DUTCH BIGOTRY [" MOSLIM GEZIN WIL SNEL WEG "]

A Lebanese refugee family in a Dutch town claims that the neighborhood is terrorizing them.

See this article (in Dutch): http://www.ad.nl/rotterdam/voorneputten/article1394650.ece

Khalil El Maoula has moved his wife and five children to a safe place, and himself sleeps in his car. He moved to the Netherlands fourteen years ago to escape violence, and has lived in the Melissant neighborhood of Dirksland (on the Island of Goeree-Overflakkee in Zeeland province) for eight years.

In recent times he has been harassed, and eggs have been thrown at his windows nightly.

Some neighbors say that the problem is the Lebanese family's own fault, and that Khalil starts fights. They also claim that the local police are not willing to step in lest they be accused of discrimination, and are consequently too timid to do anything about the family's aggression and quarrelsomeness.

Khalil claims that people in the neighborhood have made threats and yelled anti-Islamic slurs.



Now, before I say anything else, let me point out two pertinent facts:

1. I am not particularly favourably inclined towards Muslims in general, nor to Arabs.
While I do count a number of Arabs among my friends and acquaintances, and enjoy their company and rhetorical hyperbole, the Arab world on the whole very successfully manages to get my goat, big time.
2. I lived in the Netherlands for sixteen years, and while I speak, read, and write Dutch fluently, and do not look particularly foreign (it would be odd if I did not look like a native - the family tree is sodden with Dutch genetic material since some of my ancestors settled in New York in the Seventeenth century), I was never allowed to forget that I was not Dutch, and as a resident foreigner I should be humble, and grateful for any consideration. Many Dutch at that time were strongly anti-American, and whenever WWII was brought up they would stress that they had been liberated by Canadians (conveniently overlooking the role that the US played in the war and the American Military Graveyard in Margraten), and would proudly insist that the Dutch had fought the Germans and protected Jews (forgetting for the moment that they surrendered in mere days, may have had the largest collaborationist movement of any occupied country as a percentage of the population, and that hundreds of thousands of Dutchmen were very well paid by the Germans for betraying Dutch Jews, more than eighty percent of whom did not survive the consideration of their fellow countrymen).


It is that second point that I particularly wish to impress upon your attention. I know what shits some Dutch can be. I lived among them for sixteen years. I was beaten up several times for being American. I was told innumerable times that as a Yankee I was lower than dirt. I got bricks through my bedroom window. The local yobbos pissed against our door, graffitoed our house, and threatened my parents.
[It is to my mother's credit that she threatened them right back - and they were scared of her. Four feet eleven inches of pugnacious rheumatism and cancer. But steady hands, steely eyes, and a toughness that frightened even priests and policemen. Always be gratefull for the women in your life.]

No, it wasn't the majority that attempted to make our lives miserable. It was indeed a minority. The majority of our neighbors in Valkenswaard, of our "friends" and acquaintances in that town, of our classmates and teachers in the Openbare Lagere School and the Hertog Jan College - these were on the whole decent people. But they did nothing to discourage the rotten few who acted up.
[The local constabulary were fairly useless - after all, they had to live with those people too, and Dutch red-tape discourages all but the most masochistic of civil servants from ever opening their eyes.]

I remember several people in that town with loathing - especially the brutish little Cro-magnons in the local boy-scouts who additionally despised me because I was not Catholic, and several local parents who feared that I would infect their little darlings with unclean and heathenish Americanisms.
[Americans are, in the eyes of many Europeans, merely the savage dregs of Europe. One could also regard Europeans as the devolutionary left-overs of several centuries of ritualistic slaughter and internecine warfare, but that would be unkind. Accurate, but unkind.]

Teachers of English at the local high-schools insisted that as Americans it was patently impossible for my brother and myself to speak civilized English, read English with any significant comprehension, or even understand the subtleties of literature in English.
[They nearly flunked me because of imagined Americanisms.]

That, along with the equally adamant arrogance of my father's fellow engineers, who knew as a matter of unassailable fact that their English just had to be better than my father's, because after all they were Europeans, and he was merely an American......
[Never ask a Dutchman to write technical English. The result ranges from unreadable to nightmare-inducing.]


Let's just say that I am of two minds about the Dutch.

I like them, and gladly socialize with them. And I really enjoy a few weeks in Amsterdam every few years, to recharge my Euro-trash batteries and purchase piles of books. Plus herring, cigars, genever - zalig, joh!

But they easily get my bile flowing, though it has been nearly three decades since I lived among them.


So when Khalil El Maoula says that he is being victimized by his Dutch neighbors, I will give him the benefit of doubt. I will believe him. I will think that among his neighbors are some vicious xenophobic bastards, and that the majority of his neighbors are in a state of complete denial about the rottenness that lives in small town Holland.

I've been there.

---------------------------------------

Note to any 'Ollanders who may stumble upon this blog: Yes, I know that I am 'shearing an entire group over one comb', as you lot so charmingly put it, and generalizing unfairly about the Dutch. Tough noogies.
Just try denying that parts of your pissy little mud-country are unfriendly, with many small-minded bigots in small boggy towns - you read your newspapers and know that it is so. You yourself have probably used ethnic slurs, and you yourself are probably in a state of denial about the polarization and negativity that have finally come out into the open in the last five years. Does the name Geert Wilders mean anything to you? How about the term 'kut marokkaan'? Have you EVER objected when one of your friends refered to someone else as a kut-marokkaan, or a koffieboon, or a pinda, or a mof, or even a vuile jenkie?

And for crapssakes, don't start belligerently squawking about everything that is rotten in the US. We already know that, we live here, you utter moron. This isn't about us, but about you. If you disagree, you can always start your own patriotic Dutch-o-philic blog. It ain't that hard...... except, of course, if you cannot understand the technical instructions on Blogger because they are written in...... (wait for it) ...... English!