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June 22, 2010

Netherlands may use "decoy Jews" to fight anti-Semitism

By David Paulin

Anti-Semitism has gotten so ugly in The Netherlands that Jews walking along Amsterdam's street are being harassed by young Muslims who yell insults or give Nazi salutes.

Last Sunday, a Dutch TV channel aired a secretly recorded video that showed a rabbi enduring such harassment, according to a Dutch news report.  

To fight such anti-Semitism, Acting Amsterdam Mayor Lodewijk Asscher has hit upon a novel crime-fighting idea: "Decoy Jews."  

Dutch police "already use people posing as pensioners and gay men in an effort to catch muggers and gay-bashers," noted DutchNews. So the use of "decoy Jews" represents a new variation of an old crime-fighting tactic.  

The idea of using "decoy Jews" was put forth by Labor MP Ahmed Marcouch and "fits in with Asscher's decision to take unorthodox measures to try to reduce verbal and physical attacks on Jews in the capital," explained DutchNews.  

The Netherlands, of course,  has for years suffered from a growing pathology -- a toxic mix of multiculturalism; Muslim immigration; and a proclivity for tolerating the intolerant. Nobody who understands this will be completely surprised that a rabbi strolling along Amsterdam's streets can now expect to encounter anti-Semitic harassment. A country of 16.3 million, The Netherlands' Muslim population numbers 945,000 or 5.8%.   One of the first to sound alarm bells about what was happening in The Netherlands was writer Bruce Bawer in his disquieting book: "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within." It was published after a Muslim immigrant from Morocco, Mohammed Bouyeri, murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street on Nov. 2, 2004. Van Gogh's crime: defiling Islam.    Bawer offered keen insights into the pathologies of Dutch society that opened the way for such a crime.

He wrote:  

Van Gogh's murder came as a shock, even though I'd seen something like it coming for years. In 1998, I'd lived in a largely Muslim neighborhood of Amsterdam, only a block away from the radical mosque attended by Bouyeri. There I'd seen firsthand the division between the native Dutch and their country's rapidly growing Muslim minority. That division was stark: the Dutch had the world's most tolerant, open-minded society, with full sexual equality, same-sex marriage, and libertarian policies on soft drugs and prostitution. Yet many Dutch Muslims kept that society at arm's length, despising its freedoms and clinging to a range of undemocratic traditions and prejudices.  

Did Dutch officials address this problem? No. Like their politically correct counterparts across Western Europe, they responded to it mostly by churning out empty rhetoric about multicultural diversity and mutual respect -- and then changing the subject. I knew that by tolerating intolerance in this way, the country was setting itself on a path to cataclysmic social confrontation; yet whenever I tried -- delicately -- to broach the topic, Dutch acquaintances made clear that it was off limits. They seemed not to grasp that their society, and Western Europe generally, was a house divided against itself, and that eventually things would reach the breaking point. 

Given the forgoing, it's a safe bet that "decoy Jews" will be too little -- too late.     
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