- Rauf Baker
- March 12, 2021
- Paper No. 1961
Amsterdam would like to claim the role once played by London within the EU, but there are challenges in its path—and not all parties see it as a suitable candidate in the first place.
The Netherlands
- Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
- August 31, 2020
- Paper No. 1721
The decades-long absence of international media interest in the Netherlands has made it possible for the country’s authorities and elites to blur Dutch war crimes that took place during the 1948-49 repression of the Indonesian revolution. It is only now, when most of those who committed the crimes are dead or very old, that a major study on the Dutch post-war decolonization of Indonesia has started. This blurring of responsibility for the past is an integral part of Dutch culture.
- Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
- July 29, 2020
- Paper No. 1666
In July 1995, in East Bosnia, Bosnian Serbs massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. In the shadow of this act of evil, attention must also be paid to the gross incompetence, refusal to take responsibility, guilt, and abject failure of both the UN and the Netherlands. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that individuals are responsible for their own actions. It is therefore absurd that belonging to the UN confers impunity on anyone for their own criminal negligence.
- Irina Tsukerman
- July 12, 2020
- Paper No. 1637
Iran has shifted away from political assassinations of Ahwazi Arab and Kurdish opposition figures in Europe. It is now trying to normalize its ethnocentric, Khomeinist revolutionary agenda abroad by using lawfare and playing politics. This new approach is a more “diplomatic” and “acceptable” means of asserting hard and soft power, and poses a danger to the prospects for effective US sanctions enforcement.
- Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
- June 19, 2019
- Paper No. 1204
Retired Dutch general Toine Beukering – a candidate for chairman of the Senate – said earlier this month that the Jews were “chased like docile lambs into the gas chambers.” This remark, for which he later apologized, once again raised the issue of the huge historical distortion of the Dutch role during WWII. The Dutch, who collaborated massively with the German occupiers, now exaggerate Dutch wartime resistance and underemphasize the disproportionately large role of Jews in it.
- Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
- February 22, 2019
- Paper No. 1094
Antisemitism pervades soccer in the Netherlands. Chants like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” have entered the public domain. The Supreme Court has forbidden this chant, but it can still be heard at matches. A song about burning Jews was publicly sung in January 2019 by soccer fans in the streets of Leeuwarden, a Dutch provincial capital. Though Jews represent only 0.2% of the Dutch population, in 2017, out of all complaints about punishable discrimination which reached prosecution, 41% concerned antisemitism, and most of those were soccer antisemitism.
- Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
- January 20, 2019
- Paper No. 1068
The Netherlands’ attitude towards the Jews reveals Dutch society to be profoundly hypocritical. The Dutch government remains the only one in Western Europe that consistently refuses to admit, let alone apologize for, the massive failures of its predecessors towards the Jews during WWII. Ignoring the truth of its past enables the Dutch government and parts of the political system to act as moral judges over others, with Israel a prime target.
- Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
- July 25, 2018
- Paper No. 906
The emergence of Muslim political parties in the Netherlands is a new facet of Islamization. One of these parties, Denk, has three seats in parliament and is also represented at the local level, as are other Muslim parties. They usually oppose integration and do not accept Dutch culture as the country’s dominant culture. Anti-Semitism is a regular attribute, often disguised as hate speech against Israel.