JNS
One critic called the punishments, which ranged from 11 days to 12 weeks, a "joke."
A Dutch court on Wednesday convicted four additional perpetrators of attacks against Israelis in Amsterdam, issuing sentences that ranged from 11 days to 12 weeks.
The sentences follow the ones handed in December to five other perpetrators of November’s coordinated mass assaults by dozens of Arabs and Muslims on fans of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team who were in Amsterdam for a match.
Similarly to the earlier round of sentences, the new ones were widely criticized by Dutch Jews and their allies as too lenient and a sign that authorities were not properly addressing the emergence of organized violence against Jews in the metropolis.
“Sad how the Netherlands is handling this,” wrote Femke H. Vita Israël Sirag, a former candidate for the JA21 party, on X about the sentences. The judges “gave joke punishments for serious, subversive antisemitic violence.”
Naomi Mestrum, director of the Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI), told the Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad (NIW) Dutch-Jewish weekly, “The sentences are short, but unfortunately, that is part of our legal system.”
She added: “We hope and expect that aggravating circumstances will be taken into account in future cases,” in accordance with pending legislation seeking tougher sentences against hate crime perpetrators.
NIW described the sentences as “mild” on X.
The assaults featured blatant antisemitic rhetoric by perpetrators. They were the largest-scale of their kind perpetrated in Western Europe since the Holocaust and they shocked many Dutch Jews and beyond. The attacks, which leaders of Dutch Jewry have called a "pogrom," exposed a new security reality, in which hundreds of Muslim men can coordinate in real-time to carry out large-scale antisemitic attacks with little police interference.
A man identified in Dutch media as Cenk D. received the heaviest sentence on Wednesday, 12 weeks in jail—a month longer than the prosecution had sought. He was convicted of directing other perpetrators to victims in the WhatsApp group that the Muslims used to launch and coordinate the assaults. He wrote “A good Jew is a dead Jew” on the WhatsApp group and shared a photo of Anne Frank that the judges said trivialized the Holocaust.
The prosecution sought eight months in jail and another four months suspended sentence for another defendant, Diemenaar Kamal I., but the judges sentenced him to one month in jail. He had many videos of attacks on Israelis from the assaults on his cell phone but the judges said there was no proof he was present during the attacks.
Mohammed B., 26, was given a jail sentence of 11 days and another 19 suspended. He was released to his home as he had already been detained for 11 days during the pretrial phase, the Het Parool daily reported.
The fourth defendant, Mounir M., 32, got six weeks in jail for helping to coordinate attacks on WhatsApp.
Police have images and footage of 122 people who are suspected of participating in the assaults on Nov. 7 and 8, the prosecution service said in a report published Wednesday on its handling of the case. Of those, 36 have been identified and 10 have been prosecuted.
