Mar 11 2005
Let’s go Dutch
It was a strange week. While I was moving carton boxes filled with my pitiful belongings from one house to another, Bush became president for a second term and the Dutch controversial filmmaker and journalist Theo van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death. Although government officials were almost immediately incredibly outspoken on the fact that this was an outrageous attack on ‘freedom of speech’ they gave the press little or no information on what really happened.
Every journalist was eager to print the note pinned to Van Gogh’s chest with a dagger.
Our beloved mayor called for a demonstration on Amsterdam’s Dam Square later that day, not for a silent march mourning the death of an artist, but to make a lot of noise, so it would be clear for the whole world that the Dutch would not stand any more attacks on freedom of speech. And so they did. Good thinking of our mayor; let the people blow some steam so that we will not have real riots on our hands.
And of course it worked for a day or two.
It worked so well that the demonstration did not even interfere with the unloading of my carton boxes, although my new apartment is not even half a mile away from Dam Square.
So, on one hand we were celebrating freedom of speech and on the other we were not allowed to print or publish the contents of a crucial note pinned to a body explaining the motive for a political assassination executed by a Dutch man of Moroccan descent.
After the people had rattled their pots and pans on Dam Square and all Islamic groups in Amsterdam had claimed that they considered the murder on Theo van Gogh to be a cowardly and gruesome act; they released the note. Not long after that all media hysteria broke lose. All hatred towards Muslims, carefully cooked to explosion levels by overeager politicians, was released and while I sit here typing - a few mosques, schools and churches are burning.
The Dutch known for their tolerance over the ages are suddenly quite intolerant. Half of them blame our Muslim brothers and sisters that they don’t live up to the standards of our judicial system and the other half is suddenly very concerned about freedom of speech.
If this mini Kristallnacht was not such a deeply sad occasion, I could have laughed.
Freedom of speech? We have always had politicians who seemed to think that ‘no comment’ was the best way to rule a country and now they suddenly behave as our concerned parents telling us to speak up.
More than a decade ago I was a witness in a trial against the mafia here and my biggest fear was not so much directed towards the bad guys as it was towards the police and some local politicians who forced me to withdraw statements about police corruption twenty minutes before the trial started.
If I would not withdraw these statements, my pro bono lawyer would stop representing me in a convincing fashion, because he happened to be a local politician too.
God help our Muslim citizens, who have been so tolerant over the years, while they were forced to abandon their own culture in the name of ‘integration’ to swap it for a culture of beer drinking hypocrites.