The Dutch, Too Tolerant for Their Own Good?

WASHINGTON POST --

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102802437.html

The Dutch, Too Tolerant for Their Own Good?
A Country Caught Between Tradition And Terrorism

By Frida Ghitis

Sunday, October 30, 2005; Page B04

AMSTERDAM

"Why would religious Muslims choose to come here, of all places," a city resident wondered as we discussed the tense debate over Islamic radicalism in the Netherlands. Within a few blocks of where we spoke, near the modern Opera House and the painter Rembrandt's historic home, tourists walked across quaint canal bridges into coffee shops where varieties of marijuana fill the menu, and gay couples stepped into Amsterdam's City Hall for wedding ceremonies that government officials have been conducting here for years without controversy.

Over the centuries, the Netherlands has come to see itself as the world's champion of tolerance, much as America considers itself the world headquarters of individual freedom. That proud self-image, however, has abruptly given way to an angst-filled identity crisis leaving the Dutch struggling to figure out how to deal with the very real risk of terrorism, wondering how to persuade Muslim immigrants to embrace their tradition of tolerance.

The Netherlands is a country torn between its efforts to preserve a cherished identity and the need to protect itself from murderous fanatics. That's an experience familiar to practically every democracy faced with a terrorist threat. But nowhere I've been is the tension between security and tolerance as plainly visible as it is here. What the Dutch are discovering is that protecting their way of life may require undermining some of the very values they are trying to protect.

First to fall was the taboo against criticizing other cultures. The man to smash that taboo was the iconoclastic Pim Fortuyn, whose controversial statements against Islam and immigration ended when he was murdered (by an animal rights activist) in 2002. But his argument -- that the only way to protect Dutch tolerance was to be less tolerant -- was embraced by other politicians. Fortuyn, who was gay, was incensed when he heard Muslim clerics in Holland compare homosexuals to pigs and dogs. Tolerating this kind of speech from immigrants, said Fortuyn, would eventually lead to the destruction of the society the Dutch so carefully constructed.

While the Dutch are worried about the threat to their culture, they are terrified of what they believe is an impending terrorist attack. Polls show that it's the top concern of the population. Recent events have given the Dutch reason to worry. A few weeks ago, news reports here announced that the Dutch parliament building had been sealed and that there were police activities in several cities. Anxious moments later, word got around that police raids had netted seven people suspected of plotting terrorist strikes. Just days later, authorities in Baltimore stopped all traffic for almost two hours in a major tunnel under the Baltimore Harbor, responding to a tip about a possible attack that reportedly came from a man held in custody in the Netherlands.

One of those arrested in the Dutch raids was Samir Azzouz, a baby-faced 19-year-old who had already faced Dutch justice a few months earlier. Azzouz went to trial last spring after police allegedly found he had links to theHofstad terror group. In his apartment they found explosives and maps of the Amsterdam airport, the parliament building and a nuclear power plant. But the progressive Dutch system, which does not even allow the media to reveal a convicted criminal's last name, ruled some of the evidence inadmissible and acquitted him of the terrorism charges but convicted him of illegal arms possession.

The latest wave of arrests came after authorities said they found a video of Azzouz in which he said goodbye to his friends and family and, speaking in Arabic, referred to a certain "act" he was committing. Police claim he had been trying to buy explosives, and they believe he was planning a suicide bombing.

Many here expect an attack soon, perhaps to commemorate the anniversary of the day that changed everything. The day that so thoroughly traumatized Holland, not unlike America's 9/11, was Nov. 2, 2004, when a Muslim extremist killed and nearly decapitated the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street.

Van Gogh's own story captures the conflict over tolerance. The talented filmmaker had made a career of stirring controversy in a country that thrived on the unconventional. He had insulted just about every segment of society, and they put up with it. But when his film "Submission" offended some Muslims, extremists decided he, along with a number of politicians, must die. The killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, turned to van Gogh's mother after his conviction and said, "I do not feel your pain." He also vowed he would kill again if he were freed.

A telling commentary on the killing comes from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who made the contentious movie with van Gogh and who describes herself as a "former Muslim." She has been sharply critical not only of Islam but also of the tolerance of Dutch society for certain aspects of Islamic culture. Hirsi Ali, whose life has been repeatedly threatened, believes the Dutch have allowed Muslims, particularly extremists, to keep traditions that simply should not be tolerated in the West -- such as their oppression of women. We can call it respect for another culture, she says, but they are human rights abuses. She sees that oppression as part of a subculture that calls for enforcing one's will, often through violence, in the name of an extreme interpretation of Islam.

One response to van Gogh's killing was a display of intolerance. Dutch youths took to the streets and burned Muslim schools and mosques. Most in Holland were horrified by the violence. The attacks have ended, but there is still a sense of confusion in the country. A year later, the atmosphere is the kind that helps extremists on all sides thrive. A number of politicians are living under police protection, even as they continue to receive death threats from Islamic radicals.

The immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, "Iron Rita," is spearheading a number of reforms that strike deep into the hearts of Dutch liberals. New immigrants, particularly from Muslim countries, are being required to take courses in Dutch language and society and they will have to pass a test to show their proficiency in Dutch culture in order to immigrate to the Netherlands. The latest proposal includes banning the burqa -- the head-to-toe cover worn by some Muslim women -- in public places. And a new plan would have foreigners expelled from the Netherlands for committing even minor crimes. Some politicians, like the flamboyant Geert Wilders with his bleached blond bouffant hair, call for a complete ban on immigrants from the Muslim world. Wilders, also facing death threats and living in hiding under police protection, says Islam is simply incompatible with democracy.

Defenders of immigrant rights and other liberal groups worry that a climate of discrimination is spreading through the deceptively placid and sedate Dutch landscape. Others say the Netherlands has always had a nasty streak hidden beneath the charming facade of quaint canals, tulip gardens and its everything-goes society.

The atmosphere, as they say, is ripe for abuse by extremist politicians. The threat, however, is not a political fabrication. The danger from extremism is real, and the presence of a radicalized core of Muslim extremists requires action. There is every reason to believe that some of the actions the government takes will create more resentments and, at least to some degree, undermine the freedoms and tolerance that the Dutch have valued as the core of their national identity.

The Dutch system, say people like Hirsi Ali, assumed all sides would practice tolerance. In a world in which the ways of one culture can prove so deeply offensive to others, and in which some of those who take offense express their objections through murder, those rules simply have to change.

Author's e-mail : fghitis@yahoo.com


Frida Ghitis, a frequent visitor to the Netherlands, is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television" (Algora Publishing).

Herald.com | 10/28/2005 | Take Iran leader's threat seriously

So, another Muslim fanatic has just called for the destruction of Israel. Big deal. Another day, another genocidal anti-Semite. That might have been the reaction of some at news of the Iranian president's declaration on Wednesday that Israel must be ''wiped off the map.'' Look more closely, however, and this is not your everyday spewing of poisonous extremism. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown his cards and the world may live to regret its passivity if it fails to take him seriously.

The statement did not come from some masked teenage radical or from a fringe shadowy group. And the call to arms did not urge forcing Israel to withdraw from occupied territories or even for regime change. This was the president of a country, the man who recently represented his nation at the U.N. podium, urging his followers to obliterate another country from the face of the Earth.

As it happens, Ahmadinejad is not just the president of any country. He leads a nation that much of the world believes is actively working to arm itself with nuclear weapons.

For those who find solace in his threat to destroy only Israel, the Iranian president predicted, ``We shall soon experience a world without the United States.''

Palestinian state

The Iranian president also issued a veiled threat against the growing number of Muslim countries now seeking to improve relations with Israel, warning that nations moving to recognize Israel will ''burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury.'' Now that most Arab countries demand the creation of a Palestinian state, rather than the destruction of Israel, and even the president of the Palestinian Authority speaks of two nations living side by side in peace, Iran stands with the extremist rejectionists, who would accept nothing but the annihilation of Israel. The Iranian president has become more kosher than the rabbi, to use an expression he might not appreciate.

Ahmadinejad's speech comes a couple of days after the respected Jane's Defense Weekly reported details of an agreement between the governments of Iran and Syria. According to Jane's, Iran will work with Syria to help it establish four or five facilities dedicated to the production of chemical weapons.

Iran could hardly find a more suitable partner. The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has just been found guilty by a U.N. investigator of plotting and carrying out the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister. While the rest of the world cheerfully speaks of something it optimistically likes to call the ''Community of Nations,'' the two repressive regimes behave like members of an international mafia, taking out contracts on troublesome politicians, deciding which countries deserve to be wiped out, building up their deadly arsenals and encouraging killers in the region.

Just a few hours after the speech, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself at an outdoor food stand inside Israel, killing five people who just happened to have walked up to get something to eat.

While Iran and Syria act, the international community mostly talks.

To their credit, Western governments did react promptly (with words, of course) to diplomatically protest Ahmadinejad's statements.

The West, however, has shown little backbone in standing up to these thoroughly thuggish and extremely dangerous regimes. European leaders continue to insist on negotiating a deal to end Iran's illegal nuclear projects, even with Iran calling for the destruction of other countries and actively arming militia groups dedicated to turning its vision of doom into reality.

Last August, the chief Iranian negotiator in the nuclear talks told an audience on Iranian television: ``Thanks to the negotiations with Europe, we gained another year, in which we completed the (nuclear reprocessing plant) in Isfahan.''

For Europeans who may take comfort that Iran's vision only includes a world without Israel and the United States, Ahmadinejad had another little hint of his worldview, saying he sees relations between the two sides as part of the ''historic war'' between Islam and the West.

Iran's cards are now plainly open and on the table. The West has the next play.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs.

Star-Telegram | 10/24/2005 | Justice in Baghdad

Posted on Mon, Oct. 24, 2005

Justice in Baghdad

By FRIDA GHITIS

Special to the Star-Telegram


AMSTERDAM - In cafés throughout the Netherlands, Iraqi refugees clustered around TV sets, watching the start of Saddam Hussein's trial in Baghdad's Green Zone. In the smoky gathering places of their adopted land, they stared nervously at the shaky images and strained to make out the barely audible sound of proceedings against the man whose agents had snatched their relatives in the middle of the night, the man who turned their country into a land of dread, torture and perpetual war.

Then they heard the Western commentators argue whether Saddam would get a fair trial, or whether the proceedings should be dismissed as political theater or "victor's justice."

As survivors of the Iraqi dictator heard the commentators expound on the flaws of Iraq's efforts to try Saddam at home, prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in The Hague, dealt with their own tribulations in the trial of another deposed president.

The day before Saddam faced his judges, the prosecutor in the case of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, warned that the trial, which began in early 2002, could take another four or five years.

Milosevic, charged with 66 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, is believed to have orchestrated mass murders and other ethnic cleansing as Yugoslavia came apart in the 1990s. He has turned his trial into a high-level international charade.

The U.N. tribunal, presumably the model that the Iraqis should be following, has scrupulously protected his rights, and the cunning Milosevic has exploited the rules to absurdity.

Legal scholars argue that The Hague is creating a treasure of useful jurisprudence. But the endless trial is hardly one that Iraqis would wish to emulate.

Undoubtedly, the Baghdad process is highly flawed. But Iraqis had every right to resist sending Saddam to the Netherlands. No matter how flawed their trial, the Iraqi judges -- who traveled to the Netherlands, Britain and Italy to train in international law -- are trying to make this an example of justice rather than revenge.

This is no kangaroo court, and it is certainly nothing that the Arab world has ever seen. Until now, the very concept of a living "former president" was almost unheard of in the dictator-ridden Middle East.

The many regimes in the region where dictators still rule will try to discredit the proceedings, as will many in the West who deplore America's Iraq war.

Iraqi refugees watching from the Netherlands or anywhere else in the world are not the ones rushing to dismiss the importance of this trial. They are quick to remind anyone who will listen just how much they suffered under Saddam's rule, in a regime that killed so many of its citizens that it needed bulldozers to dispose of the bodies.

That was back when Abu Ghraib was a place infamous for the torture inflicted on countless thousands of Iraqis by Saddam's henchmen, before the infamy that came later, when American soldiers became the torturers.

Human Rights Watch conservatively puts the number of Iraqis in Saddam's mass graves at almost 300,000. Saddam's Iraq was a country that launched wars that killed more than a million people. It was a regime that killed 5,000 of its own with chemical weapons, long before such weapons became synonymous with bad U.S. intelligence.

When the trial resumes Nov. 28, Iraqis deserve to see the man who turned ancient Mesopotamia into a modern killing field stand to face justice. They deserve to tell the stories from a generation of sorrow to a world that will not dismiss their suffering simply because it inconveniences current political goals.

And if Iraq is ever to move forward, Iraqis of every sect and tribe should see the incontrovertible record of how each segment of their society suffered the brutality of Saddam's sadistic rule. The wounds from Saddam's rule are infecting today's conflict. They must be lanced and cleaned. And Iraqi judges, in the end, may prove better surgeons than the robed ones in The Hague.


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Herald.com | 10/18/2005 | Mother Nature -- Unforgiving, devastating

If nature were a politician, would he (she?) get trounced at the polls, or would we lavish it with support, awed by its power?

Consider some highlights of its accomplishments over the past 12 months: One quarter of a million people washed away to their deaths in December's Asian Tsunami; a major American city destroyed by a hurricane; entire villages in Central America declared mass graves after mudslides; more than 30,000 people buried in an earthquake along the Pakistan-India border.

Every one of these events -- in addition to a host of other floods, famines and assorted tragedies across the globe -- destroyed countless lives beyond the actual death count. Each one brought a pain so intense to so many people that even watching the stories on television could prove unbearable. And yet, we insist on proclaiming our love for ''mother'' nature. Disaster survivors routinely credit God (nature?) for their good fortune in living through their ordeal, but we seldom hear anyone criticize it for our misfortunes.

Sure, much of what nature wreaks is made much worse by man. And often the devastation could have, should have, been eased by man. Recriminations fly freely when it comes to our own misdeeds and those of our politicians after natural disasters. The levees of New Orleans should have stood stronger. The government's response should have come faster. A tsunami warning system should have been in place. Both of these tragedies could have been much less lethal had fewer people lived along low-lying areas. Earthquakes would kill fewer people in better-built structures. And we can only fathom what hell we are unleashing as we heat up the Earth and melt the glaciers.

Yet nature has been callously slaughtering humans like so many ants under a careless giant's boot for as long as life has existed. From Noah's flood to the plagues of Egypt, we've looked to ourselves to place the blame. After all, even the most arrogant of politicians might just respond to criticism a little better than nature ever would.

The catalog of death from the whims of nature dwarfs most, though not all, of mankind's excesses (mankind scored high in its ability to kill during the 20th century.) A third of Europe's population died of bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. Smallpox, drought, cyclones, earthquakes. Nature's casual cruelty spared no continent long before SUVs revved their greenhouse-gas spewing engines. And the killing is far from over.

That strange custom of calling that most unmaternal force ''Mother Nature'' brings to mind the kind of mother that raises terminally disturbed children, condemned to a lifetime of therapy. (Perhaps that's where we learned our bad habits, from that not-so-loving mother.)

And yet we persist, claiming that we love nature and arguing that we should love it even more, no matter how many millions of lives nature destroys, no matter the warnings that a new flu pandemic will likely kill millions more.

The reality is that much of what we call human progress is a record of humankind struggling to defend itself from the indiscriminate cruelty of forces we cannot quite understand.

Floods that killed tens of thousands in the Netherlands spurred the construction of sea walls that allowed the nation first to survive and then to thrive. Science came to the rescue after centuries of plagues, flu and pestilence that devastated entire continents throughout the ages.

So, what if nature really were a politician? My guess is that it would receive enormous support from awed and frightened voters.

And there lies a lesson for environmentalists. Is it any wonder more people don't embrace the message that we should protect the environment and love nature, even as nature batters and assaults us?

The secret to their future success is to turn their message around. Instead of telling us to protect nature from man, they would gain more followers if they told us to protect ourselves from nature. It sounds less cuddly than hugging trees and showing us fluffy panda bears. But taking a page from the politically popular war on terror, they could remind us how much pain we have already endured, and how much more we will suffer if we don't take all the necessary measures -- whatever they may cost -- to protect ourselves from the madness and cruelty of nature.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs

Herald.com | 10/18/2005 | Mother Nature -- Unforgiving, devastating