Violence continued in Amsterdam yesterday, after rioters set a tram on fire and continued to clash with police following the vicious, organized attacks on Israeli soccer fans last week. This evening, Tel Aviv’s Maccabi soccer team will play a game in Paris, where authorities fear a repeat of the pogrom in the Netherlands. To this end, they have limited the number of people who can attend the match and plan to employ over 6,000 police officers and security guards. Seth Mandel comments:

[H]ere’s the test for similar cities around the world: can you prevent your residents from burning the city to the ground over the presence of Jews playing soccer? Given the reports of follow-up violence in Amsterdam tonight, and the fact that the city’s police force aided the pogrom, that’s not a test everyone will pass. Maccabi’s upcoming game against a Turkish squad had to be moved out of Istanbul for security reasons. A September game between Israel and Belgium was played in Hungary because Brussels refused to host.

Some teams’ home cities, as mentioned above, are refusing to host such games already. It’s far from unthinkable that teams will start refusing to play Maccabi or Israel’s national team, especially if they can’t play in their home city (which is what happened with Belgium’s team).

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.