Quote of the day 22nd February 2026

Joani Reid MP, Char of the All-Party-Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism, and a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, has issued the statement below about the ban by West Midlands Police preventing supporters of the Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv F.C attending the team's match with Aston Villa.

It is now beyond reasonable dispute that the process West Midlands Police followed to arrive at this decision was egregiously flawed and that they made a whole serious of factually incorrect statements about it, including some given in evidence to the Home Affairs select committee by the then Chief constable, such as a false statement about the extent to which Birmingham's Jewish communities had been consulted and the release, presented as fact, of AI-generated details of a supposed Maccabi TA match involving crowd trouble which had never actually happened.

West Midlands police also gave an account of a violence associated with a match in Amsterdam, which was seriously at variance of the account of the Dutch police who were supposedly their source. Dutch authorities including the police, the King, the Prime Minister and the local mayor say that Maccabi TA fans and Jewish people in the vicinity had been the victims of a large scale series of organised and pre-planned violent anti-semitic attacks, but of which West Midlands Police and just about every anti-semite in Britain painted what had happened as violence instigated by Maccabi TA fans.

West Midlands Police has now admitted it "overstated the evidence" used to make the decision to ban Israeli fans from the match at Villa Park in Birmingham. The Home Office Select committee criticised the WM police assessment which informed the decision on the grounds that evidence that reinforced pre-existing assumptions about the risk posed by Maccabi fans was accepted readily, while contradictory information from authoritative sources was not given proper weight.

Classic confirmation bias, in other words. 

Here is Joani Reid's statement.



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