Letter to a terrrorist expert
Peter Breedveld
Dear mister Benjamin,
I was genuinely shocked by your testimony about Islamist extremism before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 5. In a few broad strokes you depicted a Europe in the grip of xenophobia, where Muslim immigrants are discriminated against, put away in ghettos, given second rate education and treated with hostility. You state this ‘helps to explain the appeal of radicalization’. I must say, as an expert on terrorism and European affairs, you give a very one-side view on the situation in Europe. A very anti-European view if I may say so.
You state that
although the news media have paid much attention in recent years to the re-emergence of European anti-Semitism, a burgeoning anti-Muslim sentiment may yet become the bigger and more troubling phenomenon.
I find this an extremely disturbing observation. While Muslims have nothing to fear in the European streets, in certain parts of European cities it is far from safe for Jews. Jews are intimidated, molested, spit upon and molested by Muslim youngsters and you may have heard of the gruesome murder, two months ago in Paris, of Ilan Halimi by a gang of Muslim youngsters. Ilan Halimi was kidnapped for ransom because he was a Jew and therefore had to be filthy rich, according to the kidnappers.
So if you say that the growing anti-Muslim sentiment is more troubling than the re-emergence of anti-Semitism, I suspect you do not realise on which side exactly the victims are falling.
Further on in your testimony you claim that
among the first fruits of the rightward shift has been the ban on headscarves in French schools and the Dutch decision to expel 26,000 asylum seekers from the Netherlands.
This is a painful demonstration of how ill-informed you are. The decision to expel 26,000 asylum seekers was not made in the aftermath of 9/11 or the Madrid or London bombings and it was not made by rightwing populists. In fact, the most revered rightwing populist in Holland, Pim Fortuyn, who would have made prime minister if an environmental activist (who stated he considered Fortuyn a danger to Muslims) had not shot and killed him in 2002, announced that he would issue a general pardon for the asylum seekers. The decision to expel them was made in the year 2000 by a social democrat (social democracy being a euphemism for socialism) named Job Cohen, who was then Deputy Secretary of Justice and who is now mayor of Amsterdam and - because he is so friendly to radical Islamists - Time Magazine’s European Hero of 2005.
Rightwing Secretary of Justice Rita Verdonk is thus merely carrying out a six year old law designed by the same man who is now hypocritically accusing her of being cold hearted. It might interest you to know, furthermore, that a majority of the Dutch people favours a pardon for asylum seekers who have been kept in uncertainty for too long (in many cases up to five years or even longer). It might also interest you that, despite Rita Verdonks tough language, of the 26,000 asylum seekers concerned, even less then 6,000 are expected to have left the country (voluntary or involuntary) in the end.
As for the French ban on headscarves, this is not a rightwing populist attack on Muslim immigrants either. The issue is far more complex. It is not for nothing that a Muslim country like Turkey has a prohibition of headscarves in schools, universities, courtrooms and so on. Would you say that the Turkish government is xenophobic as well for banning headscarves from public space?
Headscarves are not just innocent pieces of cloth. They are aggressive symbols of cultural superiority and sexist oppression. In the larger cities of the Netherlands, where an ever increasing number of women start to wear headscarves, chadors, burqas and niqaabs, it is not unusual for uncovered women to be yelled at by men who call them ‘whore’. I have witnessed this on several occasions. Uncovered women are not only called whores, they also risk being treated as such (that is, as a woman without value to do with as you please).
The pressure on women who do not want to wear headscarves can be enormous and almost impossible to resist. Headscarves are not only symbols, but actual instruments of oppression. By banning the headscarf the French government is freeing women of the cultural, religious and social imposition of it. The French Iranian writer Chahdortt Djavann, who has lived through religious oppression herself and knows what she is talking about, has always firmly taken position against the headscarf.
Another thing that strikes me in your speech is that you seem to equate immigrants with Muslims. You speak of a European ‘antipathy to outsiders’, but the feelings of distrust and fear towards Muslims have nothing to do with xenophobia or racism. It has everything to do with the threats against the freedoms Europeans cherish: freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of choice, sexual freedom, religious freedom (which includes the freedom to NOT have a religion).
I will give you a few examples of how real this threat has become in my own country, the Netherlands. A couple of years ago a play has been cancelled because of severe Muslim threats, a film has been taken from circulation because of severe Muslim threats, a Dutch-Moroccan painter lives in hiding because of severe Muslim threats (he was beaten up and cut once), three elected politicians (one of them a Dutch Moroccan Muslim) live in hiding because of severe Muslim threats, Jews cannot safely go to synagogue in some parts of Amsterdam because of severe Muslim threats, homosexual tourists are advised not to walk hand-in-hand in what not long ago was the gay capital of the world, Amsterdam, because of severe Muslim threats. Well, more than threats, actually. Homosexuals are molested and beaten up regularly in Amsterdam nowadays, your fellow American Chris Crain being the most famous example.
I could go on and on but I suspect you get the picture.
There are still many people who consider these incidents and who are convinced only a very small group of extremist Muslims display this hostile attitude. Unfortunately there are so many incidents that follow each other so quickly that everyone with a little common sense can see a clear pattern. Also, where the Muslim community was very vocal when it came to condemning the Danish cartoons, the silence is absolutely deafening when it concerns the death threats of artists and politicians. Muslim youngsters were dancing in the streets after the attacks of 9/11 (CNN showed the footage to the whole world) and after the slaughter of film maker and Islam critic Theo van Gogh many Muslims said he had it coming. Or they would say the murder was objectionable but that Van Gogh did go too far (in other words, he was asking for it). School kids consider Van Goghs murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, to be their hero and role model. One of the most popular Muslim politicians in Europe, Dyab Abou Jahjah, wrote in his book I, Abou Jahjah that he could not suppress a smile when he saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. Abou Jahjah has a website on which he published, as retribution for the Danish Mohammed-cartoons, a couple of vile anti-Semitic cartoons, one of them depicting Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler.
Being disturbed by all this is not a matter of xenophobia. People are simply scared out of their wits by the open hostility displayed by their fellow citizens. Most Muslims who speak out in public use their religion as a deadly weapon instead of the vessel of peace and freedom our politically correct leftist elite keep telling us it is.
You further state that
after the Madrid bombings, there was little backlash against Spain's Muslim community. But after the van Gogh murder, the story in the Netherlands, historically one of Europe’s most tolerant societies was different. Within a week, there were at least twenty reported cases of arson involving Muslim schools and mosques.
I wonder if it is on purpose that you leave out the fact that Christian churches were also among the targets of the arsonists. It seems relevant to me that Spain is twelve times the size of Holland and that it has a population of 40 million people of which 700,000 are Muslim. Holland has 16 million people and almost one million Muslims. The proportions are substantially different. But most importantly: the Spanish government is holding the Muslim community on a really tight leash. Right after the Madrid bombings 74 people were arrested in Spain and every sermon in every mosque in Spain has to be translated in Spanish so the authorities can immediately act when radical imams start spreading hate.
In Holland, on the contrary, the authorities do nothing against the spreading of a book wherein Muslims are summoned to throw homosexuals from high buildings. The mayor of Amsterdam drinks tea with hatemongering radical imams and will not obstruct them in any way. In Rotterdam an imam preached that Europeans are lower that dogs and pigs because they allow homosexuals in their midst and he was acquitted by a judge because he spoke on the grounds of his belief.
The Dutch authorities do act, however, against expressions that might be offensive to Muslims. For instance, the day after Van Gogh was murdered the Rotterdam police had a mural painting of an angel with the words ‘Thou shalt not kill’ removed because some Muslims took offence.
When the Queen of Denmark says that ‘we are being challenged by Islam these years’, she is not being Islamophobic or showing ‘antipathy to outsiders’, as you suggest in your testimony. The Danish queen is stating the obvious. When a couple of citizens of your country make a tour around the Arab world with a map of supposedly anti-Islamic cartoons (the worst of them being falsifications) in order to incite Muslims and set them up against you, I should say you are challenged by Islam and you have to show your opposition to it.
You predict that in 2050 20 percent of the European population may be Muslim. This in itself should not be a problem. Europe is a secular part of the world where everybody is free to follow or not follow a religion, to criticise and be criticised where you can choose to read, hear, see, say and write what you want. Muslims who respect the secular state and its constitution are very welcome to add to the blend of cultural flavours that give Europe it’s rich bouquet. There will be a problem, however, when 20 percent of the population is imposing its world view on the other 80 percent. Already Christian and Jewish symbols, portraits of nudes, films, books, music and other works of art are banned because of Muslim sensitivities in what I once considered the most liberal country in the world. This is where I and many other Europeans draw the line. We do not want to give up our freedom and we do not want to be second rate citizens in a European Muslim state.
Because of this dissidence we are being called racists, Nazi’s, xenophobes, Islamophobes, secular fundamentalists and many other names by the sensible representatives of our intellectual and political elite all the time. We have become more or less immune to this. It does hurt, however, to be called a xenophobe and even the cause - or part of the cause - of Islamist radicalism by an American expert on terrorism addressing a committee of the Senate. In a part of the world where anti-Americanism and servitude to Islamist expansionism is fast growing we already feel increasingly isolated. We were kind of hoping on American support, if only moral support, of our case instead of a stigma.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Breedveld
Gepubliceerd op 08.04.06 @ 10:04 PM
