Does it exist? Yes, according to David Hirsh who launched the Engage website which seeks to address the ongoing multi-layered campaign for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel.

Hirsh is interviewed by the Independent here, and Jeff Weintraub has some valuable thoughts about all of this, as usual.

The phenomenon is by the way not just restricted to cultural and academic boycotts. Various public sector unions in Canada have developed a unique and focused foray into foreign affairs: a solid anti-Israel platform. Last year the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) ventured into this arena with its own Israel boycott. And before that, the BC Teachers Federation tried to pass a motion condemning Israel's security wall, but the union's excutive retreated following a public outcry and pressure from Jewish members and community groups. And only last week an anti-Israel motion from the Ontario teachers union was defeated by its membership:

An Ontario teachers union local in Toronto has overwhelmingly rejected a controversial motion asking for a condemnation of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

The motion, including a call to create classroom materials on the conflict and to support an international boycott of Israel, was brought to the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation by English teacher and Jewish activist Jason Kunin, who has often criticized the Israeli government, and Hyssam Hulays, a computer science teacher.

It had caused an uproar among Jewish advocacy organizations that feared the motion could result in anti-Semitism in the classroom.

While some may take comfort from the fact that these motions were never formally adopted, the frequency with which they are tabled leads me to believe that we haven't seen the last of them. And even without a formal union policy you have to wonder to what extent history and current affairs are being treated these days in Canada's public high schools.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali reflects on the relationship between Jews and Muslims in the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference last week. She highlights an important aspect:

Western leaders today who say they are shocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference this week denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world, the Holocaust is not a major historical event that they deny. We simply do not know it ever happened because we were never informed of it.

Read the whole thing.

Thanks for those who commented on my assessment of changed Dutch-Israeli relations, and it seems there are two more reasons that I probably forgot to mention. One is deep guilt according to one reader:

You left out one reason which afflicts all Western societies. Guilt. The West has been fed a steady diet of guilt for the last couple of decades. Guilt over colonialism, guilt over the West’s support for Israel, guilt of the economic successes the West enjoys. Knowing the Netherlands as well as I do, guilt is certainly a motivating factor in the Dutch psyche.

Yes. The danger of this phenomenon is of course that if feelings of guilt start to affect a clear moral choice – such as supporting Israel – then the chances of moral certainty to overcome evil in this world are decreasing at an alarming rate as there is probably quite a bit to feel guilty about.

The other reason is of course plain old anti-Semitism, one of Europe’s key export products the market for which has surged over the past few weeks. A good example today was discovered by Andrew Sullivan in one of Norway’s leading newspapers which basically argues that it is time to pull the plug on Israel.

Radio Netherlands has kindly made available some numbers on the Dutch attitudes towards Israel and Hezbollah. As expected, there is a slight tilt in favor of Israel, but a 35% number saying it can understand Israel’s position is underwhelming, to say the least. Especially if you note that 18% “understands” Hezbollah. I am not sure how to interpret the latter, but I guess it is not meant to represent an objective understanding of how terrorist organizations operate.

Anyway, longtime readers know that the Dutch were once one of the staunchest supporters of the Jewish state and I have to say my current stance is in no small part influenced by the blue and white hallelujah atmosphere of the 1970s. Things like that tend to impress the young.

So what has changed since those halcyon days? What has prompted the Dutch to abandon their solid support for Israel and instead opt for a more ambivalent attitude? There are a few things at work here and I would mark the 1980s as a turning point:

(1) Holocaust - The deep guilt over the deportation and murder of about 85% of the Dutch-Jewish population during World War II - which fueled the strong support for the young state - started to wear off after some forty years;

(2) Domestic Polics - At the height of the Dutch-Israeli love fest in the mid-1970s both countries were governed by Labor and that in no small part facilitated forging strong and deep ties. Likud, the dominant player in Israeli politics during the 1980s was not easily and automatically aligned with the left-of-center tilt that characterizes Dutch politics;

(3) Lebanon 1982 - The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was not interpreted to be an act of self-defence and was carried out by Likud, a party that as noted above could not count on automatic popularity in The Netherlands;

(4) The Underdog - The love for the underdog – a feeling ironically in part crafted by the holocaust – could no longer realistically be applied to Israel from 1982 onwards. The Palestinians had successfully claimed the underdog mantle and leveraged that position skillfully – think media campaigns – until this very day.

(5) Muslim Immigration - A growing Muslim population in The Netherlands may have contributed to the factors 1 to 4 listed above, although I would be reluctant to make any claim that Dutch-Muslim organizations were able to hijack the debate to their advantage. One can’t deny however that a sizeable Muslim contingent which also benefits from the ‘underdog’ and ‘multicultural’ attitudes was and is in a far better position to make its case than the diminished pro-Israel crowd.

(6) European Integration - Yes, each EU member carries out its own foreign policy, but throughout the 1980s and 90s there has been a strong tendency to align or form a joint EU foreign policy which has – for a variety of other reasons – not exactly been overtly pro-Israel and that is of course an understatement.

(7) Naiveté - Of course the 'peace process' proved to be a defining factor in shaping perceptions and that brings me back to the Radio Netherlands report:

Lack of understanding can easily lead to impatience, and without the respondents showing any outspoken sympathy for either of the warring parties or any true understanding of what lies at the heart of the conflict, it seems there's just one thing they clearly want: for it all to end as quickly as possible.

Of course, war is unpleasant and forces a moral choice and both concepts do not fit into the culture of self-gratification and peace of mind. All western societies are prone to that, but the Dutch have turned it into an art.

NOTE: Here is an idea of how things are being considered by the Dutch’s neighbors, Germany.

Christopher Hitchens destroys Mel Gibson.

NOTE: The above quote is from an actual non-Gibson Hollywood movie. Can you guess which one?

Got a e-mail from Arjan Dasselaar who tells me the latest round of desecrations was most likely the work of a native Dutch skinhead gang. Good, that proves the Weimar-theory: increasing violence from the political fringes, while the center looks on hopelessly.

Yesterday was remembrance day in the The Netherlands, a solemn day during which the victims of WWII are remembered. Now, sixty years on this day has become the target of incidents and deliberate desecrations, like the one three years ago which I wrote about here:

I wanted to share this with you as Dutch newspapers last week reported that Moroccan youths had disturbed a number of these ceremonies throughout the country earlier this week. In one instance by throwing eggs onto participants and in another by playing football with the wreaths. The absolute bottom was reached when during the ceremony in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs a number of these youths shouted “we must kill the Jews”.

Interestingly, the damaged wreaths were just the start of what turned out to be a long drawn out battle in the Amsterdam district called De Baarsjes where the remembrance cross was eventually removed, allegedly as part of 'renovations in the area'. A storm of indignation followed, especially in light of the comments from the Chairman of the remembrance committee, who argued that protests from the local mosque prompted to re-evaluate the Christian nature of the memorial cross and that they would be looking to install a more "universal monument", one that would deal with more than just the Second World War.

The uproar about this spread to the rest of The Netherlands and as a result the cross will now be returned to a location close to where it stood before the 'renovations', once they are completed. There is no unambiguous answer as to what exactly prompted the removal - local Muslims may have been far less instrumental in this than is widely assumed - and looking over the various news reports it appears that once again it was a native Dutch decisionmaking body that decided to appease and placate in order to avoid trouble. Much like the attempt to not erect a monument for Theo van Gogh for fear of unrest, or the entire mainstream media repsonse to the Danish Cartoons.

The Dutch news this morning however reported that yesterday again, in Amsterdam, wreaths and flowers were destroyed. This apparently happened after midnight when a professional security service - which you need these days to guard memorial sites - went home.

Let me conclude the post with a translation from a newspaper clipping from a Dutch paper which I got earlier this week:

A while ago I wrote about the life of Mientje ten Dam-Pooters. She, a devoted communist, assisted in organizing the February Strike (in 1941) which was aimed at preventing the deportation of Amsterdam's Jews. Her husband Jaap was lying down on the municipal rail transport lines to prevent NSB members (Ed: Dutch Nazi collaborators) from leaving the station.

She is 89 now and when I call her she says she wants to continue to bear witness to what happened during those years, when taking a position was not without consequences but could cost you your life, like her brother, a resistance member. What does she think about events in The Baarsjes? "Have they completely lost their minds?", she cries out.

Indeed, and once again the mindless people here are not so much the Muslim immigrants, but the governing elites who will go to every imaginable length to keep the peace, to accomodate and to avoid standing up for the basic values of a free society. In doing so they embarrass not only themselves, but they shame and indeed desecrate the memory of the few Dutch that stood up against the Nazi occupier more than six decades ago. If they continue at this incredible rate, these brave souls will indeed be forgotten. Soon.

UPDATE: A timely piece from Joe Katzman, Europe's Shame, Europe's Suicide (hat tip: Glenn).

In this month's edition of Zeek, which is a Jewish journal of thought and culture, there is an interesting piece on the embattled position of France's Jewish intellectuals. It looks at Albert Memmi and the now well-known Alain Finkielkraut in detail and makes the following important observations:

First, it is clear that Finkielkraut's racism, if it can be called that, is obviously not that of the blood and soil nativist, but that of the Enlightenment universalist troubled by another’s perceived particularism. In a sense, this view places him firmly in a troubling French tradition that traces back to Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs.

Second, Finkielkraut, notwithstanding these ties to an older French tradition, was clearly running against the current of the liberal consensus that, in sharp contrast to that of the United States, has a hegemonic hold over public debate. Except for Finkielkraut and his few (and almost entirely Jewish) defenders, no one seriously doubted any of the clichés regarded by most as self-evident: specifically, that the rioters are “poorly socialized” and “marginalized” victims of racism and “arabo-phobia,” all of which make the violence understandable and excusable.

Third, in this departure from the prevailing consensus, Memmi and Finkielkraut are, paradoxically, upholding the tradition of France’s Jewish intellectuals, who as a group distinguish themselves by taking stands that are contrary to the French consensus. Today, that means being to the Right of center, all the while reinforcing their commitment to certain essential Enlightenment and French Republican values.

Most of these observations can in some form be extrapolated to other European countries, and to some extent, to the US and Canada as well. Politically incorrect thinkers who are deeply committed to core liberal values are very often marginalized and forced to live on the fringes of whatever passes for an intellectual debate. It is small wonder then that France has entered such a troubling era where progress through creative discussion and provocative thinking has essentially been stifled.

The family of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker will finally see the return of numerous masterpieces from his collection, some sixty years after they fell into the hands of the Dutch government following the end of World War II. For six decades requests to return them to the rightful owner were ignored, delayed or otherwise frustrated.

It is not the first time that the issue of the ‘brave and heroic’ Dutch and their fight against the Nazi occupier has come up on this blog, a myth that has been dutifully served up as the absolute truth. Painful though the confrontation for the Dutch with their own past is, it is the embarrassment over six decades of myth perpetuation that should provide some food for thought:

Many Jews who returned to Holland after the war confronted similar problems - a fact little recognised in a country proud of the way some citizens stood up for their Jewish compatriots. They were unable to reclaim their homes or the property of family members who died in Nazi concentration camps. 'For a long time there was a tendency to prettify the image of Holland under the Germans, but the image of a country that resisted unanimously has been steadily destroyed by recent research,' said Bas Heijne, a respected political columnist. 'The Goudstikker decision is a sort of closure. It brings both guilt and relief from a belated sense of shame.'

Heijne said the experience of Jews in Holland during the war - only one in 10 survived, one of the highest death rates in Europe, and Dutch police assisted with Nazi-led round-ups - reverberates with the heated debate over immigration in the country today.

The problem is of course that after such a long period most of the key players who prettified the Dutch image and those that were directly involved in denying the Goudstikker family their rights have since died. No one in The Netherlands really cares now it seems, but it is an instructive piece of history that will go a very long way in explaining current Dutch attitudes and (in)action when it comes to dealing with new threats.

NOTE: One small northern European country actually stood up for its Jewish countrymen during WWII. No prizes for guessing which nation that was. Their track record in standing up for freedom continues to this day.

It appears that the resistance to the proposed labor legislation in France will result in a general strike this coming Tuesday:

In a joint statement, the students said they planned to block train stations and main roads on March 30 and called on the government to resign.

"The government's deafness does not weaken our determination," they said after two months of protests which have led to sporadic riots and rising fears the demonstrations could be hijacked by hooligans.

France risks chaos on Tuesday as students, school children and their parents march in many cities, while the trade unions have called for a general strike which is expected to disrupt public transport with many trains and flights cancelled and only one in two Paris metro trains expected to run.

The pro-market measures can of course not be seen in isolation, they come not long after a series of devastating riots by immigrant groups among whose ranks unemployment is disproportionally high. The NYT picked up on this theme yesterday and pointed to the concurrent surge of anti-Semitism in France. The toxic mix of unemployment and manipulating race relations brings back memories of Europe's less than glorious recent past as Richard Landes' notes in the introduction to the collection of his essays on France:

And yet, over the last five years, a stunning transformation has taken place in Europe, made all the more rapid by the radical denial that has marked mainstream European attitudes until this day. If civic Europe survives — which I passionately hope it does — these opening years of the 21st century will be remembered as a period, much like the 30s, when well intentioned people made consistently foolish choices, deepening their danger.

It seems that the French time for choosing has somehow passed; the street is increasingly making future choices and another instalment of that destabizing process will unfold itself this week.

Below more comments from readers on David Irving and how his case is materially different from the cartoon controversy. While posting it I noticed that London mayor Ken Livingstone was back in hot waters:

Feisty London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended for a month on Friday for comparing a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard, a verdict the mayor said struck "at the heart of democracy".

A three-person panel which hears complaints against local authorities ruled in a case brought by a Jewish group that Livingstone, 60, had brought his office into disrepute. It ordered him suspended for four weeks from March 1.

Exactly the same logic applies to Livingstone as it does to Irving: the public arena is there to correct the man and Harry Place's makes a compelling case for that particular argument. In fact, Red Ken's comments are probably fairly innocent and since he was leaving a party maybe Londoners should ask themselves if Ken didn't have one too many. And that raises a completely different set of questions.

Sentencing David Irving to three years in prison for denying the holocaust, which is what an Austrian court did today, borders on the absurd. The bottom line is that for as long as Irving has been getting any meaningful media attention, it has been a well established fact that he is borderline material, a historian on the fringe. That to me is his life sentence. So far, this sentiment seems to be echoed by many other noteworthy bloggers - check out LaShawn Barber, Tigerhawk - but the most pointed question comes from Natalie Solent:

Islamofascists will say that if Holocaust denial can be criminalised why not depiction of their prophet?

Exactly, and it echoes my earlier comments in the wake of the cartoon crisis about freedom of speech and I won't repeat them again. But, what bothers me enormously about this case is that it is an Austrian court that goes to these lengths to put Irving in prison, and that, it is doing so under a law that dates back to only 1992. That is some four decades after what should have been the completion of Austria's de-nazification.

However, absolving yourself of a very incriminating past has not been a particularly easy journey for Austria, especially not given its enthusiastic and disproportionate contribution to the holocaust. So, adopting the rigid law in 1992 may well have been an effort to "Europeanize" Austria and to placate the European Union which it joined in 1995. And as we know now, the EU has a certain fondness for regulating and monitoring free expression.

NOTE: The Dutch experience in WWII especially has been tainted by Austrian Nazis, but that is just some complimentary history for those interested, and I couldn’t resist bringing it up. Don't take it as a bias against all things Austrian.

When I read last week’s Time Magazine and in particular Spielberg's interview about his new film Munich, I made a mental note to say something about it. Mind you, just about the interview for I haven’t seen the movie. But, The Augean Stables beat me to it and they have an excellent post about Spielberg’s comments and the implications they have for defining and fighting terrorism:

By giving the Arab and Muslim world a pass, by making them the beneficiaries of a grotesque moral affirmative action that “understands terrorism” we only encourage the worst. And that will not — Steven Spielberg’s best intentions aside — lead to peace.

My advice to the great filmmaker: If you wish to be the great storyteller of this critically misguided generation — and you could be — if you want to help us find a way through the heavy whitewater and jagged shoals of early 21st-century globalization, and towards a properous, responsible, peaceful and pluralistic world, tell the tale of Muhamed al Durah. It might help you recognize that, like everything, film can be used for good and for evil; that evil really does exist; and that disguising it in liberal egocentrism only makes it stronger.

It’s a lengthy post, but definitely worth your time.

Fascinating interview with one of the original prosecuors, Whitney Harris.

Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht. It comes in a week when there are again fires raging in Europe and reader and commenter Audrey C. - who actually reminded me of today’s significance – says:

Remember we were writing about the future of Jews in France and Europe and the exodus of French and Dutch Jews? Well, I'm just reading Major-General Lewis Mackenzie's book," Peacekeeper, The Road to Sarajevo." and on pg 145 Mackenzie is speaking of the mass exodus of the Jewish community from Sarajevo and Mackenzie meets up with Major-General Milan Aksentijevic, who Mackenzie describes as a cultured man with a good sense of history. He quotes Aksentijevic as saying this about the Jewish exodus from Sarajevo, " The Jewish community is an excellent barometer on which to base predictions of the future. If they are leaving Sarajevo in large numbers, it does not augur well for the next few months. I fear it is the beginning of the end."

November in Europe: month of “spontaneous” outbursts.

Here's a new blogger from San Francisco who has written a lengthy and interesting post about the disappearance of the Dutch Jewish community. It's a sad and probably irreversible piece of history in the making, and I recommended you read the whole thing.

UPDATE: The Dutch government has woken up to the surge in anti-semitism:

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende lashed out against anti-Semitism at a memorial service of the Jewish Community of Amsterdam on Monday evening.

Balkenende made the remarks at a special commemoration service in the main Ashkenazi synagogue of Amsterdam, the Rav Aron Schuster Synagogue, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Holocaust.

The prime minister was the guest of honor at the event, and seized the opportunity to speak about his admiration for Jewish tradition and the importance of a constitutional state.

Remember, Raymond van het Groenewoud, the Belgian singer who scored a hit across the pond with the song “Down with America”? Well, some Belgians didn’t take to kindly to his tune and filed a complaint with the Belgian Centre for Equality of Chances and Against Racism, an institute that is known not to waste a lot of time bringing charges against those it perceives to spread “hate”. It’s remains unclear what the outcome of this complaint will be, very little probably, but it is interesting to see that some in Europe are more than a little fed up with the relentless anti-Americanism to which they’re being exposed.

And remember, Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of the former head of the European Central Bank? She was the one who a few years ago tried to give her pro-Palestinian campaign some momentum with some unprecedented and vile rhetoric, an example of which was the following:

In June, Mrs. Duisenberg founded "Stop the Occupation," an organization that calls for the imposition of economic sanctions on Israel. A Dutch radio interviewer asked Mrs. Duisenberg how many signatures she hoped to collect on a petition of support for the group. "Six million," she replied, chuckling heartily at her own joke. Subsequently, she denied the comment's obvious implication: The number six million, she said, just popped unbidden into her head.

And she continued her mission to the West bank and Gaza where a highly publicized meeting with the late Arafat took place. That prompted a Dutch journalist to ridicule Mrs. Duisenberg, who in turn revealed her limited sense of humor by taking the writer to court in a case that she eventually lost.

Anyway, Mrs. Duisenberg assembled another group of activists, artists and writers to tour Palestinian territory this week, but the tour faltered almost immediately as Israeli authorities turned her away the moment she arrived in Israel, having been identified as a ‘security risk’. Interestingly, the same would probably have happened to her on her last tour were it not for the diplomatic passport that she then still carried by virtue of being married to the ECB chief. Mrs. Duisenberg however remains as strident as ever and has informed the media that the Dutch government and its embassy now have the task to deal with her unwarranted expulsion.

To be clear: while many of us are offended about what both Van het Groenewoud and Duisenberg say or promote, we shouldn't try and silence them by using the law or the ability to bar them from entering a particular place. The deliberate contempt they use to further their cause and the baseless claims they construct to support their arguments are best fought by exposing them for what they are. We can be grateful that there are blogs and media outlets that do so, and consequently hate speech laws do not have any role in a free democracy: they stifle debate and muzzle a free press. Still, I take some pleasure at Van het Groenwoud being served with a racism-complaint and Mrs. Duisenberg being booted out of Israel. Their bigotry has outrun its course and some people were getting justifiably tired of it.

Via Geen Stijl.

My source informs that Pearson College has taken some action against the students who felt it necessary to initiate their debate with Israeli Consul-General Brosh by painting some swastikas on the college’s pavement. The college has asked the culprits to write a apology letter to Brosh, it has informed the police, it has informed parents, it plans to design a special course for the students in conjunction with the Canadian Jewish Congress and “in turn, the students would like to participate in some form of educational program that will bring the lessons learnt from this training and from the incident itself back to our community”.

Fine, but somehow one gets the feeling that this is what the Dutch would call “mustard after the meal”, ie. wasn’t the original curriculum maybe lacking a fair and balanced approach to history? My reader sums it up in a priceless way:

The college decided not to expel the students, as it believes expelling them might encourage more bad behavior and it is better to have discussions and to encourage them to apologize etc. He did read me an apology letter from one of the students and it did sound pretty heartfelt. Still, I don't see me singing Kumbaya with these rascals anytime soon. I asked him if these were Palestinian students and he said no. I got out of him that two were from Latin America (probably Venezuela) and one was named Mohammad from the Maldives (he's the one who wrote the lovely apology letter) and I don't know where the fourth culprit is from. The dean did admit that his students, including the three Israeli ones, are very pro-Palestinian and left-leaning. He even said that all of his American students hate Bush.

Then he said an interesting thing. He said that he wished that there were more diverse views on campus. He brought Brosh in to stimulate discussion and bring another viewpoint forward. So, even a lefty is bored with all the lefty rhetoric. He didn't blame Brosh for what happened, but he did allude to the fact that Brosh was perhaps too abrasive in answering the student’s questions. He said that the students were armed with so many insightful questions after doing much research and quoted numerous UN resolutions to which Mr. Brosh got exasperated. I can't say that I blame Mr. Brosh for being short tempered, as it must be fairly annoying to be lectured to by pimple faced high school kids armed with Chomsky quotes.

Indeed. As I said it sounds like the program at Pearson is a bit one sided. At least the Brosh visit has got the college’s management thinking, but I am doubtful that a UN-sponsored school will amend its ways very quickly.

UPDATE I: Check out this site, Students for Academic Freedom. Real freedom.

UPDATE II: A reader has done some research and found this factoid, Pearson College students:

"I honestly don't believe peace and democracy can be achieved through war."

No, of course not, they can only be achieved through UN-resolutions, a point no doubt corroborated by for instance the citizens of Srebrenica.

A reader alerted me to an incident on Vancouver Island’s Pearson College where during a visit Israeli consul-general Cobie Brosh was greeted by swastikas on the pavement, apparently the work of some of the institution’s students. While every incident of anti-Semitism is of course worthy of attention, this one in particular strikes me as suitable for further scrutiny given the mission statement of the college in question:

To provide an education, in the total sense, which will produce involved, active, educated citizens, whose attitudes of understanding and service will be a force against bigotry and hatred between peoples. To provide a practical demonstration that international education works and that it can build bridges of understanding between peoples.

Well, they need to spend a bit more time on building those bridges. To the college’s credit, they alerted the Canadian Jewish Congress for assistance who are now looking into the matter. Given the discrepancy of what Pearson understands its mission to be and the daily practicalities of inciting hate on its campus it probably needs all the help it can get.

NOTE: There’s no news link I can find on this for further information, so consider this to be some raw reporting. If more news becomes available, the post will be updated.

UPDATE: Vancouver island resident and blogger Ginna Dowler weighs in:

Pearson is famous on the island for providing UN-sponsored scholarships to Palestinian students. I don't know how many there are in any given year, but the presence of those students may have something to do with the incident.

Very likely.

When I wrote about Simon Wiesenthal yesterday I qualified the Holocaust as “one of the worst mass murders in human history”. Believe me, some thinking went into that particular line as the initial draft read “the worst mass murder in history”, but I could already picture a link, an e-mail or even my own conscience telling me that probably more people died during China’s Great Leap Forward and Stalin’s pre-war purges. So I changed it, but I knew that in the rush of saving my post to this site, I erred.

Well, Norman Geras saves me by asking the question yesterday if there was anything exceptional about the Holocaust, and if it was unique compared to the many other tragedies that have marked the history of humankind. The answer is affirmative and Norm gives us three key reasons why the Holocaust stands out in uniqueness. Neither the policies of Stalin, Mao or even Pol Pot for that matter, satisfy all of the three criteria that were sadly fulfilled by Hitler. So whenever genocide or mass murder occurs we can test the events against these particular criteria in order to determine if they're on a par with the Holocaust.

At the age of 96 holocaust survivor and tireless nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal has died at his home in Vienna. Wiesenthal was the man who relentlessly pursued those responsible for one of the worst mass murders in human history and in doing so raised the awareness of the holocaust during a time when most of the world was pre-occupied with moving on and thus forgetting. And he did all of this despite numerous obstacles, threats and initially a lack of resources. If there's one way in which we can honor Wiesenthal then it is to continue his work and to keep the memory of the holocaust alive for generations to come. Never forget.

UPDATE: Lots more over at Meryl's and Norm's.

Non-jewish bloggers have been doing it for years, but now a number of high profile Canadian business executives have launched an initiative that seeks to combat anti-semitism. BMO Financial Group President and CEO Tony Comper, who started Fighting Anti-Semitism Together, or FAST, this week explained why:

"That is why we founded FAST ... as one way of crying: Enough! And why we recruited an all-star cast of non-Jewish Canadian business leaders," Comper said, citing what he called a record 857 reported incidents of anti-Semitism in Canada in 2004.

The seminal incident for Comper was news coverage of anti-Semitic attacks in Toronto, saying he was struck by the "tepid" community response that followed.

That precisely has been the root of the problem, the application of selective outrage which in turn is reflected in media coverage. And kudos to Comper for pointing out very clearly the origins of some of the present day anti-semitism:

During his address, Comper also waded into the murky waters of Mideast politics, saying today's "sophisticated anti-Semites" wrongly suggest that Israel's treatment of Palestinians is comparable to Adolf Hitler's treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Which again goes back to the very selective coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by news and opinionmakers. It's hard to assess the impact of this laudable plan but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

UPDATE: It's high time for similar initiatives in Europe and Britain.

This is significant. After sixty years the Dutch government finally admitted to the complicity of senior Dutch officials in deporting Dutch Jews to the gas chambers during World War II. A Dutch group which distributes information about Israel and the Jewish people is pleased:

"This is the first time a Dutch prime minister criticised the role of its officials during the war," director Ronny Naftaniel said.

"For years I think the Netherlands put a gloss over the fact that police took Jews from their homes and that mayors let them go ahead," he said. "This was always passed off as having been imposed by the occupiers."

And that's what most Dutch history books will tell you. Regular readers will know that this is a point I've often made, but to date it lacked corroboration from the official side. Now it does, but it's sad to note that it takes such a long time for this type of guilt to go formally on record.

Thanks to Chrenkoff and Myrtus I was alerted to this piece in the New York Times which discusses the continuing issues soccer club Ajax Amsterdam has with its supporters who have branded themselves as Jews, in turn generating anti-Semitic rhetoric wherever the team goes. It’s an old issue and by way of background I suggest you check out my original piece on the topic that I wrote almost two years ago.

But the atmosphere in Holland has changed so much since then that people with a even a small measure of authority are now willing to take on excesses that for years had been tolerated, a term of which I remain deeply skeptical. Here’s why:

"We were probably too tolerant," said Uri Coronel, a Jew who was a member of Ajax's board in the 1990's, speaking about the management's past attitude.

Since then, the atmosphere at the games has become "unbearable," he said, adding that the fans' adoption of a Jewish identity is widely misunderstood as something positive. "A lot of Jews all over the world believe that Ajax fans are proud to call themselves Jews, but it's a kind of hooliganism," he said.

Coronel is a little disingenuous here. The club did not “tolerate” the Ajax fans carrying Israeli flags and chanting pro-Jewish slogans, but were in fact very reluctant to take on their core group of supporters. It was a pragmatic approach bordering on indifference: why alienate your most loyal fans?

But by taking on their own supporters and trying to stamp out a thirty-year old tradition the club is doing something it should have done ages ago when it would have been both easier and attracted a lot less (international) attention. And that's just one aspect of this issue as the club and the authorities are now entering the slippery slope of curbing free speech by specifically targeting certain expressions, however intolerable they may be. As the NYT article correctly notes a referee recently suspended a Dutch premier league soccer game when fans of one side suggested that the spouse of one of the other teams’ star players was a prostitute. If you can’t call someone’s wife a whore any longer, a quaint piece of Dutch humor, then you have to wonder what’s next on the list of things that you shouldn’t be saying or doing. And that’s not just a Dutch phenomenon, consider this bizarre tale from Britain.

In a desperate effort to create harmony European societies are now increasingly prepared to use the strong arm of the law to regulate free expression and monitor debate. Be prepared to see a lot more of it going forward.

Having lived through the unbearable nonsense of boycotting sport events, an extremely popular tool during the 1980s, I was pleased that with the collapse of communism and apartheid it had pretty much become an obsolete practice. It was never a useful tool anyway. But in this day and age you can always count on the French to resurrect and repurpose something vile and obsolete. This time their national goalkeeper stepped up to the plate by threatening to refuse to play with his national soccer squad in Israel, allegedly for disagreeing with Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza. A reader pointed me to the comments made by The New Vintage who in turn found it over at Israellycool.

As unwise as such actions may be, the player then went on to make a complete fool of himself by apparently retracting his threat and he will now appear with his team in today’s world cup qualifier. It’s not hard to picture the reactions of the Israeli crowd every time he will touch the ball tonight, an Israeli goal will bring the house down I am sure. The problem with a thing like this is that it always gets out of hand and it can have some dire consequences. Officially outing South Africa (including a UN sanctioned sports boycott) was one thing, but it gave some of the most unsavory characters from the radical left a license to do whatever they liked in the name of ending apartheid. I remember liquor stores being trashed in Holland for having the temerity to carry the odd Cape vintage with police often standing by idly. French goalie Barthez may be an idiot, he is damn popular in France and other parts of Europe and you can bet that many will take his actions as a validation of a certain position that eventually warrants slashing some windows. That has happened before, in Europe.

NOTE: Of all people, the French should know better then to stir up emotions around a soccer match:

The threat to disrupt the national anthem brought back bad memories of a soccer game in the winter of 2001 at the beautiful Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. Pundits believed that game, the first time a French team went up against an Algerian team, played an important role in triggering Islamic extremism in France. Millions of French television viewers could not believe their eyes when their fellow citizens of the Muslim faith began booing when their adopted country's anthem was played. The booing returned when the French scored a goal.

Guess who was defending France's goal during that particular match? Yep, Barthez.

UPDATE: It's a draw, 1-1.

Remember this frivolous lawsuit where the infamous Arafat apologist Gretta Duisenberg used the courts to silence a journalist? Well, there’s justice after all, a higher court earlier this week overturned the lower court's decision that favored Mrs. Duisenberg. She is now on the hook for the legal costs, a much better outcome than having her silence a writer and serve him with a 30,000 euro bill for damages.

Today it is sixty years ago that Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces and many survivors and dignitaries from all over the world gathered for a ceremony at the site that once housed the infamous concentration camp. There’s very little that I can add today that others haven’t already said and I recommend you to check out Norman Geras who has dedicated all of his posts today to this tragedy and to the IsraPundit with reflections, comments and links.

Still, I want to say something. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the lessons of the Holocaust are slowly but steadily evaporating. Despite all the guilt and compassion professed by European nations after the Second World War – notably by my ancestral grounds with their abysmal record in this matter – they failed miserably when real cases of genocide manifested themselves, in particular during the mass slaughter that took place in the former Yugoslavia only ten years ago. The latter was a failed test and it was followed by resurgent anti-Semitism and very depressing statistics that younger generations had become increasingly unaware of the horrors fascism had inflicted upon humanity. It’s questionable if we will ever see an exact repeat of the holocaust and its final solution, but the evidence since 1945 points to the coninued omnipresence of inflicting mass suffering on one particular group of people in order to further political agendas and solidify the authority that some evil dogmas have been able to acquire.

Let’s do all we can to remember Auschwitz and the many other human tragedies in which complete innocents perished en masse, but let’s not delude ourselves that by remembering we will prevent them from ever happening again. They will come back in many different guises. Not only do we need to fight them, we need to emulate those that lived to tell the story of Auschwitz: survive and preserve humanity.

Of a holocaust victim was found this week in the Netherlands, shortly after Anne Frank captured the headlines a few weeks ago. (hat tip: Kate)

A Dutch TV station launched an effort last week to posthumously grant Anne Frank Dutch citizenship so that she could be voted into a gallery of “Greatest Dutch Ever” for a TV-show. Anne Frank lost her German citizenship when she fled Nazi Germany for The Netherlands and was never granted Dutch citizenship since the mid-1930s working assumption was that all refugees would at some point return to Germany. She did return to Germany in 1945 to die in Bergen-Belsen following a tip from a Dutch collaborator who alerted the Germans about the Frank’s family hideaway. That hiding place, better known by its Dutch name “Het Achterhuis” and Anne’s diary became world famous as symbols for all those persecuted and killed during the Second World War. It also forever associated Amsterdam and The Netherlands with Anne Frank and her family, although they never considered themselves Dutch as they were refugees whose passports had been taken away by the Germans.

For a country, whose minimal effort to save Jews from the holocaust resulted in the annihilation of not less than 100,000 of its total of 120,000 Jews during the war, to seek and claim Anne Frank as part of its national legacy for a TV-show is crossing the boundaries of good taste. Quite frankly it’s disgraceful and common sense prevailed when the government announced yesterday that retroactive naturalizations are simply not possible. The debate also served the Dutch with a shrill reminder that the nation’s founding father, William of Orange, wasn’t Dutch either: he was a German who spoke French.

UPDATE: Yonathan of Dutchblog Israel reminds me that the TV-station seeking Anne’s naturalization is a Catholic one and some Dutch media have suggested that they might as well seek to beatify Anne Frank while they’re at it. That’s not as strange as it sounds: Edith Stein, another Jewish refugee from Germany to Holland who converted to Catholicism and perished in Auschwitz was beatified and canonized by the pope in 1987 and 1998 respectively.

Last week I argued that the Left had adopted quite a number of anti-Semitic themes in this post, which generated quite a few reactions. Oliver Kamm (hat tip: Penny) discusses a similar trend by zeroing in on the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP):

It is my considered view that the SWP is best described as a fascist party of the Left, even without taking into account the Islamist connections that have brought the party such scorn on the liberal Left. It has, moreover, a striking characteristic in common with the far Right: an increasingly overt antisemitism.

Marxism 2004? Zionism is my Enemy? It’s but a small step to complete the coalition with some Islamists, unionists and anti-globalists. They may be on the fringe in the UK but in many other countries parties like this are well organized and represented, in The Netherlands for instance the “Socialistiese Partij” has 8 MPs in a 150-seat parliament, a not so insignificant 5.3% of the vote. And while they are not openly anti-Semitic they leave no doubt as to where they stand with regards to Israel's right to defend itself.

Trudeaupia links to this interesting piece about everyday anti-Semitism and his sentiments are mine entirely. The return of anti-Semitism in particular in Europe is largely due to the fact that a generation has passed since the atrocities of the Holocaust took place and with that passing the deep feelings of guilt towards Jews and consequently the unmitigated support for the state of Israel have largely subsided. But that’s only part of the story, the large and growing number of Muslims on the continent are primarily the new carriers of the invective against Jews, here’s historian Diana Pinto:

Let there be no misunderstanding. We live since 2001 in an extremely dangerous world where a new type of anti-Semitism among some Muslims has surfaced, whose tenets are worthy of the worst Nazi propaganda, and whose hatred is no longer aimed at Israeli "Zionists" but at the entire Jewish people.

But she goes on to say that this is not necessarily linked to criticism leveled against Israel by Europe’s Left:

This genuine and dangerous anti-Semitism should not be confused with the unsavoury critiques against Israel which can be found in the ranks of Europe's left-wing or with the often unpalatable Holocaust "fatigue" which many Europeans, in Germany in particular, may be experiencing.

Well, the lines are very blurred these days I think. Europe’s Left has vigorously adopted an anti-Israel message that on the one hand has emboldened Europe’s Muslims to engage in violent anti-Semitic behaviour; on the other hand it has very often crossed the line into the use of abject language reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. And not just in Europe. When I was on my blogging break a furor erupted over a Canadian anti-globalist newspaper called Adbusters which felt it appropriate to publish a list of American neo-conservatives and marking those that were Jewish with an asterisk, implying that US foreign policy was dictated by Jewish interests, echoing similar claims by Hitler’s propaganda machine 60 years ago. I am currently reading The Right Nation where writers John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge remind us that there are indeed many Jews in the neo-con ranks and that there’s a good and plausible reason for it:

“The neocons hated what was happening to America’s universities, the institutions that had lifted them out of the ghetto. How could the high priests of America’s temples of reason stand by idly by while students trashed university property? How could people who were supposed to care about intellectual standards agree to the introduction of quotas? Criticizing the war in Vietnam was all very well, but how could these overprivileged brats burn the American flag? How could they argue that America was always wrong and its critics always right? Knee-jerk anti-Americanism was particularly offensive to people whose families escaped the Holocaust only because they emigrated to America.

And that’s where I feel we are talking about a re-alignment. Anti-Semitism is no longer just attacking Jews or the State of Israel. That practice has aligned itself with an anti-Western, anti-capitalist message that originates from the remnants of what once was a thriving and racially tolerant left-liberal movement. It has become an all encompassing tool to attack the very fundamentals that have allowed poor Jews and holocaust survivors to lift themselves out of misery and into a better life: freedom. That’s why it’s no longer a fight for Jews only; it has become a struggle for all of us.

The same article by Silcoff mentions that a recent poll in Israel found that 75% of parents interviewed hoped that their children would eventually emigrate in search of a better life. That’s emigrating from Israel, but this horrendous incident, the umpteenth in a string of anti-semitic attacks in France, will explain the significant increase in immigration of French jews to Israel.

Following her return to the frontpages, Gretta Duisenberg got her day in court last week (link in Dutch only, but I will summarize it for you in English) when a judge ordered that a column about her is to be deleted from the writer’s website (it had appeared earlier in a Dutch daily called Metro) and instead lists a statement from Mrs. Duisenberg and the court. The judge however did not award her the $30,000 Euros in damages that she was looking for. I am always intrigued by judicial arguments and I will quickly explain why this journalist's right of free expression was curtailed by the court.

The writer of the column in question had extrapolated Mrs. Duisenberg’s statement that she wanted to be part of a ‘human shield’ to defend Arafat following Israel’s threat to dispose of him. The journalist in question, Luuk Koelman, had written a parody about how she would mount herself on top of the Palestinian leader after which the latter would exclaim that having Mrs. D. on top of him was an experience worse than any Israeli counter-attack. Whatever your taste is, this is the artistic license any writer has and yes, there is definitely some humor in it. Not according to Mrs. D. who interpreted the comments as ”hurtful” (which under Dutch law gives the court a certain privilege to curb freedom of expression, it's often used to protect the royal family from ridicule) and the judge backed her up on this. But here’s the argument they used: Duisenberg’s support for the Palestinian cause could not be interpreted to imply a personal affection for Mr. Arafat. I don’t know, but stating your intention to be someone’s human shield comes very close to personal affection in my book, and it seems that Dutch law was interpreted a little bit too freely in order to placate Mrs. D.

Today many commemorate the 65th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in which the Nazi’s unleashed their racist violence against Jewish businesses, synagogues and homes all over Germany. Not only was massive damage done to Jewish property, at least 96 innocents were killed in cold blood during that dreadful night that essentially marked the start of the Holocaust. In a time when anti-Semitism is resurgent in Europe and the rest of the world, we should once again reflect on what happened during that night and what followed not long after it.

Following my post on how anti-Semitism has entered the world of sports I have had some reactions from readers on the fate of the Dutch Jews during the Second World War as together with Poland, The Netherlands is one of the countries that lost the highest percentage of its Jewish population to the Holocaust and many wonder why that is the case.

There are a number of reasons behind this. Off the top of my head the first one that comes to mind is that Dutch society is highly organized, structured and everything is very well documented. It was therefore not too difficult for the Germans to figure out who was Jewish and who wasn’t once they succeeded in getting access to civil records or any other files that meticulously recorded people’s names, backgrounds, religion, addresses etc. This is also one of the key reasons why so many Dutch are vehemently opposed to any form of personal identity cards or databases that store large amounts of personal data. It is interesting that in these days of terrorism and security we are building up enormous databases, being totally oblivious to the potential future abuse of these data particularly in North America where there has been no experience with foreign occupiers that abuse information for discrimination, segregation and, ultimately, genocide.

Documenting by the way is a very important Dutch skill. When, during WW II, my grandfather became part of one of the early resistance movements in the western part of the country, the group immediately resolved to make a list of all the members: better to know who is part of the team and where we can find him or her in case of need. Needless to say, that list somehow fell into the hands of the German occupier and before my grandfather could get into action he was dispatched to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany, which he survived.

Another reason is that The Netherlands is a small and seriously flat country. Refugees, escaped prisoners and resistance fighters had an infinitely better chance of survival in impenetrable mountainous and forested areas elsewhere in Europe. The partisans in Yugoslavia and the maquis in France are good examples of groups who used the rugged territory in their countries as an effective launch pad to attack the German enemy. At the same time these vast and wild areas of land acted as a great shelter for refugees, including Jews. In the case of Eastern Europe the natural surroundings enabled both, as a number of Jewish partisan groups emerged in Poland and the former Soviet Union. So, together with the available databases from the Dutch government and very detailed maps of a flat and developed country it was extremely difficult to hide from a force that went house to house in search of innocents to be transported to a certain death.

The third reason is that Dutch Jews were in comparison to Eastern and Southern European Jews not very well prepared for what was awaiting them. Other European Jews were well accustomed to anti-Semitism, pogroms, hate and random violence and had learned to build up certain natural defenses. Although that was certainly not a guarantee for survival, it gave them a somewhat better chance to stay alive in concentration camps. Holland was a safe haven for persecuted Jews from other parts of Europe where Jews had come to live in safety without the fear of persecution. With that risk disappearing it can be inferred that their natural in-built defenses also weakened a bit, if I were put in a similar situation I would be less prepared than someone from an area where discrimination and violence are a daily occurrence.

The final reason is one about which it is not easy to make an assessment and that is the level of compliance, or even co-operation, offered by the Dutch to their German occupiers. I have grown up being told that all Dutch were heroes and that we bravely resisted the Fuhrer and his henchman but in all likelihood that was not really the case as it applied to only a very small group of people who risked their lives and the lives of their families in doing so. The ones who directly co-operated were probably also limited in terms of numbers, but yes, it was a sizeable group. The biggest portion of Dutchmen and women most likely kept their heads down and practiced their own mode of survival, which essentially meant doing nothing about anything and hoping for a quick end to the war.

If we add these four factors together I think we are able to understand why the chances of survival for a Dutch Jew where significantly lower than that for a French Jew, Czech Jew or Greek Jew. There are however many stories of survival and here is one that I recommend reading. I found it when I did a bit of background research for ‘Soccer in Mokum’. Go read it.

This is not really a new story, but during my trip I picked up a copy of Joods Journaal (Jewish Journal) a glossy Dutch magazine focusing on Jewish culture and current affairs in The Netherlands. In it I found a story about Ajax Amsterdam, the Dutch capital’s leading soccer team, its Jewish heritage and the way in which that heritage is increasingly abused and used by both the soccer club’s opponents and supporters.

For my North American audience, soccer is the number one sport in Europe (for Americans: compare it to baseball and for Canadians: think hockey) and Ajax is one of Europe’s and probably one of the world’s most renowned and successful soccer teams. The kind of soccer team that has transcended everything earthly and become a myth, like Manchester United, AC Milan or Real Madrid. It has also produced some of the world’s best soccer players (even non-soccer fans would now about Johan Cruyff), is known for its creative way of playing the game and its phenomenal history and tradition. As anywhere else in Europe, soccer in The Netherlands has been marred by violence and disturbances perpetrated by hardcore hooligans. Most Dutch clubs have in addition to their regular supporters their own group of hardcore fans, most of who are not exactly known for being well behaved or well mannered. Whenever a match takes place a huge police turnout is required to separate the supporters of the opposing sides, a battle between violent supporters of Ajax and Feyenoord (another major Dutch side), left one fan dead and many wounded only a few years ago. Hate has become a part of the clash of supporters and while a lot of it has a mildly condescending undertone (teams from the eastern part of the country are always qualified as “farmers”); Ajax and its supporters are the subject of anti-Semite rants, slogans and banners. I will spare you the details but the chants vented against the players and supporters from Amsterdam center around the Second World War, genocide and the current state of affairs in Israel.

You probably wonder why. The background to Ajax’ Jewishness is probably rooted in the fact that the club is from Amsterdam – called Mokum in Yiddish, meaning “city” or “place” – the home of the majority of Dutch Jews and the center of Jewish culture in The Netherlands. The club has had two high profile Jewish chairmen, Jaap van Praag who led the club to stardom in the 1960s and 1970s and his son Michael van Praag who performed a similar feat in the 1990s by returning the club to its past glory following a period of mediocre results during the 1980s. The name “van Praag” you probably noticed, translates into “From Prague” underlining the fact that Amsterdam was throughout the centuries a sanctuary for persecuted Jews from all over Europe. Anyway, in the days before TV-rights, IPOs and worldwide merchandising revenue, professional soccer clubs were to a large extent reliant on wealthy individuals and Ajax was often helped by Jewish businessmen such as Maup Caransa and Jaap Kroonenberg. And of course, some of its legendary stars were Jewish: Sjaak Swart and Bennie Muller who where part of the famous team in the 1960s and early 1970s to name a few. The perception therefore existed that Ajax was a Jewish club and although the club is not based on race or religion or anything like it, it so happened to be branded as a Jewish entity.

Many attempts have been made over the past few years to deal with the unpleasant phenomenon of anti-Semite expressions during soccer matches, notably by Michael van Praag as well as Dutch public prosecutors using anti-discrimination and anti-hate laws. It is however next to impossible to bring to justice a few thousand supporters in a stadium filled with fifty thousand people over a song about gas and Hamas. To the Van Praags it has always been devastating to enter their team’s stadium in Amsterdam (a city from which over 100,000 Jews were deported never to return home) and hear this vile and mean spirited rhetoric as they lost a significant number of family members during the Second World War. Jaap van Praag, who died in 1987, had to hideout for a number of years and barely survived this dark chapter in the world’s history. What was equally disturbing to them is the response of the hardcore Ajax supporters as they have taken on the Jewishness of the club as their very identity by calling themselves Jews, carrying Israeli flags and, to the ultimate horror of holocaust survivors, tattooing the Magen David on their arms or other body parts. The guys that do this are a small but very fanatical group, yet, they are an integral part of the Ajax culture so it has always been very hard for the club’s management to turn its back on these faithful supporters by excluding them from the club, its matches or other activities.

The net of this is that whenever Ajax plays you will see large Israeli flags and other Jewish symbols making the team incredibly popular in Israel where many appear to believe that the supporters of Ajax are well informed about the state of Israel, Zionism and the history of the Jews. Nothing could be further from the truth; very few of these soccer fans realize what they are doing or indeed have any knowledge about Israel and its history. As Michael van Praag would say, they are as Jewish as I am Chinese. So, a very distasteful part of what is otherwise a great Dutch soccer culture has become an integral part of Ajax’ existence as a soccer club and its image is now intertwined with Israel and Jewish traditions in an unintended way. To Israelis this may be a great thing but to Dutch Jews it is anything but. Here’s what former Ajax player Bennie Muller had to say about it:

"Sometimes when I'm sitting in the stadium and I hear those crazy people shouting 'We are super-Jews' and 'Jews are champions,' it's so bad that I just walk off and go home," he says. About 200 members of Muller's extended family died in the Holocaust and he vividly remembers the day his mother was taken away. "I had two brothers and two sisters. All of us children were crying. The German said, 'Oh, let's leave them,' but the Dutch Nazis said no. My mother had 11 brothers and sisters." His mother survived, but her relatives were killed. "Older people know what happened in the war. But these fans, they don't know. I wish they would stop, but they won't. I talk a lot with Israelis here. They all seem to like it. They laugh about it. But for the Jewish people in Amsterdam it's so disgusting, it's unbelievable," says Muller.

Muller’s sentiments are echoed here, no doubt about it. But in the days of Hamas, al-Qaeda, arm-twisting Sharon into a roadmap and, yes, Gretta Duisenberg I can imagine that many Israelis consider it to be encouraging to see a massive outpour of support for Israel in a Western European city even though it has been taken out of its context by those who express it. As discussed earlier here, the history of the relationship between Jews, Israel and The Netherlands is an interesting one with many great moments, but it is also one filled with instances of shame, sadness and deep regret. The way some Dutch treat the soccer team that hails from Mokum and the way in which some Mokummers respond is now a bizarre concoction of pro-Israel sentiments and anti-Semitism that is of benefit to no one.

Thanks for the feedback on my post of last week, discussing how Moroccan youths desecrated World War II memorial services in The Netherlands. The piece got some bandwidth as Dilacerator picked it up yesterday and his piece was subsequently linked by InstaPundit. Earlier today, Spleenville linked it directly. It is indeed a very troubling development and some readers expressed their amazement at the inability of Dutch authorities to deal with this. As my frequent visitors will now, that is what Fortuyn was all about. His attempts to wake everyone up by standing up against complacent multiculturalists as represented by the political establishment came in direct response to the social, political and economic challenges posed by unintegrated and disgruntled Muslims in Western Europe. It is a problem that will not go away, in fact as one other reader pointed out, the Muslim immigrants have one factor that is working to their benefit in an enormous way: demographics. Demographic trends will make it more likely that things in Europe will get worse before they get better, if they ever will. The fact that the Dutch press underreported these events is equally worrying.

One of the most solemn days in The Netherlands is May 4, the day that the Dutch remember all the victims of World War II. I remember the day very well for my father always took me to the remembrance ceremonies on a little square not far from our home which was appropriately called Square 40-45, as the war in Holland lasted from 1940 to 1945. It was always a very sober ceremony, some music, a speech by the mayor, veterans and survivors placing some wreaths in front of the statue on the square and a silence of two minutes followed by the Dutch national anthem. It was always deeply moving and standing there as a child I could feel the pain and sorrow of those who suffered and died under Nazism. Or so I thought.

I remember one time, I must have been about ten years old, that I was standing next to an older man who was there together with a younger man who I had seen before in our hometown. The younger man was probably somewhere in his thirties, had very dark, black hair and was mentally challenged or so it seemed to me. The older man started talking to me and I could not really follow what he was saying. I just couldn’t, I was paying attention to the ceremony and I always get somewhat uneasy if strangers engage me in a conversation I am not looking for, even as a child I had an issue with that. So, all I did was smile to the man, nodding yes, and thinking: “whatever”. As he talked on it became evident that he was talking about the mentally handicapped younger man standing next to us. All of a sudden he cut right to the heart of the matter, pointing to the young man and said to me: “they made him watch his parents’ execution”. I froze completely and I instantly pictured this poor soul having to watch the brutal killing of his father and mother. I also was deeply embarrassed for trying to dismiss the old man while trying to focus on the ceremony. The only thing he was trying to do was share his grief for I assume he had adopted the young man, and explain to me as a representative of the younger generation what had happened during those dreadful terror laden years. He gave me enough to think about during the two minutes of silence that followed.

I wanted to share this with you as Dutch newspapers last week reported that Moroccan youths had disturbed a number of these ceremonies throughout the country earlier this week. In one instance by throwing eggs onto participants and in another by playing football with the wreaths. The absolute bottom was reached when during the ceremony in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs a number of these youths shouted “we must kill the Jews”. This under any circumstance is a grieving and depraved comment, but to shout it out in a city from which 100,000 Jews disappeared never to return during the most sensitive of commemorations is beyond belief and it was no doubt perpetrated on purpose. I am not writing this as yet another piece seeking to provide further evidence of the ever growing levels of anti-Semitism Europe, although that would certainly warrant a post on this site. What happened last week goes well beyond anti-Semitism.

What happened last week is evidence of a complete disconnect of one group of people with society at large. The disconnect manifests itself in a manner that not only betrays a complete disregard for a culture’s sacred institutions, it also reveals a willingness to inflict further pain upon that society during a moment of grief and sorrow. You have to wonder how deeply some have fallen to produce such reckless venom and indeed wonder whether any of these individuals are beyond moral repair. We know that a lot of these groups have essentially become so marginalized that they are excellent targets for terrorist recruitment. But more than potential recruits, they are representing a domestic decay that is eating away at the normative foundations on which many western societies are built, as their despicable behavior may very well (and it very often has) find its way into other groups in society. Juxtaposing my memories of remembrance day with the evil defiling that took place last week, I came to realize that there is a very long way to go to stop the moral unraveling that is taking place in Western Europe today.

Stefan of Shark Blog calls me the antidote to Gretta Duisenberg. Starting out this blog less than a week ago I set myself some objectives but becoming Mrs. Duisenberg’s antidote was not one of them, however I thank him for his compliment because the behaviour of the lady in question (for those of you familiar with the case) has been truly appalling. Please have look here for some backgound on the Duisenberg story.

It ties nicely into an e-mail I received asking what has changed in Holland since the 1970s when the country was so enormously pro-Israel. The short answer is, I do not know, I left Holland 13 years ago and an awful lot has happened since then. However I can hazard a guess and I think it boils down to a unique form of resentment combined with the Dutch’s natural empathy for the underdog. Remember that out of the 120,000 Jews living in Holland prior to World War II an approximate 20,000 survived and it gave the Dutch an immense feeling of guilt. That guilt translated into the aforementioned inborn empathy for the underdog and consequently resulted in strong support for Israel and a very warm relationship with Israel ensued. That lasted until the early 80s when Israel invaded Lebanon and the Palestinians were getting some coverage for their plight in Western media. At that time Israel had become a prosperous, strong and self-reliant nation which prompted the Dutch tendency to cut Israel back down to size and this what I call that strange form of resentment: anyone who rises above what is average or standard is cut back to that average size. “If you’re acting normal, you’re weird enough” is an old Dutch proverb, believe it or not. If you drive a big Mercedes in the U.S. you’re someone who has had success but if you do that in Holland you’re a show-off and you need to be brought back to the boring grey average. This is what happened to Israel: it had just become a little too successful for comfort and the guilt over what had happened in the Second World War had been more than compensated, so let’s get back to normal please !

As Israel was always perceived as a close friend of the U.S. you can add in the potent anti-Americanism (the U.S. being another example of success and self-reliance) so prevalent in my native country. And since Israel was no longer an underdog, the feelings of empathy shifted to the Palestinians. So if you add all of these factors together you’re beginning to get the picture of why the love affair with Israel ended.

Other reasons commonly cited are the growing muslim population in Holland, but I do not believe that is a factor. There may be a bigger turn-out for pro-Palestinian rallies in Amsterdam or The Hague simply because there are more Arab speaking sympathizers around but that is about it. Neither is anti-Semitism a reason. To her credit Holland has always been a haven for a variety of oppressed refugees and many Jewish people found their way to Holland over the past few centuries which is exactly why there was such a vibrant Jewish community in Holland, particularly in Amsterdam. Anti-Semitism was and is widespread in the rest of continental Europe, not in Holland. The latter makes the performance of Mrs. Duisenberg such a toxic one as she mixed the common Dutch resentment for success and empathy for the underdog with anti-Semitism. Shame on her for doing that and if I am the antidote, fine, I am glad to do it.