The Dutch Find There's a Time for Tolerance -- and a Time to Get Tough
AMSTERDAM — Can a threatened society rally to its own defense? Or will political correctness paralyze the survival instinct? Those are questions being asked here in the Netherlands, where an experiment in no-questions-asked multiculturalism is coming to an end.
My first inkling of how permissive Holland is came when nobody checked my passport when I got off the train from Belgium. My second clue was that in days of wandering around the downtown Zentrum I didn't see a single police officer on the street.
Within a few blocks, I passed by "museums" for tattoos, for torture, for hashish -- and, of course, for sex. Did I mention the prostitutes on display? Or the 258 registered "coffee shops" that allow marijuana smoking?
But Amsterdam's problem isn't too much tawdriness. Instead, traditionally, it's been too much tolerance -- for the intolerant and for the intolerable. The crisis in Holland came to the world's attention on Nov. 2 when Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh -- great-grand-nephew of the painter -- was fatally shot and stabbed, allegedly by a Dutch Muslim. There's little doubt about the details of the murder because the man, Mohammed Bouyeri, confessed to the killing. Many in the Dutch Muslim community, mostly hailing from Morocco, were conspicuous in their refusal to condemn the crime.
In the aftermath of the killing, there was a spasm of anti-Muslim violence. About 20 mosques and schools were vandalized. Fortunately, no serious injuries resulted. But then the Dutch reverted to their standard touchy-feelyness. Students at a high school held a "group hug" as a "tonic against hate and violence in the country."
And although the churches here are notoriously empty, the Nieuwe Kerk has been jammed. Why? Because of a Moroccan culture exhibit that lets ethnic Dutch empathize with their new countrymen.
It seems to me that efforts at cross-cultural understanding have come at the expense of homeland security. All the group hugs notwithstanding, ethnic problems seem to be getting worse, as are crime and chronic unemployment. Of the million or so Muslims here in this country of 17 million, only a few are openly hostile, but many are poorly assimilated into Dutch culture.
Shouldn't there be a serious effort to get to the heart of the problem, and to crack down where necessary? Muslims loom huge in Holland's demographic future. In the cities, more than half of schoolchildren are Muslim, and new immigrants are steadily trickling in. Ethnic conflict is real, and it can't be solved by hugging.
