“This is the wrong decision,” Starmer wrote on X about the police’s decision to ban Maccabi fans from a Nov. 6 Europa League match at Aston Villa F.C.’s Villa Park. “We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets. The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”

The Home Office has offered extra support to West Midlands police in an effort to reverse its ban, The Guardian reported on Sunday. A meeting with Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG) has been set up for next week.

(The Safety Advisory Group chaired by Birmingham City Council’s head of resilience and made up of representatives of the local authority, emergency services and event organizers.)

Gary Mond, chairman of the U.K.’s National Jewish Assembly (NJA), a Jewish community organ that has been critical of the prime minister and his Labor Party, told JNS that “nobody can take Starmer’s protestations seriously.”

Starmer’s government, “along with its Conservative predecessor, has allowed antisemitism to flourish and become normalized in all aspects of public life—schools, hospitals, universities, places of employment, entertainment and sport. His sincerity is wholly questionable,” Mond said, adding that the ban was “a badge of shame for both West Midlands Police and the U.K. as a whole and must be reversed.”

In announcing the ban, the police cited violence that erupted in Amsterdam on Nov. 7-8 last year, when dozens of Muslim men hunted for Maccabi fans in town for a match. Many of the perpetrators referred to their targets as “Jews” in instant messaging platforms they used to coordinate what some of them called a “Jew-hunt.”

Emily Damari, a British-Israeli woman released from captivity in Gaza after 470 days, joined the ban’s many Jewish critics, calling it “shocking” and “disgusting” last week.

“I was released from Hamas captivity in January and I am a die-hard fan of Maccabi Tel Aviv,” said Damari, who also supports London’s Tottenham Hotspur F.C. “I am shocked to my core with this outrageous decision to ban me, my family and my friends from attending an Aston Villa game in the U.K.”

Aston Villa team bosses allowed stewards and other staff not to work on the day of the match, a measure that could prevent the game from taking place even if the police’s ban were lifted, the Guardian reported on Sunday.

UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) wrote to the president and co-chairs of Aston Villa to warn that a ban would put the club in breach of its duties under the Equality Act, the NGO wrote in a statement on Saturday.

“Under the Equality Act, there is no ‘get out’ clause for discrimination on safety grounds,” said Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel. “If Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are to be banned, then Aston Villa fans should also be banned, and the match played behind closed doors. If an event cannot be held safely without discrimination, the law requires that it not be held at all.”

Following Starmer’s condemnation of the ban, some of his critics recalled his attendance in 2015 at an anti-Israel event where he was photographed speaking against a sign that read: “Kick Israeli racism out of FIFA,” the world soccer association.

Starmer, who was not yet head of the Labour Party, was photographed against the banner at an event organized by the Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which supports a blanket boycott of Israel. JNS was not able to obtain by press time a record of what Starmer said at the event.

The slogan is likely a reference to the “Kick out Racism” campaign of the U.K.-based organization Kick It Out against all forms of discrimination in soccer, including antisemitism. The campaign coincided with extensive coverage in the international press, and especially in the U.K., of alleged expressions of racism at Israeli soccer matches.