The UK Prime Minister’s determination to overturn a police ban and allow violent racist bigots to come to a football match Birmingham is truly absurd.
Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Nothing illustrates the cynicism of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s shameless journey from human rights lawyer to war crimes apologist with greater clarity than his decision to take up the cause of the violent racists who support Israeli Maccabi football club.
Scroll back ten years.
The future prime minister is speaking at a meeting of the Camden Palestinian Solidarity campaign during the 2015 general election campaign. Behind him a banner declares: “Kick Israeli racism out of Fifa”.
Last weekend, in a screeching reversal, Starmer launched a campaign to bring Israeli racism to Britain.
His intervention came after West Midlands Police blocked Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending next month’s Europa league match at Aston Villa. The police classified the match as “high risk” following what they called a “thorough assessment”.
They stated that the decision was reached on “current intelligence”. But they also highlighted the “violent clashes and hate crime offences” which took place during last November’s match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam.
Starmer, a keen football fan, thinks that he knows better than West Midlands Police.
He doesn’t.
A brutal truth
In a highly unusual Downing Street intervention he announced: “This is the wrong decision”, and ordered his ministers to do everything they can to ensure that Maccabi fans can come to Britain.
On Monday, his culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told MPs that the Starmer government would provide the resources to enable Maccabi fans to attend the match, saying that the original ban on Maccabi supporters “chooses the exclusion” of Jewish people.
It should be understood that Maccabi Tel Aviv is Israel’s oldest and most famous club, dating back to 1909 and Israel’s answer to Manchester United or Liverpool.
There is unfortunately no getting away from the fact that a section of the Maccabi supporter base have an unforgivable record for racism and violence. They’ve been filmed attacking anti-Netanyahu supporters.
Back in 2014, when the club signed an Arab player he was booed and abused by his own fans. In March 2024 they were filmed beating an Arab male unconscious in an Athens street.
In Amsterdam, they took over the streets singing genocidal chants, including “Death to Arabs”. They also chanted “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.”
This was a mocking reference to the fact that in November 2024 more than 17,000 Palestinian children had been killed by the Israeli army since 7 October attacks. The number is much higher today.
Utterly disgusting.
Stoking up tension
Much of the very troubling media and political commentary has claimed that the ban on Maccabi football supporters is a “sectarian” issue, apparently a matter of concern only to Birmingham Muslims.
“Sectarian” has become the dog-whistle term used by politicians and newspaper columniststo signal that Muslims are not truly British.
I disagree.
Maccabi supporters on the streets of Birmingham is not just a Muslim issue.
Anyone with the faintest sense of decency – or even basic patriotism – must be appalled by the prospect of violent hooligans marching through British streets chanting their murderous, obscene and genocidal songs.
Not least of all when Israel has slaughtered more than 68,000 Palestinians, including more than 20,000 children, in the course of the last two years in what most experts today define as a Genocide.
Yet, Starmer remains determined to overturn the police ban and welcome the racists who comprise a significant proportion of Tel Aviv Maccabi’s travelling supporters.
It’s the over-riding job of a prime minister to calm down division and hatred. Yet Starmer is determined to stoke up the tension.
It’s important to investigate the reasons behind such a reckless and irresponsible behaviour.
Since he was elected prime minister last year, Starmer has turned his back on Labour’s left/progressive base.
Advised by his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, Starmer has chosen instead to aim for the support of far right and conservative voters, especially those sympathetic to Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
There is a logic of sorts to this immoral strategy.
Some Labour voters have defected to Farage’s Reform party. Starmer wants them back. Hence Starmer’s shocking reversion to the racist politics of Enoch Powell, turning on minorities with talk of an “island of strangers”.
That also explains the grotesque language about Muslims, including “shaking off the flees”, a phrase used by a Labour insider describing the slew of councillors quitting the party over the party’s policy on Gaza back in December 2023.
This policy also explains Labour’s cultivation of Britain’s far-right, Islamophobic press, and the otherwise bizarre appointment of David Dinsmore, the former editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper, for a senior communications role in government to help win back right-wing voters.
At the Sun, Dinsmore hosted columnist Katie Hopkins, who holds racist views and once labelled asylum seekers as “cockroaches”.
It seems that Starmer wasn’t bothered.
A moral abyss
This is the moral abyss into which Starmer has chosen to sink. Rolling out the red carpet for violent Israeli thugs fits neatly into this strategy.
And it has earned the prime minister – who has been excoriated in the media – a very welcome respite after a long period of unpopularity.
Thanks to his intervention on the Maccabi fans affair, he now has the right-wing press on his side. “For once, Sir Keir Starmer understood what’s at stake here,” exults columnist Melanie Philips in today’s Times.
Mike Graham, a presenter on Talk Radio, voicedhis support of the prime minister’s intervention: “I’m ashamed of the police in Birmingham. These people have no business in our country. And this bloke, Ayoub Khan, whoever he is, should go back to Pakistan.”
Ayoub Khan is the local Birmingham MP who originally petitioned for the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
As Graham’s repulsive remarks show, over recent days Khan has been subjected to a remorseless campaign of smear and vilification. A campaign that scarcely bothers to conceal its racism.
Mr Khan, it should be stated, is one of the few who emerges unblemished and with his reputation enhanced from the squalid controversy of the last few days.
It’s Starmer who unleashed all this.
He has been playing the politics of hatred. I do not believe these repugnant tactic will help him win votes. The British public are too decent, I feel certain, to fall for the prime minister’s inflammatory interventions.
According to a YouGov poll, a substantial majority of us – 42 percent against 28 percent – think Starmer is wrong.
And overnight it has emerged that Maccabi Tel Aviv itself rejected Starmer’s hideous tactics. In a body blow to the British prime minister, the club announcedthat it would not be selling Aston Villa tickets to its own fans.
Maccabi explained that “football should be about bringing people together not driving them apart” and that it had “been working tirelessly to stamp out racism within the more extreme elements of our fan base”.
We can all agree with that. Sir Keir Starmer owes Ayoub Khan a grovelling apology.
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