generalspeaking

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Resisting, Overcoming Racism

"This is why Somalia is having a civil war and Holland isn't." It was all there. People in Holland agree that violence is bad. They make a huge effort to teach their children to channel aggression and resolve their disputes verbally. They had analyzed conflict and set up institutions to regulate it. This was what it meant, to be citizens.
I wasn't strong enough to think all these things through just yet. I didn't feel ready to step back and ask myself why so many immigrants -- so many Muslim immigrants -- were violent, on welfare, poor. I just absorbed the facts. But I was beginning to see that Muslims in Holland were being allowed to form their own pillar in Dutch society, with their own schools and their own way of life, just like Catholics and Jews. They were being left politely alone to live in their own world. The idea was that immigrants needed self-respect, which would come from a strong sense of membership in their community. They should be permitted to set up Quranic schools on Dutch soil. There should be government subsidies to Muslim community groups. To force Muslims to adapt to Dutch values was thought to conflict with those values; people ought to be free to believe and behave as they wish.
The Dutch adopted these policies because they wanted to be good people. Their country had behaved unspeakably in Indonesia, and didn't (much) resist Hitler; in Holland, a greater percentage of Jews were deported during the Second World War than in any other country in Western Europe. Dutch people felt guilty about this recent past. When massive immigration began in Holland, which wasn't until the 1980s, there was a sense among the Dutch that society should behave with decency and understanding toward these people and accept their differences and beliefs.
But the result was that immigrants lived apart, studied apart, socialized apart. They went to separate schools -- special Muslim schools or ordinary schools in the inner city, which other families fled.
At the Muslim schools there were no children from Dutch families. The little girls were veiled and often separated from the boys, either in the classroom or during prayers and sports. The schools taught geography and physics just like any school in Holland, but they avoided subjects that ran contrary to Islamic doctrine. Children weren't encouraged to ask questions, and their creativity was not stimulated. They were taught to keep their distance from unbelievers and to obey.
This compassion for immigrants and their struggles in a new country resulted in attitudes and policies that perpetuated cruelty. Thousands of Muslim women and children in Holland were being systematically abused, and there was no escaping this fact. Little children were excised on kitchen tables -- I knew this from Somalis for whom I translated. Girls who chose their own boyfriends and lovers were beaten half to death or even killed; many more were regularly slapped around. The suffering of all these women was unspeakable. And while the Dutch were generously contributing money to international aid organizations, they were also ignoring the silent suffering of Muslim women and children in their own backyard.
Holland's multiculturalism -- its respect for Muslims' way of doing things -- wasn't working. It was depriving many women and children of their rights. Holland was trying to be tolerant for the sake of consensus, but the consensus was empty. The immigrants' culture was being preserved at the expense of their women and children and to the detriment of the immigrants' integration into Holland. Many Muslims never learned Dutch and rejected Dutch values of tolerance and personal liberty."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel

These, the experiences, thoughts and conclusions of a Somali woman who escaped the traditions of Islam that would have given her in marriage to a man she did not know, chosen by her father to provide a comfortable life for her, and which she rejected as not being in her best interests before she even became fully aware how she would achieve her best interests.

Escaping the marriage to become a refugee in Holland, later a human-rights campaigner and later still a member of Dutch parliament she became notorious in her battle to reform Islam and shame Islamists. Her collaboration with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in producing the film Submission, resulted in his violent death and her ongoing battle against violent Islamism.

Her observations about the tendency of the Dutch to 'respect' the traditions and the heritage and the religious system of Sharia among their growing Muslim population, leading to the prevailing conditions of enmity between clans and sects and tribal enmities so common within Islam have not changed in the years since she found refuge in Holland.

The threats against her life finally led to her having to go into hiding where she was protected by Dutch security. Even that was not possible; the potential for violence so unabated that she was forced to move again; her Dutch citizenship was in danger of being revoked and she was forced to resign from parliament. Finally leaving Holland altogether, to begin a university teaching career in the U.S.

Now another young Muslim living in Holland has also been forced to go into hiding to protect his life from vicious threats directed against him by irate Muslims who feel his activities, like hers years before, have thrown them into disrepute, and have insulted Islam by revealing the extent of their anti-Semitic beliefs, and their habit of inciting their youth to racial intolerance.

Mahmet Sahin is a doctoral student living with his family in the Netherlands. It came to his attention that there is a prevailing attitude of rabid anti-Semitism common among Muslim youth. An earlier round of interviews had made it plain that among all Dutch youth anti-Semitism still rears its ugly head, but among Muslim youth the numbers who are virulently anti-Semitic is even larger.

While interviewing Muslim high school students of Turkish extraction Mahmet Sahin was appalled to hear the level of their hateful invective against Jews and their stated admiration for Adolf Hitler. He admonished them for their attitude in stating "What Hitler did to the Jews is fine with me"; "Hitler should have killed all the Jews" (YouTube (http://is.gd/6qpuHY). And he felt obliged to do what he could to debunk their beliefs.

His reward was a petition that was circulated seeking his expulsion from the area largely comprised of Muslim residents. And because of death threats issued against him the Mayor of Arnhem felt it would be advisable for him to go into hiding. He and his family now live within a witness protection program, for his having protesting Muslim youth in Holland openly and proudly espousing rabid anti-Semitism.

Ahmed Marcouch, a member of the Dutch Parliament has announced he will raise the subject for discussion in parliament. "It is horrible that someone has to be afraid because he has done something that we all should do -- teach children not to hate."

If a previous Dutch parliamentarian was unable to succeed in moving the Netherlands to act to put a halt to this distinct malfunction in a pluralist society under even more dreadful circumstances -- the atrocity committed against Theo van Gogh -- one can reasonably conclude the issue is not viewed as important enough for full attention.

The solution to the problems facing the Netherlands today, just as it poses similar threats to the orderly and secure social functioning of other European countries like France and Switzerland, Britain and Sweden, lies in swift measures to be taken to better integrate their large and growing Muslim populations and expecting them to obey the laws of the country, not those in which they have been steeped in fundamental Islamism.

And then, decent, law-abiding, human-rights-defending citizens like Mehmet Sahin who make an effort to make the country in which they live a better place for all its people would never have to write words like this: "Within a couple of days, I will move to another city of The Netherlands ... After what happened in the last three weeks, I understood the eternal loneliness and pain of the Jewish population. In the rest of my life, I will tell the whole world that we all must resist this aggression."

Labels: Controversy, Crisis Politics, Holland, Holocaust, Human Relations, Hypocrisy, Immigration, Islamism, Societal Failures