All parties denounce anti-Semitism Amsterdam riots; Wilders blames Muslims, Moroccans
There was widespread condemnation of anti-Semitism in the parliamentary debate on the Amsterdam riots on Wednesday. Every party leader who had a chance to speak before the break explicitly condemned it. PVV leader Geert Wilders explicitly blamed the riots on “Muslims” and “Moroccans” while others urged him to stop adding fuel to the fire.
“Anti-semitism can’t be fought with Muslim hatred,” GroenLinks-PvdA leader Frans Timmermans said to Wilders, according to NOS and NU.nl’s liveblogs on the debate. D66 leader Rob Jetten: “You don’t combat anti-Semitism with even filthier racism.”
Wilders started the debate in the PVV’s classic anti-Muslim, anti-Morroccan line. “What the hell kind of country has this become?” he said, condemning the violence in Amsterdam following the Ajax vs Maccabi Tel Aviv match on Thursday. “We saw Muslims hunting Jews in the streets of Amsterdam, a pogrom of the worst kind.” Wilders called it a miracle that no one was killed. “Jews were beaten up, stabbed with knives, thrown into the water, kicked in the face.”
Wilders said that the perpetrators were “all Muslims” and “mostly Moroccans.” Whether that is actually the case has not been confirmed by the police or the judiciary. The police have confirmed that five people sustained severe enough injuries to require hospital treatment, but none had to be admitted. And around 30 people sustained more minor injuries.
Wilders received many interruptions. Volt MP Marieke Koekoek accused him of “throwing fuel on the fire” with these kinds of remarks. “What is Mr. Wilders doing?” she’d like to know. D66 leader Jetten said Wilders can’t fight anti-semitism with racism. Christine Teunissen (PvdD) accused the far-right politician of “using the riots in Amsterdam to spew Muslim hatred. What Wilders is doing here is a very one-sided story and portraying a group of people in the Netherlands as anti-Semitic.” But Wilders clashed most with Timmermans, the left-wing leader of the largest opposition party.
GL-PvdA leader Timmermans accused Wilders of exacerbating the situation instead of trying to restore calm. “Anti-semitism cannot be fought with anti-Muslim hatred,” he said. “If we are serious about combating it, we should not get stuck in anti-Semitism in Islamic circles, but also in radical left and radical right circles.” He pointed out that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a friend of Wilders’, “uses anti-Semitism in every election campaign.”
The PVV leader accused Timmermans of “running away” from the perpetrators of the violence. “I have not heard you say once: they are Moroccans, Muslims. You can’t close your eyes to that,” Wilders said.
Timmermans responded with irritation. “My condemnations are very harsh. But anti-Semitism occurs in many places. Also on the extreme right. You never address that. Don’t set up the situation in such a way that you leave an entire community in the Netherlands at home in fear. People with a Muslim background don’t deserve that.”
Wilders again called for Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema to be fired. He wouldn’t promise any more money for the police or memorial centers about the Second World War, as other parties had proposed. The PVV leader said he was sympathetic to the proposals, but won’t discuss it until the budgetary process of the Ministry of Justice and Security. He also wouldn’t support a motion by ChristenUnie and GroenLinks-PvdA for harsher punishments for hate crimes, including anti-Semitism.
BBB leader Caroline van der Plas followed coalition partner Wilders’ line in blaming the riots on “Morrocan and North African young men.” According to the BBB leader, that must be named. “There is pure hatred of Jews from part of our population,” she said. Like Wilders, she is in favor of investigating whether the government can scrap the perpetrators’ Dutch nationality, if they have dual nationality.
ChristenUnie leader Mirjam Bikker spoke of a “terrible outburst of the monster of hatred and anti-Semitism.” According to her, we now live in a country “where you see more security guards at a synagogue or a Jewish school than yarmulkes.” She wants a zero-tolerance policy for anti-Semitism and advocated for a ban on face-covering clothing during demonstrations. “The Netherlands is not the Netherlands if the Jewish community is not safe and if Jewish life is made impossible,” she said.
D66 leader Jetten was the last to speak before the debate took a recess. He has “no good words for the criminals who have been active here.” They must be identified and punished, including the Maccabi fans who instigated violence. “But the despicable behavior of one is no excuse for the behavior of the other,” he said.
Jetten said that his colleagues in national politics have been using double standards in recent days, pointing to Wilders and VVD leader Dilan Yesilgöz who “fell over each other to blame the Moroccan community” for the riots. “Even if some of the perpetrators are of Moroccan descent, that does not mean that all Muslims are bad", says Jetten. "Let us be careful not to divide the Netherlands further."
