rivals with sometimes violent fans. Moreover, as is standard practice in the U.K., West Midlands Police force can also call for support from other police forces under what is known as a “mutual aid” request. Put simply, West Midlands Police can provide as many police officers and police capabilities as its threat assessment might deem necessary for the event. Starmer can use central government funds to support this policing activity if needed.
Chief Constable Craig Guildford obviously knows all this. That he instead supports the Birmingham Council shows only his extraordinary lack of professionalism and extraordinarily weak moral leadership. He simply doesn’t want to do his job by expending resources to protect Israeli fans.
West Midlands Police’s simultaneous claim to adopt a “zero tolerance” stance against hate crime and pledge “steadfast in support” of the Jewish community is absurd on its face. After all, the reason Guildford doesn’t want Maccabi supporters based in Israel and presumably some English-Jewish fans to attend the game is because he fears they’ll suffer both anti-Israel and antisemitic hate-based violence. The appropriate response of any credible police force would have been to pledge zero tolerance against criminality, whether that violence was targeted by or against any Maccabi fans.
Of course, the real concern here is that elements of Birmingham’s large Pakistani-British Muslim population will come to the streets to accost Maccabi fans in anger at Israel’s now-suspended war with Hamas in Gaza. That’s why Khan and Guildford are showing such putrid leadership. They don’t want to annoy those few Birmingham residents who are baying for Israeli blood. In doing so, they betray the rule of law.
We are not talking about free speech here. I believe in the American, not British, free speech tradition. Waving a Hezbollah or Hamas flag in public is illegal in the U.K., but it is rightly not illegal in the U.S., for example. Still, to deny fans the ability to support their team in a multinational European tournament simply because the other fans might try to attack them isn’t an act of sensible precaution, but rather of plain surrender to the rule of the mob.
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This is a good example of why Nigel Farage’s Reform party is rising in the polls. Farage has some loopy ideas. Still, the U.K. is rotting amid pathetic leadership that seems determined to offer absolute deference to a warped political correctness. Basic values should be defended. And there are few more basic English values than the ability to attend a soccer game, even if such attendance involves a lot of police making a lot of arrests so that the peaceful majority can pursue happiness.
Starmer should overrule this decision, and the U.K.’s association of police chiefs should call for the resignation of Chief Constable Guildford. If not, the U.K. should admit that it has overtly become a no-go zone for Jews.