There are many Americans who, like Krugman, suspect that Europeans and their leaders are, as they style themselves, more sophisticated, worldly, and politically mature than Americans and their leaders. They believe that Europe’s antipathy toward America is a proportionate and rational response to American failings.
I encourage them to feel uneasy in these sentiments.
CHAPTER 2
SELF-EXTINGUISHING TOLERANCE
ON JANUARY 30, 2005, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ largest film festival canceled a showing of Submission, a short film about the suffering of women in Islamic cultures. Theo van Gogh, the director, had several months before been slain on the streets of Amsterdam by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim who found the film offensive. The festival had planned to show Submission as part of a program titled “Filmmaking in an Age of Turbulence.” Also on the agenda were films that had been censored in Russia, Indonesia, and Serbia: presumably the program’s intended moral message was one of pious opposition to censorship. But when the documentary’s producer, Gijs van de Westelaken, of Column Films, received death threats, he chose with hideous unintentional irony to embody the title of the film in question. Submission was promptly removed from the program. Added, however, were two Islamist propaganda films, one about the racism of British authorities, which, the movie offered, was understandably causing young British Muslims to join al Qaeda; the other a sympathetic interpretation of Palestinian suicide bombings as a natural response to the repressive practices of the occupying Israeli army.1 Explaining his decision, van de Westelaken remarked that he did not want “to take the slightest risk for anyone of our team.” 2
Coincidentally, the showing of the film was canceled on the day of Iraq’s first multiparty elections in half a century. The comparison is instructive. Describing the mood in Baghdad on that day, an Iraqi named Sam posted this entry to his weblog:
We decided to challenge the terrorists who threatened to wash the streets of Iraq with our blood. We said . . . let them send their dogs to suck our bones we care not! We challenged them and we knew we may die and some of us wear their shrouds and voted in a civilized way with out problems. In one incident in Baghdad an Iraqi Hero suspected a terrorist. He chased him! The terrorist run and the Iraqi hero run after him and captured him. The terrorist blows himself with our hero who died to save many lives. 3
Another Iraqi in Baghdad, Ali, wrote this after casting his vote:
This was my way to stand against those who humiliated me, my family and my friends. It was my way of saying, “You’re history and you don’t scare me anymore.” It was my way to scream in the face of all tyrants, not just Saddam and his Ba’athists and tell them, “I don’t want to be your, or anyone’s slave. You have kept me in your jail all my life but you never owned my soul.” It was my way of finally facing my fears and finding my courage and my humanity again. . . . As I was walking with many people towards the center explosion hit and gun fire were heard but most were not that close. People didn’t seem to pay attention to that. 4
Hundreds of Iraqis posted to weblogs like these in the days after the election, expressing similar sentiments. You don’t need to take my word for it: Do a quick Google search under the terms “Blog+Iraq” and you’ll find them. Granted, there is no way to verify that these sites are authentic. Perhaps they were all created, as some charge, by the CIA. 5 If that’s true, well then, chapeau!—and I apologize for all the times I made fun of you, old buddies. It’s good to know our men in black have their act together at last.
But frankly, that seems unlikely. I watched CNN that day like everyone else. You saw what I saw, I’m sure: illiterate desert tribes-men, in dusty robes, walking for miles to reach the polls; young Iraqis carrying the elderly and the infirm in their arms to the voting booths; wizened women, dressed from head to toe in black, defiantly holding up their purple fingers to the cameras. I’m quite satisfied that the CIA didn’t stage all of that and convince all the news stations, al-Jazeera included, to broadcast the phony footage.
Story after story reported on that day suggested that the sentiments expressed on these websites were typical. An Iraqi man who had lost his leg in a car bombing the year before announced to the press that he would have crawled to the polls if he had to. Voters stepped around the body of an exploded suicide bomber outside a polling station and in a particularly superb gesture spat on his corpse. Voters turned out in numbers that surpassed predictions, in percentages that exceeded any recent American election. They did so in the face of terrible danger: Thirty-five Iraqis were murdered on election day. In one instance the terrorists, apparently striving to set some kind of world record in depravity, used a kidnapped child with Down syndrome as an improvised explosive device.
The comparison to the mood of capitulation in the Netherlands is so striking that it cannot but arouse our curiosity. Of course it is understandable that the festival’s administrators were spooked by the death threats. Surely the Iraqi voters were spooked, too. Why such a stunning discrepancy in bravery and defiance? Why did we see the Dutch capitulating to terrorists on the very day that Iraqis were— literally—spitting on them? Why, in fact, have we recently seen this kind of capitulation to Islamic radicalism over and over again throughout Europe?
BARGAINING WITH DEPRAVITY
This is not the first time we have seen something like this in the Netherlands. The French have been widely and deservedly condemned— and are to this day remorselessly ridiculed—for collaborating with the Nazis. They have never lived that down, despite the extraordinary French record of bravery in the First World War, which left almost every French village bled white and depopulated of young men.2 Everyone familiar with the history of the Second World War knows that the French offered little resistance to the Nazi program for the destruction of French Jewry. It is not widely appreciated that the Dutch record is even worse. Perhaps it is because Anne Frank’s diary is so well known that people now imagine Holland to have been overbrimming with sturdy towheaded heroes who at terrible risk to themselves stashed Jews in their attics. Careful readers will note, however, that the Frank family was betrayed to the Nazis by their neighbors. 6
There is an important tradition in the Netherlands—as there is throughout Europe—of bargaining with depravity. The Dutch response to Islamic terror has much in common with the Dutch posture toward Nazi terror. Both represent perversions of the noble Dutch tradition of accommodation and tolerance, one that dates from the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century—the age of Erasmus and the birth of humanism—when Dutch art, trade, and science were among the world’s most acclaimed. The Jews of Portugal and Belgium fled to the tolerant Netherlands to escape the Inquisition. Scientists and philosophers from all of Europe, including Spinoza and Descartes, took refuge in the Netherlands. But in the past century, Dutch tolerance has had a notable tendency to shade into its ugly cousin—an inability to discern what cannot be tolerated.
The Dutch attempted to appease the Nazis. This is not a taunt, it is simply a fact. The Netherlands’ elites found much to admire in Nazi Germany during the interwar period, and were particularly sympathetic to Hitler’s anti-Communist and anti-Semitic agenda, as this typical comment from Willem Jacob Oudendijk, Holland’s acting envoy to Petrograd, suggests:
Unless . . . Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things. The only manner in which this danger could be averted would be collective action on the part of all powers.7
By 1935, the Dutch were cooperating closely with the Germans in arresting their “Marxist and Jewish elements.” Many of the German Jews who had taken refuge in the Netherlands following Hitler’s seizure of power were forced to flee. In March 1935, Fort Honswijk, south of Utrecht, was redesigned as a concentration camp to contain “undesirable elements.” In 1936, the influential newspaper Ni
euwe Rotterdamse Courant fired its Jewish foreign editor for criticizing the Nazis.8
The Dutch royal family was surrounded by National Socialists. When the future queen, Princess Juliana, married a member of the Reiter-SS, Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld, guests at the wedding party hailed the couple with Nazi salutes.9 The Nazi diplomat Wolfgang zu Putlitz, assigned to The Hague after a tour of duty in London, fondly recalled the Dutch and their cooperative posture in his memoirs:
In England I had never come across officials in leading agencies who expressed their sympathy for the new Germanism as enthusiastically as in the Netherlands. . . . The National Socialists of Mr. Mussert [the leader of the Dutch Nazis] had supporters in almost all ministries and even among the royal household. . . . There were Chiefs of Police who, summarily, at one signal from Butting [an attaché at the German embassy], deported German emigrants at any time of day or night, and handed them over to the Gestapo. . . . I have never heard that the Dutch government asked for a single document concerning such arbitrary acts, which were known to us by the dozen. 10
Following Kristallnacht, the Dutch government renounced the Netherlands’ centuries-old tradition of sheltering fugitives, declaring that it would no longer accept Jewish refugees. The border was policed with especial care against desperate Jews attempting to escape from Germany. One week after Kristallnacht, the government issued a statement condemning Dutch citizens who privately attempted to rescue Jewish children: “The behavior of Dutch who transfer Jewish children by car or by train to the Netherlands has to be disapproved of.”11
The Dutch appeasement policy ended as appeasement policies generally do when the German army invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 and overran the country within five days. Jews were swiftly dismissed from government positions and required to register themselves as non-Aryans, a demand to which the Dutch civil service acquiesced without complaint. On February 22, 1941, the first 430 Jews were picked at random, arrested, and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Within three months all were dead. Soon afterward, the identity cards of Dutch Jews were stamped with the letter J, and Jews were forced to wear the yellow star. They were forbidden to travel and barred from public transportation, theaters, libraries, parks, and the homes of Gentiles. As the Nazis demanded, the Dutch implemented the Nuremburg laws on racial purity. Jews were fired from their jobs. The Nazis seized the valuables of Jews and transported them to German banks. During the entire Occupation, with the exception of a single day-and-a-half protest strike in February 1941, organized by the Communists, the Dutch took no public action to protest any of these policies.12
Indeed, the Dutch cooperated fully in their own moral destruction. The Dutch continued to trade energetically with the Germans, filling 84.4 percent of their orders. (The French filled only 70 percent of German orders.) 13 Dutch policemen arrested the Jews. Dutch officers guarded them in the transit camps. Dutch railway workers deported them for liquidation. Dutch security forces were praised by Himmler for their loyalty and industry. “Very good,” the SS leader wrote at the top of a memo documenting their efficient contribution to the Nazi death machine.14
Ordinary people were well aware of the fate that awaited those deported. Anyone who says otherwise is speaking nonsense. The Nazis, with the help of the Dutch police, were seizing Jews from orphanages, hospitals, and homes for the aged. Their claim that these Jews were to be conscripted into labor service was patently ludicrous. No one ever received mail from the deported. Even a child like Anne Frank had a perfect grasp of the situation. “The English radio speaks of gassing,” she wrote. “Maybe that is after all the quickest method of dying.”15
When the mass deportations began, in July 1942, the Jewish population of the Netherlands stood at 140,000. Approximately 110,000 Jews were sent in sealed railway cars to the death camps. All but a handful were exterminated. The percentage of Jews who perished in the Netherlands exceeded that of any other country in Western Europe. This is why it is particularly disturbing now to see Dutch filmmakers taking orders from totalitarian fanatics who explicitly propose to destroy Dutch democracy and make no secret of their odium toward the world’s remaining Jews.
It is not only the filmmakers who have exhibited a disturbing willingness to compromise with fanaticism. The Dutch state funds, with taxpayer money, hundreds of mosques and Islamic clubs headed by radical clerics who are committed to destroying Dutch civic order. In 2003, the Dutch government granted the Arab European League permission to open its first branch in the Netherlands. The league was founded in Belgium by Dyab Abou Jahjah, a former member of Hezbollah and self-described “armed resistor” in Lebanon. 16 It had already incited vicious riots and anti-Semitic violence in Antwerp, and had issued public approvals of September 11. “Sweet revenge,” said Jahjah. Jahjah seeks the implementation of sharia—Islamic law— throughout Europe. In the “sharocracy” he envisions, all women will be covered.17 The organization has pledged solidarity with the Iraqi insurgency: With Dutch troops serving in Iraq, this would seem to be a posture that crosses the line between moral ignominy and treason.
The interim leader of the Netherlands branch of the Arab European League, Jamil Jawad, opened the league’s inaugural meeting by calling for the destruction of Israel. He then demanded the abolition of the Netherlands’ drug-selling coffee shops and legal brothels. His successor, Mohammed Cheppiah, urged that homosexuals be stoned to death. The league’s press officer, Naïma Elmaslouhi, announced that she found unproblematic the sight of Moroccan youths chanting “Hamas, Hamas, gas all the Jews” on the streets of Amsterdam, as they did during protest marches in 2002. 18 (This was reported in the NRC Handelsblad, commonly regarded as the Netherlands’ highest-quality newspaper. Elmaslouhi subsequently denied making the remark. I know who I believe.) When, in November 2003, terrorists believed to be linked to al Qaeda detonated bombs throughout Turkey, killing more than 50 people, Elmaslouhi expressed her “support and understanding” of the murderers. They had, after all, blown up two synagogues. “I am against the killing of innocents,” she said, “but how do you know who is innocent?”19 As far as I know, she has not denied making this remark. Following the Madrid train bombings that left nearly 200 dead and hundreds more injured, Jahjah, the league’s founder, remarked in a televised debate that a similar attack was likely in the Netherlands. “It’s logical,” he said. “You make war with us, we make war with you.” 20
Why on earth should the Dutch tolerate this, an official, legal terrorist organization dedicated to erasing Dutch tolerance?
OH, UNBELIEVING FUNDAMENTALISTS: THE MURDER OF THEO VAN GOGH
Dutch courage does exist, however, and has recently been personified by the politician and author of Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who happens to have been born in Mogadishu, not Holland. The daughter of a politician forced into exile by the Somali civil war, Hirsi Ali was raised throughout Islamic Africa and the Middle East, and thus observed the lives of Muslim women from a number of bleak perspectives. When Hirsi Ali turned twenty-three, her father announced her engagement to a kinsman in Canada, a man twice her age who grandly proposed to sire six children in a row. Hirsi Ali was en route to Canada, transiting Germany, when she slipped off the plane and fled, seeking and receiving asylum in the Netherlands. She spoke not one word of Dutch.
She was an uneducated woman with no financial resources. In one gesture, she exiled herself from everything familiar to her, from her family and her culture, even from her language. Supporting herself with cleaning jobs, she studied Dutch, acquiring a now-legendary fluency. She put herself through college, where she studied political thought from the Greco-Roman era to the present. She was particularly fascinated by the writings of John Stuart Mill. She joined the Dutch Labor Party and won a seat in the Dutch parliament, becoming prominent as an advocate for abused Islamic women. She denounced the forcible imposition of the veil, incest, spousal battery, and the monstrous practice of female genital mutilation. She carefully documented thousands of these
crimes among Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands.
Astonishingly, her stance on these issues was both controversial and rare. Antipathy came not only from Muslims, from whom she received a steady influx of death threats, but from her own political party, which demanded she abandon her campaign. “They don’t want to believe Muslim women in the Netherlands are beaten and locked up in their homes,” she said, “or that girls are murdered for holding hands with a non-Muslim boy. When I took it up with the Labor Party they sided with the Islamic conservatives, and told me to stop, so that’s when I became really inflamed.”21
Hirsi Ali left the Labor Party and joined the Liberal Party, where she has led a campaign against the Dutch government’s expensive support for the multiculturalism programs that, she argues, have succeeded only in isolating Muslim women still further from Dutch society. She particularly opposes the funding of education for immigrants in their own languages, rather than Dutch, and the government’s underwriting of more than 700 Islamic clubs, many headed by radical imams who do not speak Dutch and know nothing about Dutch culture.
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