UK Police Used False Claims to Ban Israeli Soccer Fans

False claims about Israeli fans were used by UK police to jus­ti­fy a ban on sup­port­ers attend­ing a Europa League match in Birm­ing­ham, accord­ing to Dutch law enforce­ment. On 23 Novem­ber 2025, The Times of Israel report­ed that British police had cit­ed fab­ri­cat­ed inci­dents to sup­port the deci­sion, prompt­ing wide­spread crit­i­cism. The arti­cle begins:

British police used false infor­ma­tion to jus­ti­fy a ban on Israeli fans attend­ing a game in Birm­ing­ham ear­li­er this month, Dutch law enforce­ment told Lon­don’s Sun­day Times news­pa­per. The Aston Vil­la soc­cer club announced last month that no Mac­cabi fans would be allowed at the game fol­low­ing a police assess­ment that clas­si­fied the fix­ture as ‘high risk,’ cit­ing ‘vio­lent clash­es and hate crime offens­es’ dur­ing a Europa League match in Ams­ter­dam between Mac­cabi and local team Ajax last Novem­ber. Accord­ing to the Sun­day Times, the deci­sion over the Birm­ing­ham game was made as a result of a con­fi­den­tial report in which British police claimed that Israeli fans threw ‘inno­cent mem­bers of the pub­lic into the riv­er,’ that 500–600 ‘inten­tion­al­ly tar­get­ed Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties’ and that the vio­lence forced the deploy­ment of 5,000 police offi­cers. How­ev­er, Dutch law enforce­ment told the news­pa­per the exam­ples used to jus­ti­fy the ban were false.

Read more: https://www.timesofisrael.com/uk-police-used-untrue-claims-about-israeli-fans-to-justify-soccer-game-ban-report/

Key Points

• British police banned Israeli fans from attend­ing a soc­cer match in Birm­ing­ham, cit­ing alleged vio­lent inci­dents in Amsterdam.

• Dutch law enforce­ment has now dis­put­ed the UK police report, stat­ing the cit­ed inci­dents were false or exaggerated.

• UK police claimed large-scale tar­get­ing of Mus­lims and deploy­ment of 5,000 offi­cers, con­trary to Dutch accounts.

• The ban was met with crit­i­cism, includ­ing from UK politi­cians and Jew­ish com­mu­nal organizations.

In Octo­ber 2025, the GIOR report­ed that Dyab Abou Jah­jah, a for­mer Hezbol­lah mem­ber who chairs the Hind Rajab Foun­da­tion, had com­piled a dossier that influ­enced West Mid­lands Police to ban Mac­cabi Tel Aviv sup­port­ers from attend­ing the match, warn­ing that Israeli fans posed a risk in the pre­dom­i­nant­ly Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty of Aston. GIOR, how­ev­er, does not cur­rent­ly have access to any infor­ma­tion sug­gest­ing that Jah­jah is con­nect­ed to the cur­rent mis­in­for­ma­tion, although his past con­tri­bu­tion is suggestive.

The Red-Green Alliance: Hezbollah Influence in British Anti-Israel Advocacy

The Unit­ed King­dom has expe­ri­enced sus­tained pro-Hezbol­lah advo­ca­cy through over­lap­ping net­works of activists, aca­d­e­mics, and NGOs that lever­age insti­tu­tion­al plat­forms to advance anti-Israel nar­ra­tives. These influ­ence oper­a­tions oper­ate with­in what has been described as a “Red-Green Alliance” fus­ing left-wing polit­i­cal groups with Islamist orga­ni­za­tions to bat­tle per­ceived West­ern impe­ri­al­ism and sup­port for Israel. Con­tro­ver­sial UK aca­d­e­m­ic David Miller has writ­ten for Al-Mayadeen, a Beirut-based pro-Hezbol­lah out­let, while pro­duc­ing con­tent for Press TV, the Iran­ian state broad­cast­er. Al-Mayadeen was estab­lished in 2012 by Ghas­san bin Jid­do, with its Gen­er­al Man­ag­er pre­vi­ous­ly serv­ing as Direc­tor of the Hezbol­lah-affil­i­at­ed Al-Man­ar TV, and the out­let has pub­lished anti-Semit­ic con­tent, includ­ing Holo­caust denial arti­cles.

Miller’s orga­ni­za­tion, Spin­watch, received fund­ing from Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-linked orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the Cor­do­ba Foun­da­tion. The Islam­ic Human Rights Com­mis­sion, a UK-based NGO with doc­u­ment­ed ties to the Iran­ian regime, has cham­pi­oned this coali­tion through orga­niz­ing Inter­na­tion­al Quds Day events and pro­mot­ing decolo­nial activism, with co-founder Arzu Mer­ali laud­ing Hezbol­lah as a shin­ing exam­ple of suc­cess­ful rev­o­lu­tion at a 2014 event co-spon­sored with the Mal­colm X Movement.

Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood orga­ni­za­tions in Britain have main­tained sup­port for Hamas, Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad, and Hezbol­lah, with the CAGE advo­ca­cy group’s Research Direc­tor Asim Qureshi pub­licly advo­cat­ing sup­port for Islam­ic State mil­i­tant Mohammed Emwazi as a “beau­ti­ful young man.” Emwazi is believed to have behead­ed a num­ber of hostages between 2014 and 2015 while he was a mem­ber of an Islam­ic State ter­ror­ist cell.

Exter­nal references:

• Dyab Abou Jah­jah — Wikipedia
• Jiha­di John: Activist who praised Mohammed Emwazi as “beau­ti­ful” caught on video back­ing jihad
• An Out­spo­ken Arab in Europe: Demon or Hero — The New York Times

Dis­claimer:

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) uti­lizes AI through­out the post­ing process, includ­ing the gen­er­a­tion of sum­maries for news items, intro­duc­tions, key points, and, often, the “con­text” sec­tion. We rec­om­mend ver­i­fy­ing all infor­ma­tion before use. Addi­tion­al­ly, all images are gen­er­at­ed using AI and are intend­ed sole­ly for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es. While they rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als dis­cussed, they should not be inter­pret­ed as real-world photography.