How will progressives explain Amsterdam’s latest anti-semitic violence?

Since the scenes of Jews being hunted, beaten and kicked as they lay on the ground pleading for mercy in Amsterdam, antisemites have sought excuse, or that weaselly insinuator ‘context’, in the reported behaviour of a number of Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans, who are said to have attacked a taxi, tore down a Palestinian flag and sang anti-Arab chants.

I wrote in the wake of those events that any Israeli fan who engaged in such yobbery is to be condemned but that their actions did not justify a modern-day pogrom that plunged Israelis and other Jews into a night of violence, fear and dread. Not least because users of private messaging apps had urged a ‘jodenjacht’ (‘Jew hunt’) prior to the violence. Amsterdam belongs to the pogrom tradition in another sense: pogroms have almost always been blamed on a pretext, real or invented, by which the Jews invited their bloody fate.