http://www.worldandi.com/subscribers/feature_detail.asp?num=24379
Holland's Tolerance is Tested
Tom Carter
Parliamentarian Geert Wilders sees himself as the legendary Dutch boy,
finger in the dike, holding back a rising tide of immigrants that threatens
to swamp the Netherlands and all of Europe. "Immigration is the biggest
problem that Dutch society is facing today," said Wilders, in his office in
The Hague. "We have been so tolerant of others' culture and religion, we are
losing our own. ... Europe is losing itself. ... One day we will wake up,
and it will be too late. [Immigration] will have killed our country and our
democracy."
The intense politician spoke under the watchful eye of bodyguards, as
his picture has been posted on Muslim Web sites calling for his beheading.
Wilders' passion reflects a problem confronting much of Europe. Old,
cold, and settled in its ways, the Continent struggles to absorb waves of
immigrants, to protect itself from the growing hatred of Muslim militants in
their midst and to live with the dark fear of a world spinning out of
control.
"If Europe does not take the full and effective integration of its
immigrants to heart and change its message from 'You are not welcome. You
don't belong,' to 'We are in this together,' Europe is going to have a very
hard time," said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy
Institute in Washington, D.C.
Said Wilders: "In the last thirty years, the Netherlands population
has grown from thirteen million to sixteen million, about 25 percent, but
the immigrant population has grown from 160,000 to 1.6 million--1,000
percent. Ninety percent of our prison population is immigrants."
"[Immigrants] are the most dependent on our [welfare] schemes. They
are non-Westerners and not speaking our language," he said. "In the next
[few] years, 75 percent of our population growth will be non-Western
immigrants; only 8 percent will be native Dutch. This is fact, not opinion,"
he said, dismissing a somewhat different picture that emerges from official
statistics posted on government Web sites.
For example, Netherlands' Central Statistical Office shows that about
50 percent, not 90 percent, of the prison population is foreign. And
Wilders' 1.6 million figure can only be reached by including second- and
third-generation children of immigrants, who were born in Holland and are
citizens--individuals who would never be considered foreign in the United
States.
Nevertheless, the thrust of his argument is gospel for Dutch
immigration reformers.
Moratorium sought
Wilders demands, and many support, a five-year moratorium on all
non-Western immigration, even to unite a legally working husband with his
family. He wants illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers deported, and
all immigrants to have a working knowledge of the Dutch language before they
arrive. To remain in the Netherlands, a newcomer should pass a basic civics
exam, one that few Dutch could pass.
Articulating the fears of many, Wilders calls mosques "houses of
terror and recruitment" for jihad; he describes Islam as "dangerous" and
"fascist."
He says that Muslims beat their wives and children, and occasionally
kill a daughter who wishes to marry outside the faith. He says that imams
preach that homosexuals--even in a society where same-sex "marriage" is
legal--should be executed.
"I am talking about non-Western immigration to the Netherlands,"
Wilders said in a recent interview. "The lessons of Pim Fortuyn have not
been learned."
Fortuyn, a charismatic homosexual anti-immigration activist, was
gunned down while running for prime minister in 2002 on an anti-immigration
platform. After the assassination--by a deranged animal-rights activist--his
party went on to capture twenty-six of one hundred fifty seats in the Dutch
parliament.
Earlier last year, the conservative People's Party for Freedom and
Democracy (VVD) expelled Wilders because of his extreme views on immigration
and his opposition to Turkey's bid to enter the European Union. That made
the bottle-blond politician leader of his own one-man party, a figure easily
dismissed by mainstream pundits as a political sideshow, a racist, and, in
some Dutch newspapers, a Nazi.
But that changed with the November 2 slaying of Theo van Gogh, the
anti-Islamist crusader and social provocateur, gunned down and then slashed
with a knife by a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent in broad daylight on an
Amsterdam street. Within days, at least nineteen other members of the
Netherlands parliament were supporting Wilders--at least on immigration
issues.
The Netherlands has sixteen million people, including one million
Muslims. Its Muslims include about three hundred thousand Moroccans and
another three hundred thousand Turks, who came as "guest workers" during
Holland's economic boom years. Holland is now their home and their children
are full Dutch citizens who have never felt welcome in Europe's most
permissive society, where marijuana consumption, prostitution, and same-sex
"marriage" are either tolerated or legal.
Dutch intelligence says that an estimated fifty thousand Muslims are
devout and may be sympathetic to extremist goals and perhaps one hundred
might actually engage in criminal or terrorist acts.
Fear of terrorism
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and March 11,
2004, terrorist bombings in Madrid amplified the fear and estrangement
between the native Dutch and the Muslim communities. Polls consistently show
that about 50 percent of voters support tighter restrictions on immigration
and asylum, even though the largest immigrant populations in the Netherlands
today are Germans and Indonesians from the former Dutch colony.
Exacerbating the gnawing unease over swarthy men and women in head
scarves on the streets of The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Amsterdam,
there is the fear of foreigners taking jobs away from native Dutch.
The Netherlands, like all of Western Europe, is facing what
demographers call a "birth dearth." The native Dutch are having fewer
children--about 1.7 per woman--which is lower than the replacement rate.
People are living longer, retiring, and drawing government pensions longer.
Economists predict the Netherlands' extensive social-welfare network
will go broke if there are not enough younger workers to pay taxes.
"If Europe doesn't employ immigrants, who will empty the bedpans? ...
who will pay the taxes needed to fund the retirement programs?" asked Ben
Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Fewer,
which details the demographic crisis in Europe.
Meanwhile, the population of immigrants, their children, and
grandchildren is becoming politically active. "I am not a guest in the
Netherlands, and I will not act like a guest, asking permission in someone
else's home to sit here or move the furniture there. I was born here. I am a
citizen," said Nabil Marmouch, the Dutch-Moroccan head of the Netherlands'
Arab-European League, a political action group that plans to field
candidates in upcoming electio
"[Muslims] have nothing to be ashamed of. We can be proud of our
religion, our culture, our traditions. We do not have to assimilate or
integrate. ... We do have to act like responsible citizens, obey the laws,
and get involved in the political process," Marmouch said.
Like other Muslim organizations, he condemned the killing of van
Gogh, but dismissed Wilders' bodyguards as a "fashion statement" designed to
create fear of Muslims and draw attention to his anti-immigration politics.
Some say the real lesson of Fortuyn was "kill the heretic, adopt the
heresy" as the mainstream parties, including the VVD, scrambled to adopt the
Fortuyn prescriptions.
In the days after the van Gogh killing, Fortuyn was named one of the
most important persons in Dutch history, outpolling Vincent van Gogh (of
whose brother the slain filmmaker was the great-grandson) and Rembrandt,
philosopher Desiderius Erasmus and Anne Frank, who was not Dutch, but a
German asylum seeker.
"The VVD understood that you can win an enormous amount of votes
playing the migration and integration card," said Rinus Penninx of the
University of Amsterdam's Institute of Migration and Ethnic Studies.
Mixed emotions
But in a typical Dutch paradox, the local politicians are refusing to
cooperate with national law enforcement charged with rounding up illegals.
"People are saying, 'Illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers should
leave, but not ours. Ours are fine.' They are protesting the closing of
local asylum centers. The mayor of Amsterdam told the government he won't
help unless the individuals are causing a nuisance," Penninx said.
Eduard Nazarski, head of the Dutch Refugee Council, said that the
myth of Dutch tolerance is overstated. "Anne Frank is a symbol, an example
of Dutch intolerance," said Nazarski, who says anti-immigrant hysteria has
made the Netherlands the most restrictive nation in Europe for immigrants
and asylum seekers. "Asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants,
the politicians don't make a distinction. They are all foreigners. ...
"About 50 percent of the Dutch people are fed up with too many
foreigners being here. Thirty [percent] to 40 percent think that we have one
hundred thousand asylum seekers a year, when it is really twenty thousand to
thirty thousand a year. It is all emotion. The government is not interested
in the facts," Nazarski said.
Jan Rath, who also teaches ethnic and immigration studies at the
University of Amsterdam, said that Holland's historic acceptance of
religious minorities such as the Mayflower Pilgrims masks a different
reality. When Reform Protestants took power in Holland in the sixteenth
century, Catholics were allowed to stay and worship, but only if they did so
in "hidden" churches. He said the Muslims would be facing less resistance
today if they were not so obvious.
"I understand the emotional difficulty of seeing your society change
before your eyes. My mother is an older Catholic, and the people in her
neighborhood and church are very upset that they are building a mosque in
her neighborhood. The priest had to remind them that not so long ago there
were restrictions on Catholics, like her, from building churches" in
Protestant Holland, Rath said.
While Dutch churches are all but empty today, the minarets of the
largest mosque in Europe tower over Rotterdam.
Foreigners unwelcome
At a flower market along the Singel Canal, Donald van Achthoven, a
tulip seller, says aloud what was once whispered: "My opinion is they have
to be like the Dutch, if they come here. Leave their religion in their own
country. Live here with the rules of the Dutch. We are a tiny country, with
too many people, too many for such a small place. ... I won't hire them. If
they come here, they should speak our language and follow our rules."
Papademetriou of the Migration Policy Institute said it is natural
for immigrants who feel unwelcome in Europe to turn inward. "Naturally, they
close in and look to themselves for comfort. ... It is like the immigrants
to New York City in the early 1900s. Someone can be here fifty years and
still only speak Greek or Italian," he said.
Historically, the second generation generally learns the language,
moves out of the ethnic neighborhood and assimilates. "This will happen in
the Netherlands, too," Papademetriou said.
Ask anyone in Amsterdam to identify a "bad" neighborhood, or a Muslim
"ghetto," and a visitor is pointed, with a shudder and a warning, to
Mercator Plein. It is a working-class district in Amsterdam West that is
about 50 percent "foreign," mostly Turks and Moroccans, and 50 percent
native Dutch. The streets are clean and feel safe. Women in head scarves
shop at the outdoor market alongside Dutch mothers pushing strollers. People
of various races eat Turkish pita and meat sandwiches, while others duck in
and out of cell-phone, appliance, and grocery stores.
Rachid ben Larbi, a Moroccan from Tangiers, in Holland only eighteen
months, already speaks Dutch, to go along with his Arabic, Spanish, French,
and English. "The problem is not with the new generation, but with the old
generation," he said while helping customers with new cell phones, easily
switching among English, Dutch, and Arabic.
"How can you ask a forty-five-year-old woman, from the Moroccan
countryside with three or four children, to integrate? The government should
give her time," he said.
Multicultural neighborhoods
Elske Wouters, a white Dutch secretary who has lived in Mercator
Plein for ten years, calls it a perfect neighborhood. "The idea that it is a
bad area is nonsense. There is very little crime, especially compared to the
United States. ... Everyone gets along. I go to that Turkish coffee shop
often and sit for hours. ... Everyone speaks Dutch."
In de Pijp, another working-class foreign enclave near the
Albert-Cyup Market, Tom Vossenberg has been principal of Dalton public
elementary school for thirty years. He has four hundred students, about 40
percent foreign, representing some twenty nationalities.
"We've never had any trouble at the school. Sometimes [in the
neighborhood] there are people who cause trouble, but on the whole, people
are living together in a harmonious way," Vossenberg said. "I understand the
emotional problem people have with immigration, but, with Pim Fortuyn and
Geert Wilders, I think we are taking steps backward," he said.
Sylvia Blom, a history teacher from Hoofddorp, had her middle-school
students line up along the canal in front of the Anne Frank House to see an
exhibit on Pim Fortuyn's right to speak against Muslims compared with an
imam's religious right to condemn homosexual relations. The day before, Blom
had taken her students to Leiden, where the Mayflower Pilgrims lived for
eleven years, to a museum dedicated to the sixteenth-century Dutch overthrow
of Spanish rule.
"I want these children to know that most of the industry developed in
Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was developed by
immigrants, from Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal," she said. "Nothing has
changed. The Netherlands was as multicultural four hundred years ago as it
is today."
"Time solves a lot of things," said Rath, of the University of
Amsterdam. "It is a process of the Netherlands, of Germany, of France
redefining who and what we are. Right now, we don't know who we want to be.
All we know is that we don't want it to be Muslim."
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