Tensions down in high-time Amsterdam

Earlier this week in Amsterdam, a 43 year old lady killed a 19 year old Marrocan boy in his attempt to steal her handbag from the backseat of her car. She tried to stop him and his companion in escaping on their scooter taking the bag. Hence she drove her car backwards in a spur of the moment. The boy unfortunatelly died between her car and this tree -the second robber made a narrow escape for it when finding his friend death on the deck. Nothing unusually one would say -happens everyday- a tragic accident with consequences for all those involved. Like the police and newspapers noted after the first investigations were finished. However nothing is what it seems like in Amsterdam ever since September the 11th.

At present about three days after the accident the Surinam-Dutch woman is still incarcerated and this time under suspicion of manslaughter by the district attorney -not by the police- which is the ad hoc yet normal state of affairs at the court of Justice here in Amsterdam. Where the Dutch public prosecutor seem to have an ethic code very different from public opinion or any practice by means of public principle. Which is a good thing of course, the justice department being a sovereign entity within our State and Society. Yet frustration and misunderstanding of the people subject to this law towards the law itself has increased in number ever since the start of the millennium. The low penalties rewarded to murders and “real villians“ plus the incapacity to root out organized crime -crime that has taken hold of our commerce -is hence taking its toll slowly on the Dutch-European Social Contract. The impotence of the public services concerning drug abuse and -tourism which overrun our urban landscape of fancy establishments is also simply a disgrace towards any well intending guest or visitor. Yet most of all the people are aggravated because of the injustice of people being victimized by the public prosecutor. These sometimes non-criminal civilians who have no clue or means to defend themselves against the system and the accusations made in public by the prosecutor. While hardcore criminals do know how to handle such a situation. This problem of the formation of Dutch justice only grew more intrigate by the public preformance of the bar -Criminal and Privat- which need to score in an easy and repetitive way. For its members want to participate in the public debate about norms and values so badly to muster this profitable thing called popularity. They go about the easy way to satisfy their sometimes misplaced vanity. Not even to try fully and stifle the elements of society that place themselves beyond the public moral. These cases which proved too difficult and costly a thing to trully accomplish. The police and justice department only to pick on social misfits -excess- and the unfortunate law-albeiting citizen. Only mistakes and failure seem to be subject to penalty here in Holland, not what you do or are on an everyday basis. It can even happen that soldiers “fighting” in Iraq get prosecuted by the civil justice department for shooting an Iraqi civilian looting UN goods -an accident again- how it happens that scapegoats for political decisions and the satisfaction of public outrage do become more and more a normal state of affairs like Pilatus’s trail by the mass was. This response of the Trias Politica on the ongoing democratic disintegration which is perverted again and again by the media. How everybody seems to want their 15 minutes of fame to have their say about things and be that expert authority on matters so abstract and shallow again. Hence besides the political populism fed by the news and fact industries plus the contemporary hasted human condition of difference in general -it is now how our society gets more and more disillusioned by the laws it made in the past- blinded by the common messages we express as a people. Frustrated and alienated as the people are by the lawmaking institutions in the Netherlands today. People are also left in the dark about what one can do or say -about where one’s personal responsibility ends and the State begins to take hold- nobody can really tell any more- not even the Queen we Hollanders still maintain as our Head of State. This while this very Thursday -more then two months after the murder of film maker Theo van Gogh- the only true object of civilization that our society can truly defend as being our own -is the laws we made in the past as a nation. The only absolute thing to respect for a foreigner in this country is the Constitution -its authority- and our banale everyday live. All the émigrés are told so on the many an occasion when they apply for Dutch citizenship. Rules and norms which frankly spoken are ridiculed at times by the many young Arabs who think of them as simply pathetic and for homosexuals only to “like“. Indeed compared to a country as Syria our laws are simply insufficient to suppress unwelcome elements and to uphold the emancipation of modern man and woman as being equals. Yet now this 19 year old robber boy who gets himself killed while doing his thing, on the day he actually had to see a judge for a violent robbery he committed last year. His friends and neighbors went out on the streets for two executives now. Even planning a march to protest and commemorate this young criminal. Downright outraged people are instead of feeling ashamed and embarrassed about this awkward situation. Suddenly “they” feel the need to undertake action on behalf of the deceased, forgetting altogether how the boy got himself killed. Forgetting that they are partly responsible for their peers as well despite the presence of the modern state apparatus. They speak of an outrage: how one of them got murdered by “white folks” this time. Yet while they are not even criminals themselves but hard working citizens, most of the time indeed working crappy jobs making long hours. So the bitter idea comes to me now how “they” identify more with a fellow Muslim who robs people -then with a woman just driving her car doing errands. These Muslims who protest are also mostly family man who are called “neighborhood fathers” to moderate the even more radicalized Marocan youth of some neighborhoods. Older man who worked in factories like “slave-laborers” in the nineteen-sixties. Older man skinned to the bone treated like dirt before -now to infuse some dignity into the debate on the street captured by the many camera’s present on such an occasion. Older man who learned or were thaught to speak Dutch yet who know how to express what respect for the good loving peace entails. For probably some 16 year old would rather drag the corps of their friend and “martyr” wrapped in green flags across the streets chanting “Hammas Hammas Jews to be g…d“, …this hypothetically speaking of course -for I don‘t know these young man personally. This hammas thing is the most insulting phrase some Muslims apply still to shock and provoke the Dutch bourgeoisie within the global setting of politics. Two years ago for instance Muslim youth disrupted the Holocaust and War commemorations in May. This other pillar of our modern national identity besides the laws and paintings of Dutch Masters being our number of terror 40-45 the war against totalitarianism anti-Semitism and intolerance in general. In the mean while back in the present -people write letters and emails to newspapers in such a vast quantity about the accident -and at such an aggressive and cynical note- the editors have stopped posting any remarks by readers on the internet. Blogs are being frozen- and editorials are posted anonymously by the editor out of fear for reprisals. Vendettas are apparently expected when things run out of hand in Amsterdam -you know- the Capital of the world’s first modern Republic. Everybody is cautious and paranoid again, like in November when mass hysteria was truly feared by the authorities, when one member of parliament was hiding in America and an ethnic conflict became almost like a reality. I don’t know why I write this letter to an American paper -which probably will not even read this outcry- where other places go to hell in even more morbid ways. Yet I feel the need to express my frustration to the world leader in the war on terrorism. About what is happening to my home being a member of the coalition of the willing. Now that our army is leaving Iraq with two casualties in March. Dutch blood that has been spilled for your President. Especially I write to you Americans since you understand what it means to have a home just like the Israeli’s do -for I have the notion most of the Dutch folks don’t know any more what it feels like to have a place to trully call home. Citizens and State just go on in their everyday frenzy to make the best of things -for themselves and their immediate surroundings. Surroundings that become more and more segregated and segmented, fragmentation which is honestly an understatement of the actual situation. For in Dutch we have a word you might be familiar with -apartheid- to designate the social disintegration of the civil way of life. It seems just never good enough what ever people do to change the tide of hatred. Things seem to approach this nihilistic hell in Europe again, this winter of people willing to give into their xenophobic feelings -as unfortunate as it seems- are a necessity to have from time to time when evaluating the pressing Status Quo.

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