Ritual Slaughter and Minority Politics in Amsterdam

As mentioned previously, Wilders’ pro-Zionist Freedom Party in Holland is supporting a ban on ritual slaughter thatopposes both Muslim and Jewish customs. Now that the ban is closer than ever, Jews are franticly trying to prevent it, but by their efforts they are showing their true colours: They pursue their self-interest under the flag of tolerance and are playing a dangerous game by making alliances with other non-Dutch minorities against the native Dutch.

Firstly, Jews have tried to appeal to the perceived ‘Dutch tolerance’, an image of Dutch history which is heavily promoted by the book The Dutch Republic by the Jewish historian Jonathan I. Israel. In fact the Protestant Dutch Republic stripped all Roman-Catholics (30%-40% of the native population) of their civil rights and heavily persecuted other sects of Protestants, but allowed the Jews to settle in Holland and enjoy special privileges. Shmuel Katzman, the chief rabbi of The Hague, defines Dutch tolerance in an op-ed in the Volkskrant of 11-04-2011 in terms of what is good for the Jews: “At school we learned how Holland was the beacon of freedom and democracy in Europe — before this idea was implemented in the rest of the world. We felt admiration of the opportunities offered to the first Jewish residents of the Low Countries, in a time when they were driven from other lands.”

In other words, ‘tolerance’ is defined by Jews in terms of what benefits Jews, but there is no appeal to moral universalism. Indeed, the banishment of the philosopher Spinoza from the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656 is a proof that the Jews were certainly not more tolerant than their Dutch hosts. The rise of an apartheid Israel in the modern word again shows that tolerance of other religions and ethnic groups is foreign to Judaism.

Secondly, Jews are colluding with Muslims to prevent the ban on ritual slaughter. An op-ed in the Volkskrant of 12-04-2011 against the ban on ritual slaughter is supported by a score of Jewish and Muslim organizations, including the Central Jewish Committee, the official Israel lobby-group CIDI, the Muslim Council of Holland and the Jewish-Moroccan Network of Amsterdam.

The Jewish Moroccan Network is very interesting. It was founded in 2006 under the patronage of the Jewish mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, explicitly to combat the ‘gemeenschappelijke vijand‘ (the “common enemy”): racism, intolerance, anti-Semitism and Muslim-hatred. While the capital of Holland is being flooded by ethnic minorities and the native Dutch are in danger of becoming an actual minority (Dutch comprise 50% of the population of Amsterdam as of 2010), the Jews are seeking an alliance with ethnic and religious minorities against the common enemy — the native Dutch. The general trend in America and throughout the West is that Jews are actively making alliances with non-Europeans against the native European-derived populations.

In this light, Jews should not be surprised to find themselves on the wrong side of the line when the native Dutch become increasingly restive about the growing influence of minorities and seek to deprive minorities of their privileges, like ritual slaughter.