“Dear attendees”, I began my speech, “I know that you are all blessed with a high IQ, and so you know that the world-famous professor Stroempelmacher has proven that…”.
Because I have told everyone that they are intelligent and because professor Stroempelmacher, in my opinion, is world-famous and the attendees must therefore know him, no one dares to raise a hand and ask who Stroempelmacher is and to question my assertion statement.
Let me state first that the hunt for Jews in Amsterdam is completely unacceptable and I hope and expect that the anti-Semites will be arrested and severely punished. I think that is very important, but unfortunately I am not so sure that will happen.
They will probably get away with a community service order of x amount of hours. It is clear that this open violence against the Jewish community is of a harshness not seen in Holland for many decades. I am certain that a number of young Jewish families have now had enough of the Netherlands where they have lived for many generations and of which they thought they were an integral part.
The images of Jews being persecuted are shocking, unacceptable, criminal. I have been assured that there will be a thorough investigation. Was it an organised action and if so, by whom? Did this hunt for Jews come out of the blue or was it predictable? And what could have been done about it and how are we going to prevent this? How many Jews ended up in hospital and was there indeed a case of hostage-taking and/or kidnapping?
Let me emphasise once again that the hunt for Jews is unacceptable and cannot and may not be justified in any way. That 7 October is terrible, but… That ‘but’ is not right.
‘But’, I begin myself, but was it foreseeable? And my spontaneous answer is: ‘absolutely’.
Long before 7 October, anti-Semitism was becoming increasingly visible. October 7th was a good reason to clearly proclaim and upgrade the hatred of Jews. And when a football match is played against Jews, the floodgates of the anti-Semitic dam are opened.
I am saddened that the scapegoats are being sought in the wrong places. A pogrom was organized by the Church in the not so distant past with the full approval of the local or national government. That is not the case here. Perhaps action should have been taken differently, perhaps our government made the wrong assessments, but it is crystal clear to me that our local Amsterdam and national government cannot simply be accused of anti-Semitism. We must await the investigation and hopefully the guilty parties will be arrested with great force.
The number of hours, no, even days that I spend on interviews from England, Italy, the English BBC, Hungary and of course from Israel, has become almost countless. I am constantly answering e-mails and of course also speaking to many Dutch journalists. “Can you still walk the streets as a Jew? Be assured that you can go into hiding on our farm! When will you leave the Netherlands? Is it still responsible for Jews to stay here? Is it responsible for Jewish Americans to come to the Netherlands for a holiday? How long do you think Jews can continue to live in the Netherlands or in Europe?
People are very easily influenced and can change from people into animals just like that.
But people are also very easily influenced and a mayor or the police are more or less degraded to perpetrators.
If an Israeli rocket falls in Gaza and a building is destroyed, the Hamas Ministry of Health knows within a few minutes how many women and children are under the rubble. We must be careful that we, regular Dutch people, do not start using Hamas games and tactics. How everything went wrong after the football match is being investigated. Until the results are known, we do not yet know what exactly went wrong. But I do know one thing for sure: accusing our government of being supporters of the popular Jew-hatred is premature, incorrect and far from constructive.
But in the meantime, politics always remains politics and sometimes comparisons are made for political reasons that discolour the truth. Man bites dog, makes the front page.
Dog bites man is not mentioned at all, because that is normal and therefore not news. I have the same feeling when anti-Semitism is countered by Islamophobia. Let me look at myself for a moment. Have I ever cursed or wanted to curse a Muslim? Never! But a Muslim who shouts at me has been normal for years. When politicians place the until recently unknown word Islamophobia behind every remark about anti-Semitism, I have to think of that man who bites the dog.
But in the end, I can still go out on the street and take my daily walk. My parents did not have that privilege in the 1940s-1945, because the government was no good then!
