Europe’s Jews: Canaries in the Civilizational Coal Mine
In spring 1942, all Dutch Jewish men, women, and children over the age of six were required to wear the ‘Jood’ (Dutch for Jew) Star of David badge attached to their outer clothing at all times.
Absent action, pogroms in Europe will become the new normal.
Twenty years ago this month, a Dutch Islamist named Mohamed Bouyeri slaughtered filmmaker and prominent Islam critic Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam. The second-generation Dutch-born Moroccan shot the older provocateur several times, then slit his throat. Bouyeri, now serving a life sentence, said he did it for Allah. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim apostate and friend of Van Gogh’s, had to go into hiding for her life after Bouyeri threatened to kill her too.
If you publicly criticized Islam, it wasn’t safe for you to walk on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. Things have changed since then. As we saw on Thursday night, now all it takes to get you ambushed by violent Muslims in Amsterdam is to be a fan of an Israeli football team. Well, the Netherlands always has prided itself on ‘progress.’
Sarcasm aside, the shocking pogrom that raged on Amsterdam’s streets after a football match between the Dutch team Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv reveal, to the surprise of no European conservative, that the Dutch authorities have learned nothing from events this century.
The Netherlands’ ruling class and their institutions have always considered right-wing politician Geert Wilders, a strong critic of mass migration, to be a greater threat to the country’s well-being than the large numbers of Muslim migrants and their offspring that live in what is traditionally one Europe’s most peaceful, liberal states.
A year ago, Wilders’ party gained a plurality in national elections, but could not immediately form a government, as tradition would have dictated, because few parties would work with the populist and Islam critic (who also must live under constant heavy security, lest he be culturally enriched at the point of a Dutch migrant’s knife). Wilders was finally able to form a government, but only after making significant concessions to coalition partners who promised to neuter his more “radical” proposals.
Meanwhile, last month, it was reported that some Dutch police are refusing to guard Jewish sites, such as the national Holocaust Museum:
Marcel de Weerd and Michel Theeboom, representing the Jewish Police Network, expressed concerns over changes they were seeing in the force.
“There are colleagues who no longer want to protect Jewish targets or events. They talk about ‘moral dilemmas,’ and I see a tendency emerging to give in to that. That would truly mark the beginning of the end. I’m concerned about that,” Theeboom said.
Geert Wilders naturally condemned this, and called on X for the firing of any officers who refused to guard Jewish sites:
But of course, Wilders, who has called for the “de-Islamization” of the country, is too radical for the Dutch establishment.
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, over 100,000 Dutch Jews were deported to concentration camps by the Germans and Dutch collaborators, and murdered. But that was a long time ago. The same Dutch police critics who sounded the alarm also said that some younger members of the police force demonstrate ignorance of what happened in their country during the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, antisemitic incidents in the Netherlands soared by 250% since the October 7 Hamas mass slaughter of Jews in Israel, and the subsequent Israeli attack on the Hamas stronghold Gaza.
Donald Trump’s astonishing comeback election this week in the United States has caused fear and anger across Europe, where most people polled strongly opposed Trump, and endorsed Kamala Harris. Only in Eastern Europe did national majorities side with Trump. NBC News, following the usual media script, fretted that Trump’s win thrilled “Europe’s far right.” The slur term ‘far right’ refers to European politicians and political parties that oppose mass migration and, in general, the globalist managerialism of Brussels and national governing elites.
It is not clear to what extent voting publics in Europe understand the true situation in the United States. If you depend on European mainstream media to inform you about American realities, you will be lost in the ideological clouds. This is true as well within the United States, as once again, eight years after Trump’s first shock victory, the U.S. news media failed miserably to describe fairly and accurately the actual country that they cover.
Similarly, as an American who has lived for the past three years in Europe, it is undeniably the case that Americans should not trust their own media to tell them the truth about European politics. The same left-wing bias that blinds and binds the European media exists among their American colleagues.
American and British conservatives who live in Hungary, for example, routinely have to reassure friends and family back home that no, we do not endure a fascist dictatorship, that in fact in terms of violence, antisemitism, and freedom of expression, Hungary is in fact far more classically liberal than Western European countries, as well as left-controlled precincts of the United States.
What the media as well as others in the European ruling class—including academia and other institutions—will not understand, because they seem to be utterly incapable of seeing what is right in front of their noses, is that absent strong, sustained, unflinching pushback against mass migration and Islamist radicalization, things like the Amsterdam pogrom will become more and more common. And so will the elections of leaders like Geert Wilders, who has a clarity of vision and a moral backbone that has been conspicuously lacking in the more respectable leaders of Europe’s established parties.
The Trump comeback symbolizes a repudiation by Americans of their governing elites. In 2016, Trump became president because those elites, both Democratic and Republican, failed to govern in the interests of the majority. What was true then is true now: Donald Trump exists because they failed.
What has changed, though, is that Trump and his allies now know how far the establishment will go to sabotage his government. They are unlikely to return to office willing to play nice with people who hate them. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, it was widely interpreted as a desire for the American people to return to normal after the tumult of the Trump years. Biden responded by embracing the most extreme possible version of wokeness, as well as allowing the southern U.S. border to collapse, resulting in over 10 million migrants entering the United States.
The American people aren’t idiots. Now, Trump is back—and this time, he means business.
We can only hope that this inspires European voters to wake up to what is being done to them by those who govern them. Last month, after an interview in Budapest with left-wing journalists from Western Europe, one of them conceded to me that Viktor Orbán was right about migration. I’m quite sure the man would never report this on the pages of his publication—not if he wanted to keep his job. But until and unless Europeans like him find the courage to open their eyes and speak the truth openly, without fear, events like what happened in Amsterdam last night will only increase. And so too will the likelihood that fed-up European voters will turn to politicians—even those condemned as ‘far right’ today—whom they can trust to get serious about the crisis.
Renaud Camus, the French “Great Replacement” theorist demonized as ‘far right’ by the French media (even though he is a gay leftist and atheist), has written that the unwillingness of Europeans to speak openly about the threats to their cultures and societies from mass migration, especially Islamic migration, amounts to leaving themselves unprotected against forces that will destroy European civilization. He’s right. It will do Europe no good to concede this to Camus after it is too late to do anything about it.
Europe does not have all the time in the world. The fate of the Jews, as ever, is a canary in the civilizational coal mine. As it was in Amsterdam in 1942, it is now in Amsterdam in 2024. What are Europeans—both leaders and followers—going to do about it?
Rod Dreher is an American journalist who writes about politics, culture, religion, and foreign affairs. He is author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not By Lies (2020), both of which have been translated into over ten languages. He is director of the Network Project of the Danube Institute in Budapest, where he lives. Email him at [email protected].
Europe’s Jews: Canaries in the Civilizational Coal Mine
In spring 1942, all Dutch Jewish men, women, and children over the age of six were required to wear the ‘Jood’ (Dutch for Jew) Star of David badge attached to their outer clothing at all times.
Twenty years ago this month, a Dutch Islamist named Mohamed Bouyeri slaughtered filmmaker and prominent Islam critic Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam. The second-generation Dutch-born Moroccan shot the older provocateur several times, then slit his throat. Bouyeri, now serving a life sentence, said he did it for Allah. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim apostate and friend of Van Gogh’s, had to go into hiding for her life after Bouyeri threatened to kill her too.
If you publicly criticized Islam, it wasn’t safe for you to walk on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. Things have changed since then. As we saw on Thursday night, now all it takes to get you ambushed by violent Muslims in Amsterdam is to be a fan of an Israeli football team. Well, the Netherlands always has prided itself on ‘progress.’
Sarcasm aside, the shocking pogrom that raged on Amsterdam’s streets after a football match between the Dutch team Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv reveal, to the surprise of no European conservative, that the Dutch authorities have learned nothing from events this century.
The Netherlands’ ruling class and their institutions have always considered right-wing politician Geert Wilders, a strong critic of mass migration, to be a greater threat to the country’s well-being than the large numbers of Muslim migrants and their offspring that live in what is traditionally one Europe’s most peaceful, liberal states.
A year ago, Wilders’ party gained a plurality in national elections, but could not immediately form a government, as tradition would have dictated, because few parties would work with the populist and Islam critic (who also must live under constant heavy security, lest he be culturally enriched at the point of a Dutch migrant’s knife). Wilders was finally able to form a government, but only after making significant concessions to coalition partners who promised to neuter his more “radical” proposals.
Meanwhile, last month, it was reported that some Dutch police are refusing to guard Jewish sites, such as the national Holocaust Museum:
Geert Wilders naturally condemned this, and called on X for the firing of any officers who refused to guard Jewish sites:
But of course, Wilders, who has called for the “de-Islamization” of the country, is too radical for the Dutch establishment.
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, over 100,000 Dutch Jews were deported to concentration camps by the Germans and Dutch collaborators, and murdered. But that was a long time ago. The same Dutch police critics who sounded the alarm also said that some younger members of the police force demonstrate ignorance of what happened in their country during the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, antisemitic incidents in the Netherlands soared by 250% since the October 7 Hamas mass slaughter of Jews in Israel, and the subsequent Israeli attack on the Hamas stronghold Gaza.
Donald Trump’s astonishing comeback election this week in the United States has caused fear and anger across Europe, where most people polled strongly opposed Trump, and endorsed Kamala Harris. Only in Eastern Europe did national majorities side with Trump. NBC News, following the usual media script, fretted that Trump’s win thrilled “Europe’s far right.” The slur term ‘far right’ refers to European politicians and political parties that oppose mass migration and, in general, the globalist managerialism of Brussels and national governing elites.
It is not clear to what extent voting publics in Europe understand the true situation in the United States. If you depend on European mainstream media to inform you about American realities, you will be lost in the ideological clouds. This is true as well within the United States, as once again, eight years after Trump’s first shock victory, the U.S. news media failed miserably to describe fairly and accurately the actual country that they cover.
Similarly, as an American who has lived for the past three years in Europe, it is undeniably the case that Americans should not trust their own media to tell them the truth about European politics. The same left-wing bias that blinds and binds the European media exists among their American colleagues.
American and British conservatives who live in Hungary, for example, routinely have to reassure friends and family back home that no, we do not endure a fascist dictatorship, that in fact in terms of violence, antisemitism, and freedom of expression, Hungary is in fact far more classically liberal than Western European countries, as well as left-controlled precincts of the United States.
What the media as well as others in the European ruling class—including academia and other institutions—will not understand, because they seem to be utterly incapable of seeing what is right in front of their noses, is that absent strong, sustained, unflinching pushback against mass migration and Islamist radicalization, things like the Amsterdam pogrom will become more and more common. And so will the elections of leaders like Geert Wilders, who has a clarity of vision and a moral backbone that has been conspicuously lacking in the more respectable leaders of Europe’s established parties.
The Trump comeback symbolizes a repudiation by Americans of their governing elites. In 2016, Trump became president because those elites, both Democratic and Republican, failed to govern in the interests of the majority. What was true then is true now: Donald Trump exists because they failed.
What has changed, though, is that Trump and his allies now know how far the establishment will go to sabotage his government. They are unlikely to return to office willing to play nice with people who hate them. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, it was widely interpreted as a desire for the American people to return to normal after the tumult of the Trump years. Biden responded by embracing the most extreme possible version of wokeness, as well as allowing the southern U.S. border to collapse, resulting in over 10 million migrants entering the United States.
The American people aren’t idiots. Now, Trump is back—and this time, he means business.
We can only hope that this inspires European voters to wake up to what is being done to them by those who govern them. Last month, after an interview in Budapest with left-wing journalists from Western Europe, one of them conceded to me that Viktor Orbán was right about migration. I’m quite sure the man would never report this on the pages of his publication—not if he wanted to keep his job. But until and unless Europeans like him find the courage to open their eyes and speak the truth openly, without fear, events like what happened in Amsterdam last night will only increase. And so too will the likelihood that fed-up European voters will turn to politicians—even those condemned as ‘far right’ today—whom they can trust to get serious about the crisis.
Renaud Camus, the French “Great Replacement” theorist demonized as ‘far right’ by the French media (even though he is a gay leftist and atheist), has written that the unwillingness of Europeans to speak openly about the threats to their cultures and societies from mass migration, especially Islamic migration, amounts to leaving themselves unprotected against forces that will destroy European civilization. He’s right. It will do Europe no good to concede this to Camus after it is too late to do anything about it.
Europe does not have all the time in the world. The fate of the Jews, as ever, is a canary in the civilizational coal mine. As it was in Amsterdam in 1942, it is now in Amsterdam in 2024. What are Europeans—both leaders and followers—going to do about it?
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