What’s the Dutch for pogrom?

My Dutch is a bit rusty. To be more exact, my total vocabulary in that language is about a dozen words, of which haring takes pride of place.

If your Dutch is even rustier than mine, it means the greatest delicacy inspired by God and produced by man: the barely marinated herring one gets from Amsterdam street vendors. But you probably guessed what it means without my prompting since the word is practically a homophone of the English equivalent.

I’m allowed to guess too. And my guess is that the Dutch for pogrom is, well, pogrom. As someone born in Russia, I’m proud of that country’s contribution to most Indo-European languages, and I’m sure Dutch is no exception.

The word stands for an outburst of mob violence against Jews. Recently its meaning has been expanded to designate any riot aimed against any group. However, as a conservative, I’m happy to report that the Dutch are busily restoring the original, anti-Semitic, meaning of ‘pogrom’.

That restoration project started when supporters of the football team Maccabi Tel Aviv descended on Amsterdam the other day. Their team was to play Ajax, a team that, like our own Tottenham Hotspur, has Jewish roots.

The Hebraic nature of the occasion was too much for pro-Palestinian thugs, sorry, I mean protesters, to bear. When they espied a group of Maccabi supporters in the city centre, they began to chant pro-Palestinian slogans and wave Palestinian flags.

Now it’s never difficult to confuse a group of football lovers in any country with a bunch of shrinking violets. So the Israelis responded in kind, flipping fingers at the mob, shouting “F*** you” and “F*** Palestine” – in English. It’s good to see how the English language acts as lingua franca, bringing people of different nationalities together. This is another reason for me to feel proud.

What followed brings back fond memories of mass violence in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, circa 1880, or else in Berlin, circa 1938. Outnumbered Maccabi fans were beaten unconscious, kicked, stomped, clubbed, stabbed, chased around the city where they desperately tried to hide in hotels, made on pain of death to shout “Free Palestine”, robbed. Some victims begged for their lives, some offered the louts the ransom of all the money they had on them.

“It’s for the children, mother****ers,” roared their Anglophone assailants. “Now you know how it feels.”

As anti-Israeli violence began to spread and turn into an old-fashioned anti-Semitic pogrom, things got so desperate that President Netanyahu had to send over two transport planes to evacuate the Israelis. In the aftermath, various Dutch politicians offered profuse apologies, promised to prosecute all the thugs involved, and assured the world that those brutes were in the distinct minority.

That, no doubt, is correct. Evildoers never constitute a majority in any country. However, they often punch above their weight.

It’s useful to remember that card-carrying Nazis made up only about 10 per cent of the German population, and the communist parties in both the Soviet Union and China couldn’t claim such meagre membership even at their peak. Moreover, when the Russian tsar fell in February, 1917, there were only 24,000 Bolsheviks in the country, of whom only a few hundred were actively involved in taking over Russia. Yet that’s precisely what they did just a few months later.

It’s tempting to think that the thugs were mostly Muslims, either recent arrivals or those born in Holland. Yet looking at the scowling feral mugs of the pogromshchiks (do let’s import not just the root word but also its derivatives), one also sees many true-orange Dutchmen, doubtless of the left-wing persuasion.

Courtesy of Hitler, anti-Semitism is widely regarded as a right-wing phenomenon, which is false on several levels.

First, Hitler’s NASDP was a socialist party, flying the same red flag as their parteigenossen in the Soviet Union, albeit with a different superimposed symbol. However, since leftists like to tar conservatives with the Nazi brush, Hitler had to be portrayed as a German precursor of Maggie Thatcher.

Actually, the Nazis only became right-wing in the eyes of progressive mankind when they attacked the Soviet Union. Until then, they had been widely and correctly seen as a socialist heresy. But since Stalin was undeniably left-wing, Hitler had to be his opposite.

Second, parties that are usually described as right-wing today tend to be nationalist populist, or perhaps even national conservative if you’d rather. Most of such parties are staunch allies of Israel, which they see as a fellow nationalist – and essentially Western – state fighting for its survival.

Thus Geert Wilders, the politician of that hue who won last year’s Dutch election, is a loyal friend of Israel (as is Donald Trump). He correctly identified the Amsterdam mayhem as directed not just against Israelis but Jews in general.

“Looks like a Jew hunt in the streets of Amsterdam,” he wrote. “Arrest and deport the multicultural scum that attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in our streets. Ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands. Totally unacceptable.”

The key word in that rebuke is ‘multicultural’, although Wilders might not have seen it as such. He probably was making an anti-immigration statement, which is one of his recurrent themes and perhaps the most salient one. But he stumbled on the root of that particular evil in its modern incarnation.

Anti-Semitic sentiments lie dormant in gentile populations, where they affect more people than those who ever vent such feelings. Yet even if conservatives dislike Jews, mostly for snobbish reasons, they are unlikely to be vociferous, much less violent, anti-Semites. One of my conservative friends (I really have no other) once defined anti-Semitism in jest as disliking Jews more than absolutely necessary.

Yet, snide offhand remarks at boozy parties apart, conservatives seldom say or do anti-Semitic things. They are by definition civilised people who refrain from such self-expression because it’s vulgar and tasteless.

Anti-Semitism may not be alien to some conservatives, but it’s certainly not an essential ingredient of conservatism. And they despise wild-eyed Muslim terrorists, which by some dialectical mechanism moves them towards respect for Israel.

Not so with the Left, especially its Marxist wing (I’m not sure there is any other). The Jew for them is the embodiment of the Capitalist, the perennial bogeyman. That’s why many Marxists emulate the virulent anti-Semitism of Marx who repudiated his own Jewish roots.

Such is the tradition of long standing. However, following the Holocaust, many Leftists, those who purloined for their own nefarious use the term ‘liberal’, eschewed that tradition by tucking it away for future use as appropriate.

Enter Israel, which provides a ready outlet for left-wing anti-Semitism. It can now come out of its hidey-hole in the guise of multiculturalism, one of the blunderbusses the Left aim at the heart of our civilisation. The existence of Israel is an equivalent of a carte blanche saying “now you can” to the Lefties, and they grab it with avid alacrity.

Thus the most recent outrages of public anti-Semitism in Britain occurred within the ranks of the Labour Party, especially but not exclusively when it was led by Corbyn. By and large, the more influential the loudmouthed Leftist minority is in the country, the more often will anti-Semitic outbursts occur.

That’s why I’m not surprised that the latest pogrom happened in Amsterdam and not, say, in Paris or London. Even though the Dutch delivered more parliament seats to Wilders than to anyone else, the country continues to be in the forefront of the European Left assault on Western tradition.

The country leads from the front by pushing through such subversive measures as euthanasia, transsexualism, same-sex marriage. And even though the largest party in Holland is pro-Israel, Palestinian flags fly over Amsterdam and other Dutch cities in perhaps greater numbers than anywhere else. Pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah and generally pro-Islamic propaganda is in the mainstream of the Dutch press – even more so than in our own dear Guardian and The Independent.

Hence the air of Holland is galvanised with ostensibly anti-Israel but in fact anti-Semitic charges. The slightest provocation, and sparks begin to fly all over the place.

They did so the other day, and Wilders is right to be “ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands”. Yet we should all be ashamed that this can happen anywhere, where the Left rule the roost.

In fact, I can think of one such country taken over by radical socialists bent on class war, cultural war and in general war on the West. You know the one I’m thinking of?

P.S. Speaking of The Guardian, it offers its employees counselling to help them cope with the trauma of the US elections. May I suggest a lobotomy instead?