The decision of West Midlands Police and Aston Villa football club to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from the Villa match against the Israeli team early next month because of Maccabi’s notorious reputation for racist riots has seen a massive media and political operation swing into action to project ‘outrage’ at the supposed decision to ‘deny football fans the right to attend a game because they’re Jewish’. Supposedly.

The campaign has made no mention of non-Israeli teams being banned plenty of times because of fears about the behaviour of their fans — including all English teams at one point. Nor do they mention — at least with any honest portrayal — the abundant video record of racist chants, rape threats and death threats of Maccabi fans, their songs about drinking the blood of opposing fans, their cries of “Death to Arabs” and their mockery of dead Palestinian children killed in Israel’s Gaza genocide. A behaviour so bad that Dutch intelligence services now classify Israel as a national security threat.

One figure has appeared in the media more than any other as the face of supposed ‘Jewish’ hurt at the idea that Israeli thugs, terrorists and racists might be banned ‘just for being Jewish’ — Andrew Fox. Fox was at first presented as the ‘Jewish honorary president’ of the “Jewish Villans” (or “Villains”) supporters club, though some outlets have removed the word “Jewish” after people pointed out Fox, in bygone days, had admitted that he isn’t.

Aston Villa Jewish supporter’s club

But the ‘mystery’ goes further: there’s no such thing as “Aston Villa Jewish Villans/Villains” supporters club.

The club did once tweet Passover greetings to Jewish fans including a message from Rabbi Michael Pollak, whom it described as “Chief Rabbi and member of” the group “Fans of Diversity Aston Villa Jewish Supporters Club.” However, the message quoted by Pollak doesn’t mention Aston Villa.

There is a Rabbi Michael Pollak, but his bio says he’s from London and makes no mention of Villa or any links with the club. The only existing Google hit for his name and “Villa” at the same time is a link to a B’nai B’rith post where the page contains a link to a comment in the last couple of days about the Maccabi ban:

Even “Fans of Diversity Aston Villa Jewish Supporters Club” and its variants have next to no online presence, but “Aston Villa Jewish Villans/Villains” appears to have none at all before it sprang into being for the Maccabi faux-outrage. Search engines reveal no relevant hits before the last few days, except for a few new comments on older pages — which appears to be a regular tactic used by Israel lobby ‘astroturfers’ to try to create some older-looking search results:

These results are corroborated by Villa fans’ forums, who’ve never heard of either variant:

And Mr Fox himself? Well, he exists and appears to be a retired army major as the media have described him — however, he is also an ardent advocate for Israel who has visited Israel with the Israeli military and appeared on far-right TV station GB News to defend Israel’s war crime of bombing a civilian building in (US ally) Qatar in September — an appearance that the Islamophobic ‘Henry Jackson Society’ (HJS) also featured. Fox also appeared on screen to describe Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a ‘just war’ and regurgitating Israel’s long-disproven atrocity propaganda of mass rapes and beheaded babies.

And in an article for HJS, as human rights groups, the UN and journalist groups condemned Israel’s targeted, UK-assisted slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, he said Israel should be killing more journalists, a comment that Action on Armed Violence condemned as:

a politicised argument that undermines the foundational principle of civilian protection in war. To accept it would be to take a step toward normalising the targeting of journalists for the content of their reporting: an erosion of humanitarian law that would outlast the current conflict and endanger reporters worldwide. And if Fox’s own repeated, IDF-facilitated trips to Gaza were judged by the elastic criteria he applies to others, he himself might be classified as a combatant.

None of this has prevented Mr Fox from being presented by virtually every ‘mainstream’ UK media outlet as the face and voice of supposed anger among Aston Villa fans at the decision not to allow Maccabi thugs to rampage through Birmingham as they did in Amsterdam and elsewhere.

And not only did it not prevent it, none of these facts has as much as been hinted at in the ‘MSM’ coverage.

You’d almost think it was a joint operation between the genocidal coloniser Israel and the genocide-denying and collaborating Starmer regime to whitewash Israeli racism and violence and demonise any opposition to it. Outlandish, eh?

By Skwawkbox

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