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Gabrielle Cusumano on Monday, December 04, 2006 2:08:44 PM
Europeans ponder how the tolerant can best deal with the intolerant"
Islamic terrorism in Europe
After Van Gogh
Nov 11th 2004 | AMSTERDAM, BERLIN, BRUSSELS AND PARIS
From The Economist print edition
Hollandse Hoogte
“THE jihad has come to the Netherlands.” That was the verdict of Jozias van Aartsen, parliamentary leader of the power-sharing Liberals (VVD), after the violence following last week's murder in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh, a film-maker, by a Muslim radical. Attacks on mosques and Muslim schools were met by retaliatory attacks on churches. A raid on a terrorist cell in The Hague turned into a street battle featuring hand grenades and wounded policemen, before two suspects were arrested.
This sorry tale raises a big issue not just in the Netherlands, but across Europe: how far should liberal societies tolerate the intolerant? For 20 years the instinct of many has been to defend the rights and cultures of growing numbers of Muslim immigrants, even radicals. Any other approach, it was feared, would pander to racists. But both multiculturalism and tolerance are now under broad attack.
In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn, a gay maverick, popularised the argument that Muslim immigrants were promoting values inimical to Dutch traditions. When he was murdered in 2002, his political movement all but collapsed. But some of his arguments found a new advocate in Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a female Somali immigrant and former Muslim who is now a liberal member of parliament. She urges the Dutch to insist forcefully on the superiority of western liberal values. Ms Hirsi Ali was threatened, along with Mr Van Gogh, after they made a film together that attacked Islamic fundamentalists' treatment of women.
Voters are also turning to a new champion, Geert Wilders, a renegade member of parliament thrown out by the liberals. Polls show that his party-in-the-making might win 7-17 seats if an election were held now, largely thanks to his attacks on Islam. The government urges restraint; but it is tightening immigration controls and cracking down on Islamic extremists.
In France, Nicolas Sarkozy, now finance minister but once interior minister, commented recently that “whether I like it or not, Islam is the second biggest religion in France. So you've got to integrate it by making it more French.” His government has a two-pronged approach to its 5m-strong Muslim population. It has tried to contain the radicalism of Islamists by co-opting them. And it has used a tough security regime to curb troublemakers.
To the first end, Mr Sarkozy last year set up the French Council of the Muslim Faith, an official voice for French Islam. When hardliners won elections to its regional branches and governing council, he said this was no disaster: it was best to bring such groups out of the shadows. Yet his strategy has had mixed results. A power-struggle rages in the council, threatening moderates. But one mark of the council's success was the reaction to the seizure in Iraq of two French journalists whose captors want the repeal of a ban on the headscarf in state schools. All shades of French Islam condemned the capture.
France has a strikingly harsh anti-terrorism policy. It has had no qualms in making the most of laws allowing the detention of terrorist suspects without trial for months on end. All four of its nationals repatriated from Guantánamo Bay were detained on a judge's instruction on their return to France. Dominique de Villepin, Mr Sarkozy's successor as interior minister, has been unyielding in his determination to expel imams guilty of hate crimes. When an expulsion order against Abdelkader Bouziane, an Algerian cleric based near Lyon, was overruled in the courts, Mr de Villepin changed the law—and Mr Bouziane was on the next plane out.
For Mr de Villepin, the trade-off between security and civil liberties is a fine one. But he insists “we must never find ourselves in a position of powerlessness.” The French monitor activity at mosques across the country, reckoning that of 1,500 Muslim prayer places, some 50 preach a radical form of Islam. This need not mean violence, but Mr de Villepin urges vigilance: “radical Islam can be used as a breeding ground for terrorism.” The French are also keen to co-operate with other European countries, fearful that their tough regime might otherwise move the problem to “softer” neighbours. With this in mind, Mr de Villepin has secured agreement with Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain to share intelligence on radical Islamists who attend training camps.
In Germany, home to 3.5m Muslims, over three times as many as the Netherlands, fears of violence and jihad are somewhat smaller. Admittedly, Islamic extremists could hit anywhere, but most Muslims in Germany are from Turkey (2.6m) or Bosnia (170,000), and espouse a more moderate form of Islam. Police have found few links between Islamic groups in Germany and the Netherlands. Yet Germany is not oblivious to the threat. As in France, the government is getting tougher on Islamic fundamentalists, even as it tries to foster integration. This double strategy underpins Germany's new immigration law: it facilitates the expulsion of Islamic radicals, but also makes language classes mandatory for immigrants.
In the same spirit, EU immigration ministers, meeting in the Netherlands, signed up on November 10th to common principles, both tender and tough, for integrating newcomers. They must be helped to take part in peaceful politics; faith must be respected, but not used to curb freedom.
In Germany, as elsewhere, there is now more emphasis on toughness. In October, after four years of legal manoeuvring, Germany ejected Metin Kaplan, the Turkish founder of an illegal Islamic group. There is less tolerance for radical Islamists using legal tricks to stay in Germany. The rule of law must “show its edge”, says Otto Schily, the interior minister.
After the Van Gogh murder, calls for Europe's open societies to be more aggressive towards Islamic radicals can only get louder. “Militant Islamism is only a tiny force in Europe”, wrote the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “yet it is dangerous, because many societies on this continent have elevated their defencelessness into a virtue.” Yet the risk is that, rather than the intolerant learning tolerance, the tolerant become intolerant too.
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3379357
Christendom awake! (Bakground Article # 2)
r's Onward Muslim Soldiers
Twice convicted of inciting racial hatred after she criticized the ritual sacrifice of sheep by Muslims during their Eid el-Kebir holy day, Brigitte Bardot (above) is making news again this year for much the same reason. Two French human rights groups took swift legal action against the provocative French screen siren, charging that her latest book Crî dans le silence is full of racist attacks against Muslims—though, of course, Muslims are of all races.
The evidence of her latest offense: Bardot denounces the "Islamicization" of France and blames the degeneration of French society on her country’s liberal immigration laws. "For twenty years we have submitted to a dangerous and uncontrolled underground infiltration," she writes in her new book that became an instant bestseller in France this summer. "Not only does [Islam] fail to give way to our laws and customs. Quite the contrary, as time goes by it tries to impose its own law on us."
Naked facts would seem to bear out BB’s contentions. For example, practically all of France’s 1,200 mosques are funded by foreign governments, and out of the country’s 230 major imams, none is French. According to journalist Christopher Caldwell, "imams are often chosen by foreign governments for loyalty to their ideological priorities," priorities that are decidedly not those of France. Anyone who has been to Marseilles recently will understand what Bardot means by "Islamicization." The Muslim population of France doubled between 1989 and 1998, and if population trends continue, the eldest daughter of Christendom could have a Muslim majority by 2040 or earlier.
Back in the U.S.A., Robert Spencer has topped the aging sex kitten with a new book of his own. Onward Muslim Soldiers is jam-packed with some of the most politically incorrect statements about Islam (e.g., "Jihad and killing is the head of Islam."), though it is instructive to note that many of these statements, like the example above, are direct quotes from Muslim religious leaders themselves. Such is Spencer’s tack in providing his critical analysis of Islamic writings, history, and current practice.
Irony abounds. While Brigitte Bardot is being sued for the third time by French human rights groups advocating on behalf of Islam, Spencer charges that it is Islam itself, its traditional teachings and modern practice, that not only incites hatred—hatred of non-Muslims (infidels)—but also incites violence. Islamic intolerance, he says, plays no small role in our present clash of civilizations.
Last November, for example, Nigerian journalist Isioma Daniel penned an article for the Lagos daily This Day about the Miss World pageant, which was to be held in Nigeria in December. She asked, "What would Mohamed think? In all honesty, he probably would have chosen a wife from one of them." Muslims were outraged, including the Muslim official in the Nigerian province of Zamfara who called for the journalist to be killed for her "blasphemy." Riots ensued and Muslims set ablaze the offices of This Day. Approximately 500 people were killed in the rampage, and since then Christians have been fleeing the area. Such is what President Bush expediently called a "religion of peace."
Again, Spencer’s thesis that Islam is an intolerant religion is not a politically correct vision, nor one that is widely accepted among scholars—big surprise. Despite the fact that he provides dozens of supportive examples throughout his well-documented book, Onward Muslim Soldiers will undoubtedly come under attack as being filled with "racist attacks" against Muslims. To be sure, if he had published his book in France he would be facing the same sort of legal offensive by hysterical rights groups that make a living out of defending the status quo of European multicultural rot.
The most absorbing point, if not the main point, of Onward Muslim Soldiers is that most Western countries, and especially France, are serving the twin gods of multiculturalism and tolerance to their own demise. The big question with respect to the Muslim immigration to Europe and America: How can a tolerant society (as characterized by the West) survive the presence of an intolerant minority (as characterized by Islam)?
Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn asked exactly that question just before he was assassinated last year on the eve of Holland’s national elections. Fortuyn, a self-professed homosexual and unapologetic libertine (whose kitchen featured portraits of Marx and Lenin) was consistently vilified by Europeans as "far right" despite the fact that in most ways he supported the postmodern, post-Christian Holland of hashish cafes and licensed prostitutes. What set him apart? Fortuyn believed that traditional Islamic values are incompatible with the liberal, secular societies of the West and warned that immigration from Islamic countries threatens to change Dutch values inalterably. He once called Islam "a backward religion," arguing that while Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, as much cannot be said of Islam.
Spencer claims it was partly Fortuyn’s flamboyant homosexuality that led him to espouse such a controversial position. The Dutch politician pointed out that in the Netherlands homosexuality is treated on par with heterosexuality. In Islam, not so. Tired of being insulted by Muslims who called him "lower than a pig" for being a gay man, Fortuyn proposed curbs on Muslim immigration to Holland and called for the assimilation of the Muslims already there into the secular, multiethnic, multicultural, tolerant framework of modern Dutch society. "We need to integrate these people; they need to accept that, in Holland, gender equality and tolerance of different lifestyles is very, very important to us."
Fortuyn’s assassin, Volkert van der Graaf, believing that Dutch Muslims are an oppressed minority, felt that the rise of Fortuyn on the national political scene signaled the advent of fascism. He explained that he shot the Dutch renegade in order to save the Netherlands from such a neo-Hitlerian mentality.
Fortuyn, however, was able to vocalize what his Dutch brethren are unwilling to accept, that most Muslims commonly believe that the only legitimate basis for a society—and that would apply to Dutch society as well as anywhere—is the Sharia, the Islamic law that the Taliban was so strictly enforcing. Spencer quotes an imam in Holland: "The Sharia does not have to adopt to the modern world because these are divine laws. People have to bend to the Sharia." Defense of the Sharia includes, among other things, the defense of stoning—not only for the sins of Sodom, but also for adultery, a staple of modern Dutch life. Moreover, Muslim cultural features such as arranged marriages, revenge killings, and female circumcision (including sewing up the woman’s vagina from top to bottom) are diametrically opposed to Western values. Fortuyn’s fatal mistake was to warn Holland against the Trojan horse of intolerance it is inviting into its society in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism.
Tensions between Islam and European secularism are also apparent in the realm of women’s rights. If the principles of classic Islamic law hold sway, women will be reduced to second-class citizens.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, elected to the Dutch parliament in January, has criticized Islam precisely on this point. Hirsi Ali, a young Somali immigrant who considers herself an "ex-Muslim," charges that it is Islam at its core (not simply so-called "radical Islam") that is oppressive to women. She refers both to verses in the Qur’an as well as modern-day Muslim practices. For example, Sura 4:34 of the Qur’an says women should obey the male members of their families—even if, say, they are forbidden to leave their homes—and if they do not obey then the husband may beat his wife: "As for those [women] from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them." According to Hirsi Ali, there are millions of Muslim men who carry out that simple verse, beating and oppressing their women in the name of Islam. For daring to voice such a scandalous testimony, the young Somali was forced to flee her country under threat of death, becoming a latter-day Salman Rushdie.
To be sure, Spencer duly recognizes that some Muslims willfully secularize, but he takes great pains to point out that many other Muslims not only reject the idea of assimilating with the prevailing secular cultures of the West, but see as their goal nothing less than the establishment of Islamic states in Europe. If the mounds of evidence piled up in Onward are to be believed, the groundwork is already being laid in more ways than one.
Turkey’s Catholic Archbishop Giuseppe Bernardini warns, for example, that millions of Saudi petro-dollars have been used not to create work in the poor Islamic nations of North African or the Middle East, but to build mosques and cultural centers in the heart of Christian countries with Islamic immigration, even including Rome, at the very heart of Christendom.
How can we ignore this blatant Muslim program of "expansion and reconquest," asks the archbishop, especially when radical Muslims have been so forthright about their intentions? Bernardini recounted a conversation he had with a Muslim leader who said to him: "Thanks to your democratic laws, we will invade you. Thanks to our religious laws, we will dominate you."
In London, Sheikh Omar Bakri openly declared his intention to transform the West into Dar Al-Islam and to establish Sharia on British soil. "I want to see the black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street," he has said. In fact, his al-Muhajiroun group is dedicated to this goal. Likewise, Abu Hamza, widely quoted as saying there’s nothing wrong with Osama bin Laden or his beliefs, headed up a similar organization called Supporters of Sharia, dedicated to the Islamicization of Britain.
Muslim clerics like Bakri and Hamza (both immigrant British citizens, by the way), have not exactly been shy about their modus operandi: to exploit the Western system which guarantees them free speech, well-being, and respect for religious rights in order to ultimately impose their intolerant (and in many cases barbaric) laws on that same Western society.
This clever brand of jihad confirms Bardot’s contention that "Not only does [Islam] fail to give way to our laws and customs. Quite the contrary, as time goes by it tries to impose its own law on us."
Thus Spencer devotes a good deal of his book to an in-depth look at the Islamic concept of jihad as it is preached today in mosques around the world. He carefully examines traditional Islamic teachings to reveal the advocacy of violence justified by religion. In his analysis, jihad is a violent doctrine of theology, a tradition, and a legal system within Islam. He answers critics who hold that jihad is not holy war by saying that they are unwilling to face uncomfortable facts of Islamic history and theology. For example, Muhammad himself taught—and he was very clear about this—that jihad is about making war (not peace), about fighting unbelievers in order to establish the supremacy and hegemony of the Islamic political and social system, not just the religion.
It’s clear from Onward Muslim Soldiers that there are more than enough radical Muslim clerics out there to dispel the myth of a tolerant Islam (in fact, Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani toured the American mosques in 1999 and estimated that 80 percent of them are under control of radical extremist Muslims who teach violent jihad). Rather than being "a religion of peace," Spencer presents a pretty convincing argument that Islam is intolerant and violent at its core, as much in its traditional doctrine as in its modern-day practice. In the words of Ibn Warraq, "unless a reformed, tolerant, liberal kind of Islam emerges soon, perhaps the final battle will be between Islam and Western democracy." Says Spencer: This is the war we’re in now.
Michael S. Rose
17 December 2003
http://www.cruxnews.com/rose/onward.html
May 7, 2002 12:40 p.m.
Murder in Holland (Background Article #3)
e will not be able to gauge the full impact of Pim Fortuyn's murder on European politics until we know who killed him, and why. Dutch police have arrested a Dutch-born white male in connection with the crime, but he's not talking. Whoever he turns out to be, the fact that a popular anti-immigration politician was assassinated during a campaign in one of Europe's most civil and tolerant nations is seismic on its own.
Fortuyn's legion of enemies denounced him as a fascist and a racist, partly for his tough-on-crime policies, but mostly for his belief that immigration should stop, and that immigrants — particularly Muslims, whose views on women and gays he considered barbaric — should be pressed harder to assimilate into Dutch life. Immigration and assimilation of Third World immigrants: These are and will continue to be tremendously important issues for Europe, particularly as its population ages with the native birth rate remaining below replacement level. Whether Fortuyn's murderer turns out to have Islamic connections or is part of the extreme Left, the sobering truth is that Europe — democratic, gun-controlling Europe — is a place where questioning the immigration status quo will not only get you branded a fascist by the news media, it will get you shot dead.
It is hard to overestimate the psychological impact the killing is having in Holland, a bourgeois and orderly country that prides itself on tolerance.
"We were a quiet, normal country, where we never had any big criminal things happening," says Marnix Kort, 36, of Haarlem. "This changes everything. We have become a banana republic in an instant."
"Things like this don't happen in Holland. It's like the 11th of September for us. Everybody thought this couldn't be, but we see that it is possible. I feel very insecure," said Miriam Jeurissen, 34, who lives in a suburb of Amsterdam.
A woman who answered the phone at Fortuyn campaign headquarters [http://www.pim-fortuyn.nl] last night said things were too chaotic there, and that no one would be able to speak to the foreign press until today. Through her tears, she said, "It's unbelievable that someone gets killed only for saying what they believe."
What Fortuyn said and believed rocked the normally staid world of Dutch politics, which has for many decades been built around coalitions of parties representing traditional Dutch constituencies — Catholics, Protestants, Socialists, and smaller parties. In practice, this has resulted in an increasingly ossified statist government overseen by elitist political class which, as in France and other European democracies, a growing number of voters see as unresponsive to its desires.
"Pim Fortuyn was reacting strongly against a highly organized communal politics," says Erik Jones, a Netherlands expert at the University of Nottingham. "What he was arguing for was more of a sense of individualism, but within the context of a strong monoculturalism. He argued that the Dutch needed to do away with all this consensus, and just voice their opinions — but to do so within the general framework of Dutch culture."
To do that, Fortuyn challenged one of the fundamental principles of liberal Dutch culture: Thou shalt not be seen as intolerant. Immigration and immigration-related crime are not new problems in the Netherlands, but the ability to speak openly about it is. For years, the ruling elite, which includes the media, has made discussion of the growing immigration problem taboo, on pain of being branded a crypto-Nazi.
As recently as last week, Fortuyn denounced this paralyzing political correctness, telling an interviewer that "everywhere in Europe, socialists and the extreme left have forbidden the discussion of the problems of multicultural society."
"Professor Pim," a 54-year-old, openly gay, ex-Marxist professor turned newspaper columnist, emerged as an unlikely spokesman for anti-immigration sentiment in the Netherlands, where immigrants, many of them Muslims from Turkey and North Africa, make up 10 percent of the densely populated nation of 16 million.
Unlike France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, to whom he was often unfairly likened, Fortuyn was a free-marketeer who preached lower taxes and deregulation. He promised to get tough on crime, return the police to local control, and impose stricter standards on the educational system. Fortuyn, who frequented gay bars in his hometown of Rotterdam, was an unapologetic libertine who stood firmly behind Dutch beliefs in a liberal, tolerant society, but he maintained that Muslims and other immigrants who refused to accommodate themselves to Dutch values were a threat to liberty.
Kicked out of his original party for anti-Islamic statements — he once called Islam a "backward religion" for its treatment of women and gays, and authored a best-seller, "Against the Islamicization of our Culture — Fortuyn founded his own political party, List Pim Fortuyn, and shocked political observers by taking a third of the seats in Rotterdam municipal elections — this in a city where 45 percent of the electorate are not ethnically Dutch.
"If you look at his electoral list [of candidates], it was a case study in ethnic diversity," Jones says. "He sounded right-wing, but at the end of the day he was more about individual responsibility versus collective responsibility, as opposed to 'we hate foreigners.'"
Indeed, Fortuyn polled surprisingly well among ethnic voters, particularly small businessmen worried about crime brought by newer immigrants. Twenty percent of the votes at one Rotterdam mosque that served as a polling place went for Fortuyn. Said Kort, "We had black people on TV saying they will vote for him because he's doing something for black people who work for a living. He was against freeloaders."
"If anything, he was a libertarian, and that flew in the face of 50 years of collectivist tradition in the Netherlands," says analyst John Huslman of the Heritage Foundation.
The telegenic Fortuyn's media skills ("Imagine a gay Pat Buchanan," says Jones) sometimes slipped into demagogy, but were effective. In a recent televised debate with an imam, Fortuyn baited the Muslim cleric by flaunting his homosexuality. Finally the imam exploded, denouncing Fortuyn in strongly anti-homosexual terms. Fortuyn calmly turned to the camera and, addressing viewers directly, told them that this is the kind of Trojan horse of intolerance the Dutch are inviting into their society in the name of multiculturalism.
"They effect was galvanizing," says Jones. The September 11 attacks in America also made voters more open to Fortuyn's warning about the danger Islam poses to the open society.
"I'm not anti-Muslim, I'm not anti-immigration; I'm saying we've got big problems in our cities," Fortuyn said last month. "It's not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate."
Though Muslim extremists seem the natural suspects in the killing, Fortuyn had many enemies. The Dutch press demonized him as "the Dutch Haider," even though Fortuyn distanced himself from the controversial Austrian rightist, denouncing anti-Semitism and vowing strong support for Israel.
To some on the left, the rise of Fortuyn in the polls — some analysts expected him to emerge from the May 15 elections as a major player in the next coalition government — signaled the advent of fascism. To understand how hysterical this view is in an American context, you have to realize that Fortuyn is to the left of most Democrats here.
In his obituaries, Fortuyn is being described as a "far right" or "hard right" politician, which is nonsense. Fortuyn routinely made the point that it was inaccurate and foolish to put all anti-establishment politicians in Europe into the same "far-right" camp.
He was right, but it's in the interest of the political establishment in Europe to demonize challengers like Fortuyn as neo-fascist, thus delegitimating their ideas without having to engage these ideas democratically. A Belgian government official reacted to the Fortuyn murder by cautioning politicians to be more careful about how they campaign — implicitly blaming Fortuyn for his own assassination. This will not last, particularly when the average voters believe people like Fortuyn are a liberating presence in the stultified, statist world of European politics.
"I wouldn't have voted for him, but he was a fresh breeze through the whole political scene," says Jeurissen, a stay-at-home mom. "If somebody has a different view, and makes people aware that there's a different way to think about things, that's okay."
The fact that that anodyne opinion — that freedom of speech is an acceptable part of democratic society — is enough to get a man killed in today's Europe should shock the conscience of the continent. Fortuyn may or may not be a martyr in the war against fundamentalist Islam, but he is almost certainly a martyr in the war on political correctness. European populations are aging, and cannot maintain their welfare states without massive immigration; immigration from Islamic countries threatens to change European values inalterably. Fortuyn said Europe cannot avoid confronting these realities. He may be a more powerful force for change by the way he died than he would have been had he lived.
"The clock is ticking in Europe, and is ticking in a democratic way," says Hulsman. "Maybe now is the time to begin real dialogue about immigration, crime and culture, because if a real one isn't begun, these impulses that can't be processed through democratic institutions are going to have ugly manifestations. This is the problem in Europe: nothing of real significance is ever discussed by the political elites."
Murder in Holland
by Rod Dreher
http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher050702.asp
May 9, 2002 8:45 a.m. (ackground Article # 4)
Exreme?
Pim Fortuyn was not who they say he was.
Associated Press: "In the first assassination in modern Dutch history, a gunman fatally shot far-right leader Pim Fortuyn on Monday..."
Agence France-Presse: "Dutch far-right leader Pim Fortuyn was shot dead today..."
BBC:"The killing of Dutch far-right politician Pim Fortuyn, only days before the country's general election, has stunned the European political world."
Supporters of murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn have long been accusing the media and the Dutch political establishment of character assassination for their exiling the maverick libertarian to the racist fringe. Placing Fortuyn on the "far right" or "extreme right" was a ridiculous smear, entirely typical of the Left (one is reminded of the abuse Rudolph Giuliani, another common-sense reformist, routinely endured from the Left in New York City during all but the last few months of his mayoralty). But it was effective.
How "extreme" was Fortuyn, really? Read his platform for yourself. But if you don't have the time or the patience to parse the slightly wonky verbiage, here it is in plain English. Does this sound like neo-Hitlerism to you?
IN HIS OWN WORDS
Europe is a bureaucracy that barely interests its citizens, let alone inspires them. The Dutch ruling coalition has meant high crime rates and massive problems with the healthcare and education systems. Its twin policies of generous immigration and tolerance of extreme multiculturalism are dividing the country. The country can't absorb all these newcomers, and the government gives them no incentive to assimilate and become a part of Dutch society. This has to stop.
1. Health: The healthcare system is overregulated, and people have to wait absurdly long for treatment, even for life-threatening illnesses. The heavy hand of the state must be lifted, and market-based reforms must be introduced.
2. Education: Teachers must be paid a market salary, and the education system should be deregulated to get rid of the excessive red tape discouraging educational experimentation and freedom of choice for teachers. Smaller schools are preferable, and each child must be within cycling distance of a primary school.
3. Social affairs: The abuse of the disability-claims system is costing too much, and must end. [Note: One out of seven Dutch workers is on full disability] Workers can only get disability benefits if they are injured on the job. Private insurance should cover other situations.
4. Public order and safety: Cops need to leave their desks and get out onto the streets. Disorder in public places must not be tolerated. Authorities must cease prosecuting citizens who defend themselves, and redouble their efforts to punish criminals. Control of the police should devolve to local officials, and chief constables should be replaced if they don't deliver results. If we have to build more prisons, fine. To beef up security forces, the military police will be given the same powers as the standard police.
5. Finances: The Dutch pay unnecessary taxes [Note: The top personal-income-tax rate in Holland is 60 percent; the average Dutch worker pays 50 percent of his income in tax.], and there must be a thorough accounting for tax policy at all levels. Some taxes, such as the capital-gains tax, cannot be justified. If it cannot be explained why the tax is charged, and it is not clear what is done with the tax collected, then eliminating it should be considered.
6. Emancipation and integration: Dutch society can't function with large groups of people from countries that did not experience centuries of Judeo-Christian-humanist developments, as Europe has had for centuries. [Note: He's talking mostly about immigrants from Islamic nations.] We've got to do something about it. The government should redouble its efforts on housing, schools, and cultural education for these groups, but it should also require these groups to make maximum effort themselves. Cultural developments which are diametrically opposed to Dutch values — such as arranged marriages, revenge killings, and female circumcision — must be fought. Discrimination against women in fundamentalist Islamic circles is unacceptable. In a democratic society like ours, all citizens have the same rights and obligations. Our hard-fought freedoms are worth protecting against increasing fundamentalism.
7. Immigration: Holland is not an immigrant country. We have one of the densest populations in the world. [Note: 16 million people in a place roughly the size of Rhode Island] We have to get our own society in order before we can accept more immigrants. Bringing in more poorly educated people with no income is a burden we can no longer bear.
8. Mobility and spatial planning: The government must stop spending money on prestige transportation projects, and instead improve local transport. Get tough on crime and vandalism in public transport to encourage people to use it more. End crime and restore social order in the cities, and people will quit leaving for the suburbs.
9. Culture: Subsidizing cultural development should take place only with the greatest of restraint. This will have to be based on the profit principle, with the primary focus on scholarship.
10. Defense: Reduce Dutch participation in NATO peacekeeping operations. Emphasize dialogue as well as military operations in the war on terrorism. Restructure the armed forces to eliminate bureaucratic overlap.
11. Agriculture: Deregulate Dutch agriculture to free up farmers to be more competitive in the marketplace. End onerous regulations in the areas of food safety, animal welfare, and the environment.
12. Domestic government: Citizens should take more responsibility for running their own lives. As a general principle, local control is preferable to centralized bureaucracy, which has proven that it's not responsive to the needs of the average citizen.
13. Europe: The EU is a good thing, but Holland should retain its own identity and, where possible, sovereignty. New member states will only be permitted to join after the Dutch people have been given their say in a politically binding referendum on the matter. This will keep politicians accountable to the voters for EU decisions.
FAR RIGHT?
That's it. That's the political platform of Pim Fortuyn. If mild free-market libertarianism like this is "far right," what on earth do we call true fascists? Of course, what accounted for Fortuyn's "extreme right" reputation was not his tax or agricultural policies, but his views on immigration and acculturation, which were easily caricatured by malicious opponents.
For example, Fortuyn, who was openly gay and a self-confessed libertine, came out in favor of repealing Article 1 of the Dutch constitution, which forbids the government and individuals from discriminating on "religion, belief, political opinion, race or sex, or on any other grounds whatsoever." That makes him a racist, sexist, anti-religious bigot, right?
Wrong. He was a civil libertarian who believed in free speech. As written, this constitutional clause potentially forbids frank and open discussion of the crime problem in Holland, which is largely one of predominantly Arab youth gangs. As NRO's Dave Kopel has observed, "In other words, Fortuyn [was] proposing that free speech protection in Holland be expanded to the levels of the American First Amendment."
DUTCH LIFE
About those youth gangs. Did you know that swimming pools, libraries, and other public places across Holland have been closed by police because of harassment and trouble caused by these young men, chiefly from Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia, who are often armed? The police there find it easier to shut down the facilities than face the politically correct uproar that would ensue if they enforced the law.
Years of tolerating this abuse has produced a nation of voters like this Dutch woman wrote to NRO yesterday, relating common Dutch experiences and views:
Everybody in Holland has had culture-clash experiences such as these. I can honestly say, that I know of no one in my circle of friends who is racist. But every single person I know gets their prejudices and stereotypes justified just about every day when confronted with such situations; they just do not assimilate.
Here we are, conservative, normal, sober, Dutch people, quietly living our lives, proudly earning our money, keeping up with the Jones's but certainly not standing out from the rest, and gladly paying our taxes for the better good. And while bicycling to our work, we see the "foreign" youth, hanging out on the street, skipping school, up to no good, and we avoid them for our own safety.
We see "foreign" adults and elderly, hanging out on park benches, doing nothing, shooting the breeze, all day! And we say nothing, for the neighbors might think us intolerant and critical. And we bicycle off to our eight-hour workday, so we get our paycheck and can pay our bills and taxes. And they close our pools because we might not be safe there, and our police don't dare to deal with them, and they live off of the state (our collective money), never making much of themselves or putting in their two cents' worth — and some never being able to speak Dutch, while the Dutch government offers free (long-term) Dutch lessons for all immigrants to help assimilate.
And Pim Fortuyn is said to be a racist because he talks about this in public? This is why the Dutch are awaiting these elections with much anticipation. How are the government elite going to deal with the things Fortuyn finally said out loud?
May 9, 2003
http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.p?ref=/dreher/dreher050902.asp