Posted on 11/14/2004 1:49:34 AM PST by Eurotwit
What's wrong with this picture? The airspace over the city is declared off-limits to all unauthorized aircraft. Some 200 police, including rooftop snipers and antiterror forces in balaclavas and bulletproof armor, descend on a neighborhood near the main train station..."We cannot let ourselves be blinded by people who seek to drag us into a spiral of violence," the prime minister tells a shaken nation.
So what's wrong? The city is The Hague, and the country is the Netherlands—famed for tidy bicycle lanes, a well-mannered citizenry and the court where Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for war crimes. It underscores the fact that the clashes of civilization taking place at the global level—between Muslims and Christians, between religious fundamentalism and secularism—are also unfolding inside individual communities and countries on a smaller but still dangerous scale. And it shows that the war on terror is sometimes just down the street... Watching events unfold in the Netherlands, the rest of the region knows it's looking into a mirror. The once admired Dutch "polder model" has grown increasingly ill suited to today's Europe, much less tomorrow's. Already the Netherlands has the second largest Muslim population in Europe in percentage terms (6 percent, compared with 7 percent in France). Britain, Denmark and Sweden all have just over 3 percent. Norway, Finland and Ireland have among the smallest Muslim populations in Western Europe, under 1 percent. But even in such countries, tensions often run high because of the speed at which the Muslim community has grown.
The fanatical blow of an assassin against a filmmaker on a busy Amsterdam street thus, rightly or wrongly, becomes part of a chain stretching from the World Trade Center and Bali through the Madrid train bombings to Abu Ghraib and Fallujah.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
The Netherlands didn't force immigrant Muslims to learn Dutch, thus ensuring that they'd live in ghettos and be unable to better themselves -- a recipe for disaster. The US has at a conservative estimate, 13 million illegal Hispanics. They need to learn English if we're not planning to send them all packing. English should be made the US official language no matter what.
Great line -- I'm going to remember that. Very true, too, along with your tagline.
He's probably chuckling to himself.
It's reported that those who can are getting out of Holland before it's too late. A French columnist was talking about this vis a vis France just a few months ago. Same problem, same results. Scared people with money leaving. He thought it would take another couple of years to happen, but it looks like he was wrong.
That article yesterday about Muslim terrorists learning Spanish, living in Mexico for a year and then coming over the border...plus the post about Al Qaeda hooking up with radical, violent Hispanic gangs and Maryland police being targeted. So they're here and getting busy.
And they're all wrong. Check the CIA factbook for the correct information.
Where is the CIA factbook?
The problem is Islam - it teaches hate. The sooner the Christian world wakes up to that fact the better.
By funding religious schools that isolated many migrant children from mainstream Dutch life and by not doing enough to encourage immigrants to learn Dutch, even as job prospects were diminishing, the government created ghettoes of discontent, especially among those who came from outside Europe.
"We cannot let ourselves be blinded by people who seek to drag us into a spiral of violence."
No. You cannot let yourselves be blinded by your own denial, i.e. your own refusal to face reality.
"We Dutch are easy prey."
Note the inferences of "victimhood" and self-congratulation.
"We're vulnerable because we're a soft, tolerant society."
No, you're vulnerable because you refuse to face reality.
Any good thing taken sufficiently to its extreme becomes a bad thing. This is the ancient Greek concept of nemesis. Tolerance is no exception.
Furthermore, being realistic about the limits of tolerance does not mean that you must abandon tolerance.
Click the link to go to the page for the UK. The pertinnt facts regarding the Muslim population is about 1/3 the way down the page.
There are 1.5 million Muslims in the UK, out of a total population of over 60 million. I'll let you do the maths to find out the percentage ;-)
Thank you, I have been looking for a good line to apply to various things, in this case tolerance, but can be applied equally well to immigration, and diversity. Well spoken, (and the etimology is nemesis, very interesting)
bookmark bump
Dutch crackdowns
The different concepts and viewpoints inherent in the words of different languages are also fascinating. Greek concepts are particularly interesting. Sanscrit too.
By the way again, I used the word "inferences" incorrectly in post #31. I hate it when that happens. I meant to say, "Note the implications of 'victimhood' and self-congratulation" or, better, "Note the implicit 'victimhood' and self-congratulation."
I appreciate your note. Thanks.
Pickled pigs feet?
I remember 60 Minutes did an interview with Karadzic (sp?), the Bosnian Serb leader a few years back. The guy is pretty much a war criminal, but he made the point that soon, all of Europe was going to have the same problem with Muslims as Bosnia did. 60 Minutes used it to show what a nut he was, but day by day he's looking more and more right.
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