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Here's an interesting commentary on Muslims and gay bashing in Holland from a friend who lives there. It was prompted by an ongoing exchange among a few American gay activists. Some American homosexuals are still under the illusion that Holland is some kind of "gay paradise." Not discussed is the fact that in elections four years ago, the Socialists won big and were the third-largest party, but have now collapsed and don't even make the top four parties. Hence, there is no left alternative at all. David ================================================ To begin with the article headline: Holland is Scared. You bet your ass it is. Ten years of privatisation of everything – mail service, telecommunications, gas, electricity, railroads, public transit, garbage pickup, health care (Rotterdam even sold off its public library to an 'information company') – has caused spiralling prices for everything (health insurance has nearly tripled since privatisation) that are pressing everybody, up through the middle class, to the wall. Then came the tens of millions handed to the banks in early 2009 to stabilise them. Now the government says the cupboard is bare; welfare, unemployment and child care benefits (which are given for every child, not on the basis of need, so the middle class is being hit hard on this one too) are being slashed, and the retirement age is going up to 68. Unemployment is still reasonably low by European standards, at 7%, but that is high by previous Dutch standards, which were kept low by removing thousands of older, low-skilled native Dutch workers into various welfare programmes when their jobs in the harbour and factories disappeared in the 1990s as the Dutch economy shifted from production to service; their benefits are being cut too. Retail businesses are failing right and left, and repossessions of homes rising. People /are/ scared – deeply scared – and they have no history of political analysis to know who is to blame. So the media and a couple of politicians have some suggestions... Gays are also losing ground – though this has been going on for the past decade. Gay teachers are leaving the profession in droves because of harassment from pupils. Verbal and physical assaults have been increasing. Gays may be able to marry, join the army and police, and adopt – in other words, they can be just like heteros – but that has not changed underlying social attitudes about them. They've won their “sexual revolution”, and discovered it hasn't changed a thing. However, this is not a specifically Muslim problem. It is nationwide, not just in the four great cities where most of the Muslim population is. Gays are being bashed in small towns, where there is nary a Muslim in sight. The majority of the bashers, and teacher harassers, are white, native Dutch teenagers. In Muslim neighbourhoods, and occasionally in city centres, public displays of gay affection will attract verbal harassment from Muslim kids. But in white working class neighbourhoods, such displays will attract harassment from white kids. Gays are scared – but most will admit that this is not just a problem involving Muslims. In fact, that is why they are scared. If it was just Muslims, it would be simple to suggest solutions. (One exception is a vocal little group of gays who claim that this is all the fault of pedophiles and pederasts who abuse Muslim boys and thus cause them to hate gays. Surveys of and among those arrested for anti-gay crimes have disproven this, but it still keeps being trotted out.) In the early 1990s, at a dinner party I was seated next to a young Australian Chinese gay man who had moved to Amsterdam for its relative freedom. He made what I have subsequently come to realise was a very perceptive observation about Dutch society. As a double target for discrimination in Australia – Oriental and gay – he said he knew the signs of prejudice in people's reactions when he saw them – and he saw them here too. The difference, he said, was that here there was a social convention to not express the prejudice: it was something that wasn't done, while in Australia there was no control which prevented people from moving to openly say or act on their prejudices. He regarded that convention as a relief. Others, of course, call it the tyranny of PC. The dam broke about eight years ago, with Pim Fortuyn – ironically, a gay – when he claimed the right to defy PC and tell the “truth” about Muslims/foreigners, which the bien-pensant left was suppressing. After his assassination, his followers and successors ran with it: Hirshi Ali, as a member of parliament, claimed all Muslims were paedophiles (because their prophet married a nine year old girl), Theo van Gogh fatally began replacing the word Muslim with “goat fucker” in his discourse. Now one could shout “goat fucker” at a Muslim on the street. A triumph against PC? OK: but one could also shout “flikker” (faggot) at homos on the street, and call your teacher a flikker in class. One person's expression of “prejudice” is another's “truth” and victory over PC; it just depends on whether it's your ox getting gored. To the extent that this is a Moroccan problem, there was a recent piece of sociological research from the Gay Studies department at UvA that found that for all the anti-homo sentiment being expressed in the Muslim community by imams and kids on the street, it had not changed the endemic same sex behaviour that was going on inside the Moroccan community among the boys. The problem seemed to be their offense at the public display of “gay” behaviour, not with the acts. Another thing which points in that direction was an interview done a couple years ago by “Prem”, a Hindustani-Surinamese TV journalist who, to my mind, is one of the sharpest journalists working in Holland; as an interviewer he's equally merciless about getting canting white government and social work officials and mouthy street agitators to expose themselves, and then skewering them. There had been an incident where two lesbian women were abused by a group of young Moroccan teenage boys in Amsterdam West; Prem, with his contacts in the non-native community, managed to track the group down and interview them. Evidently not realising what they were doing, the boys boasted about what they had done. Some older boys – late teens and 20s – who were in the background watching and did understand how the younger kids were hanging themselves, wandered over and intervened. They explained that yeah, they had done stuff like that too at that age – you see, in their community, kids get fucked until they are twelve or thirteen and then become men, but they are still pretty insecure about their masculinity for a while and try to reinforce their masculinity by harassing those whose non-masculinity they experience as threatening, until they finally grow out of it. Now, some of these guys might even have been community college students, but I doubt that any of them had ever read any of Dynes's stuff from the 1970s about 'Mediterranean sexuality' that is divided into penetrators and the penetrated; they'd arrived at the same conclusion by looking at their own culture. But that is likely where some of the problem there does lie, right in the homosexuality of that community itself. (And no, the penetrators are not “paedophiles”, they are the brothers, cousins and uncles of the kids themselves, who in turn become penetrators of women – and younger kids.) The two politicians who are are making the most of this climate of fear are Hirsch Balin, the Catholic Minister of Justice and an Opus Dei member, whose career has been devoted to morals legislation in general and paedophile hunting in particular, and Geert Wilders. Both have interesting backgrounds. Balin is the son of a Jewish man who was hidden during World War II by a Catholilc family, who converted and married their daughter after the war. Wilders is also Catholic – and is Dutch-Indonesian. Yes, that is why he dyes his hair blond. Without the dye it is jet black, and he //looks// Indonesian. His family went out to the East Indies around 1900, and in three generations there intermarried with Indonesians. They returned “home” after Indonesian independence; Vrij Nederland (a normally rather right-wing magazine which researched his family history) in fact attributes his anti-Muslim attitudes to hatred of the Muslim independence movement which expelled his family from their paradise. But he also spent about six years living in Israel, and is married to a Jewish woman. He himself credits his discovery of the vile nature of Muslims to witnessing their attacks on the brave Israelis – and needless to say, while he is opposed to any Dutch money or soldiers going to battles to spread “democracy” in Iraq or Afghanistan (no Muslim anywhere is worth one drop of Dutch blood!), and any development funds going to any foreign country, he is an extreme supporter of aid to Israel in its attempt to clear the Promised Land of Muslims who are in the way. (This is all rather interesting in light of the background of the author of the article which started your thread, Karni Eldad.) Balin does his best to channel the fear of the Dutch into fear of sexual perversion. During his several terms as Minister of Justice he has effectively raised the age of consent to 19, redefined “child pornography” as any image of any sort of a person, real or virtual, which might tend to lead to abuse of a “child” under 19 (in other words, it can be a virtual “child” or of a person provably over 19 – so long as a prosecutor wished to argue that viewing it could encourage or stimulate a “paedophile” to abuse a “child”, or if it could be used in “grooming” the “child”). “Possession” is to have your cookie found on a site which had such pictures; there is no need to prove you saw them. It should be obvious that with ages of consent and “child porno” that high, we are getting well into “gay” territory, and in fact this contributes to suspicions against gays. Balin has also now announced that he accepts that paedophilia/pederasty is a sexuality, as “incurable” as heterosexuality or homosexuality – which means that anyone convicted of it must be imprisoned for life, preferably in camps as far distant from society as it is possible to get in this country, as there is no sense in “treatment” or “rehabilitation”. Most recently, his response to the hype about paedophile priests (from his own Church, n.b.!) has been to call for the removal of any statute of limitations on “paedophilia” and for a national commission to investigate just how deeply paedophiles/pederasts have penetrated Dutch society. A population who are already scared about their children's future are like a tinderbox for this kind of thing. It should also be noted that last year, up in Groningen, the Ministry of Justice conducted a high profile prosecution against a group of gay men who had had an S/M club in which they did “tit work” among other things, which involved injecting blood from one another into each other's nipples. Yes, one was HIV positive, and a number of the others ended up with the virus. The prosecutor's contention was that the organizers of the group knew he was HIV positive, and four of them were tried for attempted murder. The media lapped it up: See what homos are really like? That nice couple of gay bankers two doors down from you with the two adopted children: what are they really doing at night? Incidentally, Balin also grandstands about other kinds of “immorality”. Last year he got a new package of laws dealing with bestiality passed. There had been no laws regarding sex with animals on the books here since they were dropped from the code during the French occupation between 1806 and 1810 (there were, and are, laws against the mistreatment of animals, which were and are used against the sick bastards who go out and carve up the genitals of horses and cows in fields), and in these 200 years the morality of the Netherlands had not collapsed, but now, with what Balin insisted was a vast wave of sheep and poultry fucking, and porn of women being fucked by dogs, we had to reinstate them. And not just that, but add a section on the production, distribution and possession of animal porn, a rewrite of his kiddie porn laws. Warning: today in Hirsch Balin's Netherlands, you'd better be careful about visiting internet sites which might have kitty porn – photos of cute kittens! So much for the sexual sideshow. The main act is Wilders and his Party of Volk and Security (or, as one of our better raconteurs/cabaretiers calls it, the Fat Frightened White People's Party). He feeds on, and in turn feeds, the idea that everything that is wrong with The Netherlands is --- foreigners. And in particular, Muslims. But foreigners, in general. One of his proposals – and he is constantly floating them, to see what responses are – is that any person who came to the Netherlands after 1950 – //and their descendants// – should be expelled, back to their "country of origin". Never mind that that is now sometimes two generations who have been born here: their parents and grandparents never should have been here in the first place. Once you get rid of all of those people, there will be jobs for all the real Dutch who are left; unemployment solved. (He does, at least, admit that this will probably require those Dutch who have lost their spirit of hard work and enterprise and been sitting around on welfare of various sorts to get off their asses and take on jobs they won't take now, like emptying bedpans, now filled by foreigners – but that will only improve the moral fibre of the Dutch Volk, after being corrupted by the foreign presence!). The housing crisis will be over, with all those apartments vacated by foreigners. The medical system will be restored, particularly after all those guest workers who unexpectedly stayed are chucked out, along with their work-related illnesses from the asbestos plants and mines. The pressure will be off education, without the mobs of children those foreigners breed. And we will let no more refugees in – not of any kind. The UN can take its refugee treaties and stick them where the sun doesn't shine. And no more immigrants, for at least a couple decades, until we see how self-sufficiency works out. We're going to take our country back! The post 1950 date of course permits //him// to stay – but for instance rules out all the Surinamers who chose for the “motherland” at the time of independence in the 1970s. It was also notable that when last week he proposed putting the commandos returning from Afghanistan to work patrolling "out of control" neighbourhoods of foreigners, the three he mentioned were heavily Surinamese. Wilders has also refused to be drawn on what this will do to the most recent royal wedding, of the Crown Prince with Maxima, the daughter of a member of the former Argentine junta. His Muslim hate is simply the spearhead of this. They are the most conspicuous foreigners. Hindu temples may be ugly (in fact, they are), but Hindus at least don't insist on building mosques with minarets that dare to equal or – horrors! - exceed the height of steeples on Catholic churches – and what's more, have four to the Roman's three! They insist on broadcasting calls to prayer – at the same moments when the Catholics are bonging away with their bells. (Wilders, when challenged on this one, blithely responded that the bells are “our” culture, and thus not noise pollution, while the muezzins are “foreign”, and therefore are.) They are also rather conspicuous on the street with beards, robes, headscarves, veils. Of course, there are the conservative Calvinists with /their/ chinstrap beards and their wives' black stockings, long skirts and wrist-length sleeves and white lace caps – but they have the decency to stay out of our sight, in places like Staphorst or Urk, except when they bring their cheese and produce in to the farmers' market on Saturday, when they are so /colourful/. And of course the vast majority of Muslims don't dress any differently than you or I, and the number of veiled women is minuscule. (I don't know the figure here offhand, but with the controversy about burkhas in France, I did see the figure that down there, the whole issue is about between 1100 and 1500 women in a population of 55 million; frankly, if France's great civilization is so feeble that it is going to crumble as a result of 1500 women walking around in burkhas, it deserves to be put out of its misery.) Anyhow, the number here can't be more than a couple hundred – but they do stand out. They are also the tie-in with gay issues. The supposed Muslim hatred of and attacks on gays gives Wilders a wonderful stick with which to beat a dog. The only problem is that this is bullshit. Yes, several imams have denounced /al lut/. Catholic bishops regularly denounce sodomites – and in a town down in Limburg – Wilders's home turf – this year the Church refused to give communion to a gay man who was elected Prince of the Carnival, and his krew, because he was gay. Not a peep from Wilders. Yes, Muslim boys are involved in harassment and bashings. Most of the violence is by Dutch kids, though. Polls have consistently shown that most Muslims have no more problem – and among the younger, better educated and more successful Muslims born here, rather /less/ problem – with gays than the general population does. In fact, polls across Europe indicate that on a whole range of issues, the picture that Dynes and Glover paint of “intolerant” Muslims is bullshit. Furthermore, among Muslims who are successfully moving up into society here and elsewhere in Europe, one sees the same secularization at work that one saw in the churches over the past fifty years. Although social condemnation against Muslims drives some younger people into a more public affirmation of their culture – the number of girls wearing headscarves has risen, although the number of women wearing full veils is minuscule – the mosques are slowly and surely emptying, just as the churches did in the last fifty years. Retired guest workers may go five times a day, and spend the hours between the prayers telling beads and drinking tea and chatting, but that is in lieu of a senior citizen's centre. They may be joined at prayer by a handful of young fanatics. Friday prayer may get about the same numbers that Christians get on Sunday. But the majority of Muslims observe only Ramadan, just as their Christian neighbours only celebrate Christmas. But perhaps the most curious development is a story which is just beginning to surface; I've seen two very short items on it, but our media here, which in general is very deferential to Wilders, as he provides them with great copy, is not reporting much about it. Seems he gave a right-wing Christian outfit from the US permission to do a fly-on-the-wall documentary about him, and in the final cut of the film they had footage of him making anti-gay remarks. The Yanks evidently didn't realise there was any problem: why, a good Christian right-winger obviously hates gays as much as Muslims! What's wrong with that? Wilders, who has invested a lot of effort into his public image of being a 'friend' of gays persecuted by Muslims, seems to think differently, and has taken legal steps to block the release of this film, or at least force a re-edit. What are Wilders's chances of being the next prime minister? A couple of months ago, they looked pretty good. Polls showed him pulling in over one-third of the voters. He's slipped since. When the Labour party, seeing the support Wilders was getting for his insistence on withdrawal from Afghanistan, pulled the plug on a recommitment of troops there, and with it brought down the government, they rose sharply in the polls, and they rose again when their party leader retired to be replaced by the (Jewish: all Mayors of Amsterdam must be Jewish, to show The Netherlands' national regret for the Holocaust) Mayor of Amsterdam. Much of their rise was at Wilders's expense. His party did come in first and second in the two municipal elections they fought recently, in Almere (a vast white, middle aged, middle class suburb of Amsterdam) and The Hague, respectively. His hope was to pull a Pim Fortuyn, who used the municipal elections in Rotterdam as a springboard to national prominence, after gaining the most votes there and being welcomed into a coalition by the Christian Democrats. Only this time there seems to have been a train-wreck on that route. Van Agt, the last confessional, Calvinist Christian prime minister (before the present financial technocrats took over the party), who still has a strong following among older Christians, has denounced Wilders as a danger to Dutch values and a racist, and urged that the Christian Democrats boycott Wilders in any possible coalitions. (The strongest thing that Balkenende, the Christian economic technocrat who is currently Prime Minister, could think to say is that Wilders will hurt our country's trade and economy, should other countries respond to his election by boycotting us like they did Haidar's Austria.) Low and behold, the Christians have apparently joined Labour in freezing Wilders out of the city council coalitions in both places. (In The Hague, there may be another reason too: the Christians there are heavily supported by conservative Turks, with whom they cooperated to shut down nude beaches and gay cruising areas – before anyone barks that this is Muslims forcing their values on us, please note these were Christian issues before the coalition with the Turkish imams – and this political alliance there limits how far the Christian Democrats in The Hague can go toward Wilders's anti-Muslim party.) Polls have shown Wilders has dropped still more as a result. As of this week, Wilders would have 26% of the vote, Labour 25%, the Christians 23%, and the Liberals (secular conservatives) 18%. It appears only the Liberals (Wilders was a Liberal until they chucked him out for racist remarks) would rule with him, so the math doesn't add up. The elections are in June. And who knows what might happen if the footage of him making anti-gay remarks gets aired, and he gets painted as a hypocrite (even if people might agree with him)? ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
