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By Phyllis Chesler
(JNS) Those who’ve survived an atrocity are always more haunted by what the allegedly “good” people failed to do than by the actual crimes. They are haunted by those who heard their screams and did nothing, by those who denied that there even were screams, and by those who, like the police in Amsterdam last week, were warned in advance that something bad was to come but chose to delay any actions.
And then there are the cheerleaders who celebrate war-zone rapes or “Jew hunts” in modern-day Europe.
Last week’s pogrom was conducted by groups of Muslim men and taxi drivers who carefully planned a Hamas-like Oct. 7 rampage against civilian Israelis who had come to Amsterdam to watch a soccer game.
We know that Holland is the country that gave the largest percentage of its Jews over to Hitler, more than any other European country. Out of a pre-war total of 80,000 Jews, 64,000 Dutch Jews—80%—were murdered.
According to Leon de Winter, a Dutch author and journalist writing in The Wall Street Journal, “Today there are about 20,000 Jews in Amsterdam and 40,000 in the whole country. By contrast, there are roughly 1 million Muslims in the Netherlands … about 90,000 Muslims live in Amsterdam.”
For the moment, I am thinking more about the Dutch non-Arabs who are celebrating the “Jew hunt” than I am about the Muslim attackers. These mainly Caucasian citizens—the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Dutch who sacrificed their Jewish neighbors during World War II—are the ones who are now those chanting “Free, free Palestine” and in favor of killing the Jews.
This virus of Jew-hate, perhaps dormant for a while, has fully re-emerged.
Since Hamas’s pogrom of Oct. 7, anti-Israel protests around the world have been led by Muslims but always joined by non-Arabs. Calls to “Globalize the intifada” have become normalized. This is inevitable given that authorities refuse to stop such demonstrations and college administrators and professors defend Jew-hatred as a form of “free speech” and politically “just” since they view Israel as the “colonial occupier” of innocent Arabs.
Just scan the worldwide media coverage of the Amsterdam assault. Reuters and The New York Times downplayed what happened, calling it either a fight between soccer fans or a fight that the Israelis started, rather than a “Jew hunt” in which mobs of Muslims in groups of perhaps five to 15 people were seen trying to run Jews over, beating them in the streets and forcing them to say “Free Palestine” if they wanted to live.
The day after the pogrom, Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema did not call the rioters Islamists, Muslims or Moroccans … she referred to them as “scooter youths” as they rode mopeds to commit their crimes.
This “Jew hunt” was not perpetrated by Christian Caucasians as in the past. This time, it was pre-planned and apparently carried out by Holland’s Muslims, some of whom are likely second- or third-generation citizens. How can Holland deport those found guilty of perpetrating a pogrom on Jewish civilians if the perps are Dutch citizens? Can the Dutch, both Muslim and non-Arab, be de-programmed?
Probably not, at least not without a major, overwhelming, mandatory re-education plan.
In their works, prescient French novelist Jean Raspail and scholar Bat Ye’or, an Egyptian-Swiss woman whose real name is Gisèle Littman, predicted the coming of “Eurabia” and the downfall of Western civilization. So did writers like Andrew Bostom, Oriana Fallaci, Richard Landes, Bernard Lewis, Douglas Murray, Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq, with some pointing to instances in Europe of so-called “no-go” zones in areas with significant Muslim populations and little police oversight, sexual assaults of women some call “infidels,” honor killings and a refusal to assimilate.
Let’s not forget the assassination in 2004 of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by Moroccan-Dutch Islamist Mohamed Bouyeri, who was born in Holland and whose hit list included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian. He stabbed a five-page note into Van Gogh’s body, which he addressed to Ali, who he called a “heretic” and a willing collaborator of “Zionists and Crusaders.” Bouyeri believed that a “Jewish cabal” controlled Holland.
Despite such warning signs, those who spoke against the rise of Islamic extremists were called “Islamophobes,” racists, fear-mongers and conspiracy theorists.
De Winter wrote that the violence that took place overnight Nov. 7-8 “emerged from deep-seated, historically entrenched antisemitism.” He also noted that “Moroccan youth have participated in weekly anti-Zionist demonstrations through the streets of Amsterdam.”
The attackers in Amsterdam did not paraglide into the city as Hamas did, but many were on scooters. De Winter believes that these Muslims are “collectively humiliated” by the Dutch “indifference” to their religion and by the “infidel” demands placed upon them to assimilate.
What next? Well, according to Dutch journalist and editor Esther Voet, the day after the “Jew hunt,” an Israeli TV crew was trying to broadcast a report from Dam Square in Amsterdam and was confronted by pro-Palestinian protesters. “They called for police protection to return to their hotels. The police refused.”
With the protesters behind last week’s pogrom still on the streets, we will likely see more pogroms in Holland and other parts of Europe. Will the police in those cases respond in a more timely fashion than the Dutch police did?
Time will tell. France, which is hosting a soccer match in Paris with Israel on Thursday, is deploying 4,000 security personnel to ensure that what happened in Amsterdam does not happen there. Israeli security officials, meanwhile, are telling Israelis to stay home.
Let’s be clear on this: Only Israel rescued the Jews under siege in Amsterdam last week. The Dutch government did not do so, nor did any neighboring European country. The world’s “peaceniks” and the United Nations were nowhere in sight.
What happened in Amsterdam reflects what has happened to Jews historically in Europe and throughout the Muslim world. Israel has not caused this Jew-hatred. Israel is, in fact, the only rational response to antisemitism. It is the height of madness to demand that there be no Jewish state or for Jews to willingly negotiate for an even smaller, almost tiny, part of the land in which we are the indigenous people, a people who have now returned to our inheritance.
