In November 2024, photographer and citizen journalist Annet de Graaf became, almost by chance, a key witness to one of the most violent nights Amsterdam had experienced in recent years. Previously known for her urban portraits taken with an iPhone, De Graaf captured on camera the attack by a group of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans who, after the match against Ajax, assaulted citizens in the city center. Her video—51 seconds long—showed the attackers dressed in blue and yellow striking passersby near the Hotel Victoria. However, within hours, that same footage was clipped and circulated on social media and major international outlets as if it documented an “anti-Jewish pogrom” carried out by Dutch citizens against Israelis. What had been direct evidence of violence was overnight transformed into a global falsification.
In this interview, De Graaf reconstructs the events and denounces the inverse media narrative that followed the attack: the complicity of outlets like Reuters and Sky News, police passivity, and political pressure that, according to her, rewrote the events before dawn. Her experience led her to found Whispering Media, an independent platform born from the conviction that truth must be protected even from those who claim to defend it. A year later, her testimony remains a stark warning: in the digital age, not even images can safeguard the truth when power demands a different story.
