Trump and the global rise of fascist anti-psychiatry

Despite spending more on psychiatric services and prescribing psychiatric medications at a higher rate than almost any other nation, mental health in the United States over the last two decades has only been getting worse.

Rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, overdose, chronic disability due to mental health conditions, and loneliness have all been rapidly increasing. No quantity of psychiatric drugs or hospitalisations appears adequate to reverse these trends.

Despite this, the US medical and psychiatric establishment has persistently refused to use its substantial political power to demand the transformation of care by expanding non-medical support systems to address the root social causes of mental illness, such as poverty, childhood trauma and incarceration, rather than focusing on reactive treatment via lucrative medication-centric norms. This failing status quo has created an opening for President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health Robert F Kennedy Jr’s emerging plans to remake the nation’s approach to mental health, with disastrous consequences now coming into focus.

Trump and Kennedy have hijacked legitimate anger at a broken system to justify destroying public care infrastructure, including Medicaid, food and housing assistance, harm-reduction and overdose prevention programmes, and suicide-prevention hotlines for LGBTQ youth, while promoting wellness scams and expanding the police state. They focus on the “threat” supposedly posed by psychiatric medications and call to reopen the asylums that once confined approximately 560,000 people, or one in 295 US residents, in horrific conditions, until protests against their cruelty led to their closure beginning in the 1950s.

Trump invokes false claims about mental illness to demonise immigrants, whom he is now hunting via a mass arrest and incarceration campaign. Last month, he signed an executive order that allows police to arrest and forcibly institutionalise poor Americans who are unhoused, deemed mentally ill, or struggling with addiction, effectively incarcerating them for indefinite periods.

Trump’s order, which also defunds housing-first programmes and harm-reduction services, while criminalising homelessness and encampments, contains no provisions to protect people from abuse or from the political misuse of psychiatric labels and institutionalisation to target his opponents. This raises concerns about risks to LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable groups. It also threatens groups upon which the administration has shown a eugenicist fixation: transgender people, people with autism, and others with disabilities that RFK Jr and Trump have characterised as a threat or burden on society.

The order appears to grant the government the power to deem anyone mentally ill or abusing substances, and to confine them indefinitely in any designated treatment facility, without due process. In a context where there is already a profound shortage of psychiatric beds even for short-term treatment, there are no provisions for new funding or regulatory systems to ensure that facilities are therapeutic or humane, rather than violent, coercive warehouses like American asylums of decades past.

Trump’s allies, including some medical professionals aligned with ideologies of social control and state coercion, may dismiss this as overly pessimistic. But that requires ignoring the fact that Trump’s executive order follows Kennedy’s proposal for federally funded “wellness farms”, where people, particularly Black youth taking SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors primarily used to treat anxiety and depression) and stimulants, would be subjected to forced labour and “re‑parenting” to overcome supposed drug dependence.

These proposals revive the legacy of coercive institutions built on forced labour and racialised interventions. Kennedy has also promoted the conspiracy theory that anti-depressants like SSRIs cause school shootings, comparing their risks with heroin, despite a total lack of scientific support for such claims. In his early tenure as health and human services secretary, he has already gutted key federal mental health research and services, including at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Given this, it is unclear what kind of “treatment”, other than confinement and cruelty, Trump and RFK Jr plan to deliver in their new asylums.

Trump and Kennedy’s lies about mental health, cuts to public care and vision for expanding the incarceration of immigrants, homeless people, and anyone they label as mentally ill, worsen mental health while creating more opportunities to profit from preventable suffering, disability and death. These tactics are not new, and their harmful consequences and political motivations are well established.

From Hungary to the Philippines, right-wing politicians have deployed similar rhetoric for comparable purposes. In a precedent that likely informs Trump’s plan, Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, attacked psychiatric reformsas leftist indoctrination and defunded successful community mental health services, replacing them with coercive asylum and profit-based models, while advocating pseudoscience linked to evangelical movements. Bolsonaro claimed to defend family values and national identity against globalist medical ideologies, while sacrificing countless Brazilian lives via policies later characterised by the Senate as crimes against humanity.

Bolsonaro’s record is instructive for anticipating Trump’s plans. Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Brazil’s disgraced former president and their shared political ideologies. Bolsonaro’s reversal of Brazil’s internationally recognised psychiatric reform movement, which emphasised deinstitutionalisation, community-based psychosocial care and autonomy, inflicted profound harm. Under his rule, institutionalisation in coercive “therapeutic communities”, often operated by evangelical organisations, with little oversight, and similar to RFK Jr’s proposed “wellness farms”, skyrocketed.

Investigations revealed widespread abuses in these communities, including forced confinement, unpaid labour, religious indoctrination, denial of medication, and physical and psychological violence. Bolsonaro’s government poured large sums into expanding these dystopian asylums while defunding community mental health centres, leaving people with severe mental illness and substance use disorders abandoned to punitive care or the streets.

This needless suffering pushed more people into Brazil’s overcrowded prisons, where psychiatric care is absent, abuse rampant and systemic racism overwhelming, with Black people accounting for more than 68 percent of the incarcerated population. Bolsonaro’s psychiatric agenda enhanced carceral control under the guise of care, reproducing racist and eugenicist hierarchies of social worth under an anti-psychiatry banner of neo-fascist nationalism.

Trump and Bolsonaro’s reactionary approaches underline a crucial truth: Both psychiatry and critiques of it can serve very different ends, depending on the politics to which they are attached. Far-right politicians often use anti-psychiatry to justify privatisation, eugenics and incarceration. They draw on ideas from the libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who argued in the 1960s that mental illness was a “myth”, and called for the abolition of psychiatric institutions.

In the US today, these political actors distort Szasz’s ideas, ignoring his opposition to coercion, by gutting public mental health services under the guise of “healthcare freedom”. This leaves vulnerable populations to suffer in isolation, at the hands of police or fellow citizens who feel increasingly empowered to publicly abuse, or even, as seen in the killing of Jordan Neely in New York City, execute them on subways, in prisons, or on the streets.

By contrast, critics of psychiatry on the left demand rights to non-medical care, economic security and democratic participation. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, RD Laing and Ivan Illich advocated for deinstitutionalisation not to abandon people, but to replace coercion with community-led social care that supports rights to individual difference. Their critiques targeted not psychiatry itself, but its use by exploitative, homogenising political systems.

To oppose reactionary anti-psychiatry, mental health professionals and politicians cannot simply defend the status quo of over-medicalisation, profit-driven care and the pathologisation of poverty. Millions justifiably feel betrayed by current psychiatric norms that offer little more than labels and pills while ignoring the political causes of their suffering. If the left does not harness this anger towards constructive change, the right will continue to exploit it.

The solution is not to shield America’s mental health systems from critique, but to insist on an expansive political vision of care that affirms the need for psychiatric support while refusing to treat it as a substitute for the political struggle for social services. This means investing in public housing, guaranteed income, peer-led community care worker programmes, non-police crisis teams and strong social safety nets that address the root causes of distress, addiction and disease.

Mental health is fundamentally a political issue. It cannot be resolved with medications alone, nor, as Trump and RFK Jr are doing, by dismantling psychiatric services and replacing them with psychiatric coercion.

The fight over mental health policy is a fight over the meaning of society and the survival of democratic ideals in an era where oligarchic power and fascist regimes are attempting to strangle them. Will we respond to suffering with solidarity, or with abandonment and punishment? Will we recognise the collective causes of distress and invest in systems of care, or allow political opportunists to exploit public disillusionment for authoritarian ends?

These are the questions at stake, not just in the United States, but globally. If the psychiatric establishment refuses to support progressive transformation of mental health systems, we may soon lose them altogether as thinly disguised prisons rise in their place.

If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, these organisations may be able to help.

Slot hints at new Liverpool bid for Newcastle’s Isak

Liverpool manager Arne Slot has refused to rule out an improved bid for Newcastle’s Alexander Isak as the Premier League champions consider adding to their formidable firepower as Darwin Nunez is set to leave for Saudi Arabia.

After a quiet first year in the transfer market under Slot, the Reds have spent almost 300 million pounds ($402m) on forwards Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike as well as full-backs Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong.

Nunez is one of a number of significant exits that will help recoup much of that outlay as the Uruguayan closes in on a 46-million-pound ($61.8m) move to Al Hilal.

Liverpool reportedly had a 110-million-pound ($147.8m) bid for Isak turned down by Newcastle, who are seeking a record British transfer fee.

The Swedish striker has not been part of the Magpies ‘ preseason preparations and has been told to train on his own by Newcastle.

“You never talk about players that are not yours”, Slot said on Friday at his pre-match news conference before Sunday’s Community Shield against Crystal Palace at Wembley, the traditional curtain-raiser for the season.

“I think we have a lot of attacking power in our team. When I think about Cody Gakpo, Federico Chiesa, Hugo Ekitike, Mo Salah, Jeremie Frimpong, who can play as a right-winger, Florian Wirtz, who can play as a left-winger, I already feel I have a lot of attacking options in my current squad.

” But as always as a club, we are always looking at the chances in the market. “

Last season, Liverpool celebrated a record-equalling 20th English top-flight title but were devastated last month by the death of forward Diogo Jota.

The Portuguese international was killed in a car accident with his brother in northern Spain as he began to make his way back to England for the preseason.

A series of tributes has been paid to Jota at every Liverpool game since and will continue throughout the season.

A” Forever 20 “emblem, referencing Jota’s now-retired shirt number, will be printed on Liverpool’s shirts this season while a permanent memorial will be installed at Anfield.

” First of all, tragedy impacted us, but it impacted far more his wife, children and parents, “Slot said.

” But it impacted us as well, definitely. The tributes that have been done since were all very emotional and impressive every time we were somewhere.

Have sections of the US Constitution gone missing from government website?

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It didn’t take long for internet sleuths to notice that something was missing on the Library of Congress website that annotates the United States Constitution.

Reddit users pointed out on Wednesday that the website omitted text from some sections of Article 1, which include provisions about the right of habeas corpus as well as limits on congressional and state power. Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, people found that the full text appeared on the Library of Congress website on July 17 but was missing in snapshots after that date.

Some people mistakenly said President Donald Trump’s administration removed these provisions from the constitution entirely without Congress’s input.

“BREAKING: The official US government website has quietly removed Sections 9 and 10 of Article I from the Constitution,” one Threads post said on Wednesday. “Let me say that again: They didn’t amend the Constitution. They didn’t debate it in Congress. They just erased two of the most protective sections; the ones that deal with habeas corpus, limits on federal power, and Congress’s sole authority to set tariffs.”

Altering the text on a website would not remove or erase sections of the constitution. It can be changed only through a formal amendment process, which begins in the US Congress, which can modify or replace existing provisions. The constitution’s full text is also available on the websites for the National Archives and the nonprofit National Constitution Center.

The amendment process outlined in Article 5 is the only way to alter the constitution. Any proposed amendment must first be approved by a two-thirds vote in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Then it must be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures or via state ratifying conventions.

Government website omits constitution sections

On Wednesday about 11am in Washington, DC (15:00 GMT), the Library of Congress posted on X that the missing sections were “due to a coding error”.

“We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon,” the post read. The website on Wednesday also displayed a banner that said: “The Constitution Annotated website is currently experiencing data issues. We are working to resolve this issue and regret the inconvenience.”

The institution issued an update on X a few hours later that the website was fixed.

“Missing sections of the Constitution Annotated website have been restored,” it said. “Upkeep of Constitution Annotated and other digital resources is a critical part of the Library’s mission, and we appreciate the feedback that alerted us to the error and allowed us to fix it.”

Article 1 establishes the federal government’s legislative branch. Its missing sections included portions of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10, which largely focus on limits on congressional and state power.

Before being restored, the text of Article 1 ended in Section 8, just before a line that lists Congress’s ability to provide and maintain a navy.

This screenshot shows a comparison of the page archived by the Wayback Machine as it appeared on July 17, 2025, left, with how it appeared on August 6, 2025, right. The highlighted text shows a portion of what was removed.

Section 9, which was temporarily deleted, details limits on congressional power. It addresses habeas corpus, the legal procedure that grants people in government custody the right to challenge their detention in court. The section says Congress may not suspend habeas corpus “unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it”.

Habeas corpus has been in the headlines during the second Trump administration. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters in May that the administration was looking into suspending habeas corpus. Later that month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrongly said habeas corpus is a right the president has to remove people from the US.

Section 10, which was also temporarily removed, covers restrictions on US states, including regulating tariffs without Congress’s consent.

Our ruling

A Threads post said an official US government website “quietly removed Sections 9 and 10 of Article I from the Constitution” without input from Congress.

On Wednesday, the Library of Congress’s annotated website of the US Constitution was missing sections of Article 1.

The library said the issue was related to a coding error, and it was corrected shortly afterwards.

Website alterations do not affect US law or the constitution. The document can be changed only through a formal amendment process initiated by Congress.

Trump to host Azerbaijan, Armenia leaders to sign US-brokered deal

United States President Donald Trump has confirmed that he will host the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia for a “historic peace summit”.

Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, and Nikol Pashinyan, the prime minister of Armenia, will meet with Trump at the White House on Friday for an official “peace signing ceremony,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“These two Nations have been at War for many years, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people. Many Leaders have tried to end the War, with no success, until now, thanks to ‘TRUMP,’” he wrote.

News of the talks in Washington was reported earlier this week when Pashinyan’s government announced the meeting in a statement on Telegram.

The two countries, former Soviet republics, have faced off over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh since the late 1980s, when Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.

The region, which was claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time.

The two sides fought a bloody war that lasted into the early 1990s, and the region has remained a major flashpoint ever since.

The conflict resumed in 2020 when Azerbaijan tried to retake Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia.

Azerbaijan recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, prompting almost all of the territory’s 100,000 Armenians to flee to Armenia.

The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan met in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, for peace talks last month, but no breakthrough in the decades-old conflict was announced.

The Trump administration intensified its efforts to seek a resolution in March when the president dispatched his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region.

The prospective agreement could potentially put an end to decades of conflict and set the stage for a reopening of key transportation corridors across the South Caucasus that have been shut since the early 1990s.

US officials told The Associated Press news agency that the agreements included a major breakthrough establishing a key transit corridor across the region, which had been an obstacle in peace talks.

The agreement, according to the officials, would give the US leasing rights to develop the corridor and name it the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.

It would link Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan region, which is separated from the rest of the country by a 32-kilometre (20-mile) patch of Armenia’s territory.

How the world is reacting to Israel’s plan to take over Gaza City

Israel’s security cabinet has approved a plan to seize control of Gaza City, triggering growing international condemnation, with world leaders warning of dire humanitarian consequences.

The plan to take over Gaza’s largest city was announced on Friday, a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel intended to take military control of the entire Gaza Strip.

Israel’s plan to expand its assault on Gaza is expected to worsen the humanitarian devastation in the besieged enclave, triggering a wave of mass displacement amid a hunger crisis.

Here is how the world is reacting to the Israeli plan:

UN rights chief

“The Israeli Government’s plan for a complete military takeover of the occupied Gaza Strip must be immediately halted,” the UN human rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement on Friday.

“It runs contrary to the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel must bring its occupation to an end as soon as possible, to the realisation of the agreed two-State solution and to the right of Palestinians to self-determination,” Turk added.

Palestinian presidency

The Palestinian presidency condemned Netanyahu’s announcement that Israel intends to seize full control of the Gaza Strip.

“This is a complete crime,” the Presidency said, describing it as a continuation of “genocide, systematic killing, starvation and siege,” in report carried the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

It warned that Israel’s actions would lead to an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.”

Hamas

Hamas warned that the Israeli government’s decision to escalate the war would amount to “sacrificing” the captives being held in Gaza.

“The decision to occupy Gaza confirms that the criminal Netanyahu and his Nazi government do not care about the fate of their captives,” the group said in a statement. “They understand that expanding the aggression means sacrificing them.”

Turkish foreign ministry

Turkiye said the decision to take control of Gaza City aimed to forcibly displace Palestinians and called for international leaders to prevent the plan from being carried out.

“We call on the international community to fulfil its responsibilities to prevent the implementation of this decision, which aims to forcibly displace Palestinians from their own land,” Turkiye’s foreign ministry said, according to Reuters.

British prime minister

United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Israel’s decision to step up military operations in Gaza “wrong” and called for restraint.

“The Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong, and we urge it to reconsider immediately,” he said.

“This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed.”

China’s foreign ministry

China expressed “serious concerns” over Israel’s plan to take control of Gaza City and urged it to “immediately cease its dangerous actions”.

“Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people and is an inseparable part of Palestinian territory,” a foreign ministry spokesperson told AFP in a message.

“The correct way to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and to secure the release of hostages is an immediate ceasefire,” they added.

German chancellor

Chanceller Friedrich Merz said Germany will not authorise any exports to Israel of military equipment that could be used in Gaza “until further notice”.

“The even harsher military action by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, approved by the Israeli Cabinet last night, makes it increasingly difficult for the German government to see how these goals will be achieved,” he said.

“Under these circumstances, the German government will not authorise any exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice.”

Sweden foreign minister

Sweden’s foreign minister said the Israeli government’s decision to escalate the assault on Gaza would make it harder to reach a truce.

“I view with great concern the decision that the Israeli government has made,” Maria Malmer Stenergard told Swedish broadcaster SVT on Friday. “We need a ceasefire and this decision risks taking the development in the opposite direction.”

“I have previously reiterated that any attempt to annex, change or reduce the territory of Gaza would violate international law,” she said.

Australian foreign minister

Responding to Netanyahu’s remarks that Israel’s military would take control of the entire Gaza Strip, Canberra warned that the expansion would deepen the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

“Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international law,” Foreign Minister Penny Wong said, as she renewed calls for an immediate ceasefire.

“With international partners, Australia maintains our call for a ceasefire, the return of hostages and aid to flow unimpeded,” she said.

Wong also reiterated Australia’s growing support for Palestinian statehood, stating it was a matter of “when, not if”.

Finland’s foreign minister

Finland’s Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen expressed deep concern over the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, warning of a looming famine.

“We hope for an immediate Gaza ceasefire and the immediate release of Israeli hostages,” Valtonen said, according to Reuters.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad

The Palestinian armed group Islamic Jihad said Israel’s plans to expand its assault on Gaza were “a new chapter in the war of extermination.”

In a statement, the group said: “The Zionist entity’s government is preparing to escalate its massacres in Gaza,” adding that “we hold Arab governments and the West responsible for curbing this escalation.”

It accused Netanyahu of pushing for “forced displacement,” saying his “escalation, fully supported by the Trump administration, aims to occupy the Gaza Strip.”

Netherlands foreign minister

The Netherlands’ foreign minister criticised Israel’s plan to expand its military campaign in Gaza, calling it “a wrong move”.

“The plan of the Netanyahu government to intensify Israeli operations in Gaza is a wrong move,” Caspar Veldkamp wrote on X. “The (Gaza) humanitarian situation is catastrophic and demands immediate improvement. This decision in no way contributes to this and will also not help to get the hostages home.”

Saudi foreign ministry

Riyadh condemned any Israeli move to take control of Gaza, according to a foreign ministry statement.

The kingdom “categorically denounces Israeli occupation authorities’ persistence in committing crimes of starvation, brutal practices, and ethnic cleansing against the brotherly Palestinian people,” it said.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen

Ursula von der Leyen, the head of EU’s executive branch, said Israel must reconsider its plan to take control of Gaza City.

“The Israeli government’s decision to further extend its military operation in Gaza must be reconsidered,” she wrote on X.

Danish foreign minister

Israel’s decision to intensify its military operation in Gaza is wrong and should immediately be reversed, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told Denmark’s TV2.

Jordanian foreign ministry

The foreign ministry in Amman “condemned, in the strongest terms, the plan” approved by Israel that “aims to entrench its occupation of the Gaza Strip and expand full military control over it”.

The statement also accused Israel of committing “grave violations of international law and international humanitarian law”, and undermining “the two-state solution and the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on the lines of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital”.

Spanish foreign minister

Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said: “We firmly condemn the decision of the Israeli government to escalate the military occupation of Gaza. It will only cause more destruction and suffering.”

He added that “a permanent ceasefire, the immediate and massive entry of humanitarian aid, and the release of all hostages are urgently needed.”

Belgium’s foreign ministry

Belgian foreign minister summoned the Israeli ambassador citing the announced plan to occupy Gaza City and take military control of Gaza.

The ministry said Belgium wanted to “express (its) total disapproval of this decision, but also of the continued colonization … and the desire to annex the West Bank,” adding that it will “vigorously advocate” for a reversal of this decision.

“Following the official confirmation by the Israeli government of its intention to encircle and then occupy Gaza City and take military control of the entire Gaza Strip, Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot has decided to summon the Israeli Ambassador,” it said.

Israel’s opposition leader

Opposition leader Yair Lapid condemned the decision to seize Gaza City.

“This is a disaster which will lead to many more disasters,” he posted on X, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of caving to pressure from far-right ministers. He said the move ignored military advice and the exhaustion of troops.

Far-right Israeli football fans set off pyrotechnics in Latvia’s capital

Riga, Latvia – Thick black smoke billowed across Skonto Stadium as fans of the Israeli football team, Beitar Jerusalem, defied UEFA rules, setting off several rounds of pyrotechnics.

With only one minute played of the UEFA Conference League qualifier match against Riga FC, Latvian fans looked bewildered as a Beitar fan, wearing a black balaclava, nonchalantly threw a succession of fireworks around the stand, causing a small fire and scorching parts of the away stand.

A banner displaying the name of Beitar supporters’ fan club, “La Familia”, sat draped across the stands. The notoriously racist fan club, which is known for its anti-Arab chants and violent behaviour, has in the past come up against the police in Israel.

In 2016, an undercover police operation resulted in the arrest of 56 fans on suspicion of smuggling weapons and violence.

On Thursday, one Beitar fan held up an Israeli flag in the home stand, garnering cheers from other Beitar fans, but angry stewards ushered them down the steps and into the away stand.

The team, which in its 89-year history has never signed an Arab player, boasts right-wing Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir among its supporters. It is currently playing its home matches in Romania due to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and travelled to Latvia just weeks after fans were filmed chanting “Death to Arabs” while marching through the streets of Bucharest, where their team beat Sutjeska of Montenegro 5-2.

After the Riga game on Thursday, the raucous fans were held inside the stadium perimeter for about half an hour. A solitary home fan shouted “free Palestine” towards the direction of the Beitar fans gathered behind the gates. “F**k Palestine”, came the response.

The game had ended 3-0 to Riga FC, and afterwards, Beitar fans let out their frustration by setting off flares in heavy traffic. Amid the chaos, a number were herded off to police vans by Latvian police.

An Israeli soldier holds his scarf showing the colours of Beitar Jerusalem football club while others hold up an Israeli flag while posing for a group photo at a position close to the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on December 14, 2023 [Jack Guez/AFP]

‘Double standards’

The chaotic, alcohol-fuelled behaviour displayed by Beitar fans may not be new to European football, but it comes amid the backdrop of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians and led to calls from rights groups for Israeli teams to be banned from European football competitions.

The world football governing body, FIFA, has repeatedly delayed its review of a Palestinian bid to have Israel suspended from the international arena over its war on Gaza.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it took FIFA only a matter of days to suspend Russian teams from all international football competitions.

That highlights the “double standards” shown towards Palestinian lives, Dima Said, spokesperson for the Palestine Football Association and former captain of Palestine women’s national football team, told Al Jazeera.

She said seeing Israeli football fans being allowed to shout anti-Palestinian chants without punishment around Europe is “as a Palestinian athlete … one of the hardest things to watch”.

“For me to see that those people who publicly support genocide, who publicly advocate for children to be killed, is something that’s very harmful for me as a human being, first, but secondly, as a Palestinian, it should not be allowed,” she said.

She also pointed to the fact that more than 200 Palestinian footballers have been killed since Israel’s war on Gaza began.

On Wednesday, the former Palestinian national football team player, Suleiman al-Obeid, was killed in an Israeli attack on aid seekers in Gaza.

Last November, Israeli football fans clashed with apparent pro-Palestinian protesters before and after a Europa League football match between their team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, and Dutch team AFC Ajax in Amsterdam.

Videos shared on social media at the time showed Israeli fans chanting racist, anti-Arab songs, vandalising a taxi and burning a Palestinian flag.

After the game, when fights broke out, Dutch police arrested people who had retaliated against the Israeli fans, as world leaders made accusations of anti-Semitism.

It was an incident that Thomas Ross Griffin, a sports studies scholar and associate professor of postcolonial literature at Qatar University, says demonstrates the impunity with which Israeli fans can act.

“If these were English fans rampaging through the streets, destroying taxis, breaking into property, smashing windows, beating private citizens … there will be condemnation all over Europe, but you attach these fans to an Israeli sporting entity, and suddenly … they’re the victims,” he said.