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Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

As we don't live in the middle ages any more, it would be more than reasonable for the community to demand the riot police step in and arrest the provocators.

It would not be OK to plan a "jew hunt" on WhatsApp and perpetuate violence by performing a "flash mob attack" against not only against Maccabi hooligans, but also non-violent Maccabi fans, and also Jewish and Israeli people who aren't even visiting for the football. And completely random people who you just think look Jewish or Israeli.

No, that's not acceptable. That's retributive bullshit. An eye for an eye leaves us all blind.

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> it would be more than reasonable for the community to demand the riot police step in and arrest the provocators.

Likewise, it would not be unreasonable or unprecedented for your community to respond by stomping this lynch mob into the gutters, or at least running it out of town.

The principle that intolerance should be tolerated is not universally held, and IMO is a bit privileged.

> And completely random people who you just think look Jewish or Israeli

That sounds like it came after the maccabi rioters started their campaign of violence against random people who they just thought looked Palestinian or Muslim.

Indiscriminate targeting of civilians is never ok under any circumstances, but unfortunately it still happens, and ethnic violence tends to beget ethnic violence.

The sibling comment answered perfectly, but I'll add that your advice sounds reasonable in a vacuum, but in reality this event happened one year after the start of genocide. The community had no reason to believe that the state would do anything, as the state allowed a genocidal country's genocide-celebrating citizens to travel to the community's city for a football match and the police didn't do anything while they were chanting death to arabs, hours before the locals took matters into their own hands.

After a year of international inaction in response to the genocide, the Amsterdam community acted quite reasonably, and to be honest quite commendably, by stomping the lynch mob into the gutter, as the sibling eloquently put.

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