Choosing sides in World War II

At the beginning of May, there are two important days in the Dutch calendar, the 4th and 5th. The fourth of May is Remembrance Day, when the dead of the Second World War are remembered and honored, followed by Liberation Day on the 5th. At 8 PM on the fourth of May, the country comes to a halt to remember the fallen and the murdered, silence descends on the country, with only bell tolling on the Waalsdorpervlakte, a plain near the dunes of the Hague where the Nazi executed Dutch resistance fighters. All over the country, wreaths are laid, speeches made and above all, the memory of the of occupation and the Holocaust are renewed.

This year, the remembrance ceremonies were descrated. There hadn't been much attention paid in the media to this initially, but there are now more reports appearing the papers. Today's edition of the Trouw newspapers has a long article on the events. I shan't translate all of it, but here are salient excerpts:

It was the leader of the D66 Michel Rog from the Amsterdam precinct of de Baarsjes who went to the media. He was furious over what happened on Sunday May 4th at the remembrance ceremony in his neighborbood. But neither the organizers, nor the precinct council, nor the police reported the incident. "Subsequently it turns out that the ceremonies were disrupted in several Amsterdam precincts. That's serious. But everywhere it's been kept quiet, even when reports had been made to the police. Shocking. Some of the incidents have even now not been publicized yet."

[...] The horn sounded, it turned quiet. Almost immediately afterward [..] Rog heard from behind him, further down the street, the chanting of slogans. There was a group of boys, apparently Moroccans, between the ages of 10 and 18. At least five of them chanted "We have to kill the Jews." [In Dutch, this rhymes]

[...] After the ceremony Michel Rog managed to identify together with the neighborhood police officer one of the boys, just a child, who strenuously denied having participated. But a friend of his furnished indirect proof, pleading with the cop "Mister, he did not know there were Jewish people there."

The article goes on to the question whether this is just plain vanilla vandalism of youngsters who don't know any better, or whether there is something deeper going on. The appropriate answer is probably a "duh" here.

Amsterdam-West, where this and other such incidents took place has a large Arab immigrant population, mostly consisting of Moroccans. The schools there, according the article, "find it ever harder to teach about the second world war." Anti-semitism is a way of life there. Most May 4th incidents involve Moroccan youngsters. Playing soccer with the wreaths, shouting anti-semitic slogans, throwing eggs and otherwise disrupting the ceremonies. Some apologists claim it's "just vandalism," that does not wash. These scumbags knew exactly what they were doing, and what the significance of the event was. This was a calculated attack to cause as much offense and grief as possible. These disturbances were very deliberate attempts to offend. On the day when we remember the victims of the Nazis, the Moroccans youths came out and supported the Nazis. They consciously and deliberately aligned themselves with a regime that has become the generic shorthand description of evil.

The newspaper article recites the rise of anti-semitism:

All over the Netherlands the number of complaints of anti-semitism keeps rising. The problem is most visible in Amsterdam, because that's where the biggest Jewish community is. According to the CIDI [Centrum Information and Documentation Israel] it's usually verbal abuse, almost always in Amsterdam, almost always by Moroccan boys. [...] "Yehoud" has become a well-known expletive. Jewish men wearing a yarmulke can be certain nowadays to be accosted. Moroccan boys last year threw stones at synagogue visitors in Amsterdam-West. [...] A few months ago, in a busy shopping street, the house of a Jewish man was vandalized. "JEW" it said with big red letters on the windows."

It's not really news that the Arab immigrants here are virulently anti-Semitic, but the descration of the of May fourth remembrance ceremonies is a further escalation, taking the anti-semitism to a brazen new level. And while the war may have ended over half a century ago, the May ceremonies still play an important role in Dutch life. By disrupting them, the Moroccan thugs have placed themselves even further outside of civilized society than they already were. Choosing the side of the Nazis so blatantly makes it very hard even for the most deluded multiculturalist to defend them. They've been forcibly deblinkered, at least temporarily. It won't take long for new blinkers to grow back on though, but perhaps not all of them will regenerate.

Strong odors from Denmark

The situation in Denmark has long since passed the early stages of decomposition, as the smells coming from that country are overpowering. A reader forwarded me an email from "a Danish Jew," dated March 5th:

An open letter to Danish MP's, European MP's, the Danish and foreign press and defenders of freedom everywhere:

Gangs of muslim immigrants demostrated openly in the streets of Copenhagen yesterday to kill DANISH JEWS!!

Believe it: An open call to violence and terror in the streets of Copenhagen, confronting Danes with a call to terror against Danish citizens!!! This is not a hoax. It is horribly real.

The question remains if political responsibility and will still exists amongst Parliamentarians and the Courts to stop this here and now!!!

Now Denmark is saddled with a problem of radical, fundamentalist activity by a growing group of young muslims. They are being bred, fed, co-ordinated and inspired by foreign terror and hate cells in the Middle East and in other European cities. With birth rates that far exceed that of the Danish population, and an hostile ideology of world conquest and essentially "religious imperialism" this radical population now open calls for killing Danish Jews - a group they outnumber by 40 to 1.

Their overwhelming numbers and a suspended sentence of 3 months in jail for a radical Hizb-ut-Tahrir fundamentalist hate calls to "kill Jews where you find them" on their website, seems to encourage even more activity and calls for violence, terror and death in Denmark!!

Danes have to be able to walk their streets without feeling intimidated. Parents should not have to have their children see this kind of violence, hatred and sociopathy in the streets of Copenhagen. PArents shouldn't have to worry about their children's safety.

Danish politicians have to take upon themselves the responsibility of dealing with this! Without regard to consequences, a foreign population with a hostile ideology is being allowed to create a slow acceptance of violence and change in the Danish society.

The evidence is overwhelming of a growing violence in schools, a lower educational level, hostility and crime on the streets, an explosion of gang rape against Danish girls, economic crime and tax and toll evasion in the kiosk's and vegetable shops muslims have all but taken over, along with open calls of violence toward Jews is the result of a Danish invitation to a new chance, and a new life, in democratic Denmark.

This abuse of freedom must be stopped before lives and liberty are lost. Before Denmark is changed irreparably.

Legislators in Denmark have to do something NOW, before someone is killed and injured.

The reader who forwarded me this email asked me to look into, wondering whether it could be true. Now, I can just enough Danish to get the main point of a newspaper article, but I was not able to find any reports of this demonstration in the Danish press (but my Danish is sufficiently poor that this could very well be my fault.) The English-language press does not contain any references to this demonstration either, so I can neither confirm nor deny that it took place. I would have thought that something like this would have attracted attention in the Israeli press, but I have not been able to find it (my knowledge of Hebrew is negligible, so I only searched the English-language publications in Israel).

However, the email does mention an organization called Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and they're not very hard to find on the web. The blogosphere's favorite expert on Islamofascism Daniel Pipes wrote about Hizb-ut-Tahrir last September:

A Muslim group in Denmark announced last month that a $30,000 bounty would be paid for the murder of several prominent Danish Jews, a threat that garnered wide international notice. [....] Muslim violence threatens Denmark's approximately 6,000 Jews, who increasingly depend on police protection. Jewish parents were told by one school principal that she could not guarantee their children's safety and were advised to attend another institution. Anti-Israel marches have turned into anti-Jewish riots. One organization, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, openly calls on Muslims to "kill all Jews . . . wherever you find them."

The theme of Hizb-ut-Tahrir calling for the murder of Jews in Denmark is not a one-off. An organization linked founded by a defector (who thinks Hizb-ut-Tahrir is too moderate), openly calls for the destruction of democracy in Denmark. The Danish website of Hizb-ut-Tahrir still contains the exhortation to kill Jews: "And kill them, whereever you find them." (The Danish for this is "Og dræb dem, hvorend I finder dem.") There are reports in Belingske Tidende and Politiken in Danish on this. Given this background and the brazen nature of these threats, it would not surprise me in the least that Muslims in Denmark would be willing to go out on the street and chant death threats to the Jews.

The weak response thus far from the Danish authorities to these threats from the Islamofascists is deeply worrying. Something as blatantly despicable as this should show up as a blip even on the radar of the most deranged multiculturalist. But apparently the decades of multiculturalist propaganda have led to the evisceration of any sense of right and wrong, giving a pass to anyone who is the Officially Recognized Victim Groups.

This is a serious threat to our way of life, the values of liberal democracy, and in fact all we hold dear; the things that make life worth living, the foundation of our freedom and prosperity, that which sets our minds free to create, argue and think without fear. Whether it's the Dutch AEL calling for the destruction of Israel, or these calls for the extermination of Jews in Denmark, they're part of the forces that arrayed against us. Not just the US and Britain, as the appeasers delude themselves, but they're arrayed against all of us in Europe. We'd better start dealing with the problem.

The AEL opens up shop

it comes as no surprise, but now it's official: the AEL has opened its Dutch subsidiary. The AEL is the Arab-European League, an organization which had its roots in Belgium and claims to represent (and probably does) the muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. It claims to be a democratic and Islamic party. There is little doubt that it is Islamic, but the democratic bit seems to be more difficult to find. At the inaugural meeting, the interim leader Jamil Jawad immediately called for the destruction of Israel, claiming that it has no right to exist. The quote is for "the State of Israel to be dismantled." That's great way to start a new democratic party, by calling for the desctruction of the only democratic state in the Middle East.

But what of the citizens of Israel? Do they only want the state destroyed, or the people as well? The press officer of the Dutch AEL, Naima Elmaslouhi, is quoted in the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad as saying that she did not disapprove of Moroccan youths chanting "Hamas, Hamas, gas the Jews" during a protest march last year in Amsterdam. Of course, she now denies making the remark. Speaking of democratic credentials, the interim leader Jawad also said he understoof why Moroccan youths are keen to see body bags with US soldiers to be sent back to the US. He said, "Those kids see war against Iraq as a war against Islam." Keep this up and it'll become one.

No anti-semitism to see here, please move on

American commentators have been pointing out the resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. The response from European politicians has mostly been one of denial. No anti-semitism here, please move on.

To combat this non-existent anti-semitism, the Anne Frank Foundation is launching a new campaign and a book. The Dutch daily Parool carried this article with the following quotes:

"More and more, the Anne Frank Foundation is receiving signals from teachers who for instance in their lessons on the Second World War and the persecution of Jews are confronted with anti-semitism under their pupils. [...]" says the Foundation.

Teachers are afraid to give lessons on the holocaust and the hatred of Jews, because half the class will walk out, says Jan van Kooten, head of education at the Anne Frank Foundation. "Another example: pupils from Monnickendam were not allowed by their parents to visit the Jewish Historical Museum, because they did not want their children to learn about Jewish culture, 'because Jews are bad.'"

[...] "Many groups in the Netherlands have feelings of loyalty to the Palestinians and are therefore by definition against Israel and the Jews. Hatred of Jews and the policies of Israel are thus becoming entangled. As far as I'm concerned, anyone can say that he's opposed to Israel's policies, but that can't mean that every Jew in the Netherlands becomes the victim of that. Just as it is wrong to hold all Muslims responsible for the actions of Bin Laden," according to van Kooten."

The Anne Frank Foundation does a lot of good work in keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, and it's needed too. But I do wonder how effective they can be if their own spokesmen blithely trudge down into the morass of moral equivalence, equating Israel's self-defense with Bin Laden's acts of barbarism. Of course it's true that not all Muslims should be held accountable for Bin Laden's acts, but the fact is that many of them are cheering him on, even those living in the west. If you can't tell the difference between the deliberate mass murder of civilians on the Islamofascists' part, and Israel's self-defense (which seeks to avoid civilian casualties), then you have no business being in charge of education at a foundation like Anne Frank.

Not only is anti-semitism alive and kicking, but even those fighting against it suffer from the European disease of Muddle-Headedness.