Peter-Vincent Schuld

The Netherlands Institute for Social Research has found that Muslims with a Turkish or Moroccan background are becoming increasingly religious.
This translates into more frequent mosque visits, more prayers and women increasingly wear a headscarf.

So much for this fact, which loosened quite a few tongues and caused a stir. The facts are not new. Anyone who studies
and observes society closely would have drawn this conclusion a long time ago.

What is even more interesting is that according to the aforementioned research, about most Muslims are negative about the Netherlands and its society.
Ex-Muslims (apostates in the view of the religious Mohammedans), on the other hand, are generally positive about our society and participate fully in the social fair and contacts of earthly existence.

But if this institute, which is known as a reliable institution, communicates this message, it is a reason to take a closer look. We’ll do that in a moment. With a wink and with a conclusion.
What is new, however, is that these facts are communicated in a crystal-clear manner. Until now, communicating from the government about these kinds of
facts was completely taboo.

It was high time that we started naming “man and horse”, or in this case “man and camel”.

But what’s behind the facts? How should we interpret this and what conclusions should we draw from it?

I will take you to just two of the many events that came my way. Whether these incidents are representative is a matter for you to decide.

I drive into the Netherlands, I go into a random supermarket and what does your reporter see? Half of the (female) staff wears a headscarf to express the precepts within their religion. Emancipation has lagged far behind in Islamic circles; I don’t see a single man with a headscarf. In Islamic circles, transsexuality remains a taboo.

I stand by in another Dutch supermarket and therefore at a different checkout. Shortly before, somewhere in Europe, an act of terrorism had been committed by an IS supporter with a large knife. Behind me in the queue is a lady, wearing a headscarf who has taken a large knife as a purchase and puts it on the conveyor belt to soon pay for it with the lady behind the cash register. Of course, your reporter couldn’t keep his mouth shut and said with a grin on his face, “Oops, headscarf + knife; That’s going to be link here”. Then this Muslim woman starts calling your reporter a racist. She screams at the store as if she was raped on the spot and then quartered.

An open, free society begins with the ability to engage in public satire, supplemented by ridicule and self-deprecation. Putting others and yourself into perspective. However, humour does not seem to have a place in Islam.

Society knew this from the moment the cartoons about Prophet Muhammad were circulated and reacted to them with uncontrolled outbursts of anger, serious threats and homicidal tendencies from the global Islamic society.

While society was cramping into political correctness, in the Netherlands it was only Geert Wilders, so vomited out by the political elite, who subtly pointed out to us that the “Tourette’s phenomena” that escalated to violent elevation were not normal and that we should not consider them normal either.
The man was and is right, whatever you may think of Wilders.

But anyway, I was called a racist by the Muslim woman involved.
Now I calmly asked her if she knows what the word racist means. But the lady doesn’t answer substantively and keeps shouting all kinds of things.
Kicking ass, playing the role of victim and creating a situation in which public order was in danger of being mortgaged.
None of this impresses me at all. I consider content pilot shouting to be unengaging and irrelevant.

Was I talking about a breed here? No, why should I? In a satirical setting, I made a connection between Islam and socially disruptive behaviour.
Islam positions itself in our society mainly as a many-headed monster.

An entity when it is criticized, starting with verbal violence and ending with lethal violence, bites off but also attacks through various stages in the spiral of violence

What the hell have we brought in? What is certain is that from generations ago, politics and business had no idea at all what it means to bring in people from Islamic countries and ditto beliefs. Now it’s not so much about the people in question, but what do they take with them? What ideas do they bring with them and what are the demographic effects from their culture and religion?

To ask this question is to “swear in church” for people who embrace egalitarian thinking and dismiss any critical question about immigration as xenophobia.
The discussion is not even possible. In journalism and science, one thing is important, namely having the courage to look at things with a critical eye, in complete independence and without any bias.

But for decades, society has lacked the courage to question such matters. Anyone who does so will immediately be publicly pilloried with the inscription “racist”.

Now, racism is a crime. Criticizing a religion and/or/annex an ideology or mocking or parodying it is not.

The Muslims in the Low Countries will have to accept that. The card of “discrimination” cannot be drawn for everything, although it is
tried and not only by the Muslims themselves.

I have seen few people, who have been wrongly accused of racism or discrimination, who had the courage to file a complaint against this form of libel and slander with the police or the Public Prosecutor’s Office on the basis of Article 261 of the Criminal Code. Asking critical questions or drawing critical conclusions has nothing to do with racism. The few times that a report was filed, the Public Prosecution Service dropped out. This is good for an Article 12 procedure before the Court of Appeal in which the Public Prosecution Service can be ordered by the Court of Appeal to prosecute.

Islam and those who profess this religion in the Low Countries and the rest of Europe are very much on people’s minds.

Open homophobia, rioting during Ramadan, terrorism, ritual slaughter, rampant anti-Semitism, etc. etc. There is not much good to write about Islam, even if I wanted to.

Billions of euros have been spent on failed integration projects, subsidies for many mosques, neighborhood fathers, and the question arises whether these amounts are in proportion to the purpose of welcoming people with a Muslim background and, in the case of guest workers. The economic gain that society had in offering a place in the Low Countries with people with an Islamic signature seems very relative.

All those integration subsidies? At first and second glance, the money seems to have been thrown down the drain. At the third glance, I don’t get much further than that they were supposedly expenses at the house of death.

When a plant or an organism comes from outside that positions and profiles itself dominantly, suppressing the original composition, and is therefore harmful, they are referred to as “invasive alien species”. For the definition of “invasive alien species” I would like to refer you to a page of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency from which I quote in the attached screenshot;

Does this also apply to humans? It seems like a logical question, but there is something very dangerous about this question. Namely, the possibility of unvarnished xenophobic thinking.

In itself, a person is not harmful. Far from it. People’s behaviour or a society-oriented vision can be harmful. When a child is born, the harmful behavior is
nil, but that applies to every baby regardless of origin and signature of the parents from which they were born. It is the learned traits that can make someone “harmful”. No child is born with a signature or with a vision that organizes society, a child is raised that way. We all have a will of our own and our own responsibility. This also means that you can put aside certain behaviors or elements from your upbringing and go through life as a “liberated person”. In Islamic cultures with strong social control, peer pressure is extremely high. Now, with the exception of authentic specimens, people are fairly docile. It is always easy when something has already been “thought of” for you, so that being responsible for your earthly life and the success or organization of it is no longer subject to independent thinking.

Let’s take a look at the role that Islam claims in Dutch public life. The aforementioned expressions of socially disruptive and intolerant behavior of considerable numbers of people who adhere to Islam in all its various forms can only be said to bring the original norms and values in the Netherlands into oppression.
So that’s invasive and harmful. We see that under pressure from Muslim parents, Christmas celebrations are banned in schools. Christmas is part of our cultural heritage.
The Islamic fasting month of Ramadan is definitely not part of our cultural heritage. It doesn’t belong to the Netherlands and it doesn’t belong to Europe.
It is therefore completely understandable that many residents of Western countries in the Netherlands are immensely annoyed. Again, an example of this is the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, where the labor productivity of Muslim workers decreases and there are often riots on the streets during this time, such as now in Noordwijk.

You can’t call it an enrichment of the Netherlands if you just look at the facts.
Islam’s sense of superiority over dissenters is also a major concern and is downright dangerous.

It is a given that Islamic cultures are very dominant cultures. Also in the Netherlands. Respect is demanded, space is demanded for their confession.
But is there anything to demand?

The last revision of the Dutch constitution dates back to 1983.
Article 6 of the Constitution stipulates freedom of religion. This article in the Constitution is intended to preserve freedom based on the reality of the religions originally existing in the Netherlands and the numerical proportions at the time of writing the Constitution. Primarily these are the different movements within Christianity and Judaism. But let’s follow the hypothesis that Islam is an invasive religion. Is Article 6 of the Constitution, freedom of religion, still tenable? In the meantime, there are serious doubts about this. The removal of Article 6 from the Constitution does not automatically imply that the practice of a religion becomes a criminal offence. The deletion of Article 6 of the Constitution does provide the opportunity to put a stop to excesses that religions can bring with them.

The Constitution is a static law. When the constitution was written, it did not take into account future realities and demographic developments such as birth rates, immigration for asylum policy and family reunification. It has been assumed that every religion is on an equal footing. But is that really true?
“You are free to profess Satanism, as long as you do not commit any criminal offenses.” That was kind of the simplism that was thought of.

But that a religion that behaves aggressively and demands and that also has a vision that organizes a society would arise, that could not be accepted by the naïve jurists of that time. Well, America had converted a certain Cassius Clay to Islam and let himself be called Muhammad Ali. “yes what a star huh?, What can that guy box!. No one thought further about such a choice. We were in the middle of the Cold War, the Russians and the Warsaw Pact troops were dangerous. That danger at the time was indeed real. But don’t be ashamed (for those who already existed in those years and could read, think and write) you weren’t the only one who didn’t understand. In the attempt of the Russians to bring Afghanistan under control, much against the wishes of the not so smart West that did not understand the conditions in those countries, the US and other Western countries supplied handfuls of weapons to the Mujaheddeen of Afghanistan, from which the Taliban would later emerge. Due to a lack of knowledge about Islam, the Dutch media hardly talked about it or asked critical questions at the time.

The Netherlands has a high degree of tolerance. That high degree of tolerance is good. Not everything that is “different” is necessarily negative. But by definition, it is not always positive or neutral either. When a “new” religion with a socially organizing character manifests itself actively and at times aggressively in the Netherlands, it is understandable that there will be a stir among the original population and that it will be resisted. From that point of view, Pegida Netherlands, for example, does indeed have sufficient grounds to protest against, as it called itself, “the Islamization of the Netherlands”. Now, in 2018, this group is seen as extreme, but there is a considerable chance that in a few decades it will be viewed very differently. Pim Fortuyn was also reviled at the beginning of this century. Now many politicians are enthusiastic about Fortuyn’s visions. Pegida Netherlands is seen as a thorn in the side of society. But perhaps the shocking and insulting effect that Pegida’s (intended) actions have is very functional in a democratic constitutional state such as the Netherlands? In any case, it is an understandable reaction to the invasiveness of Islam in Europe, and there should be a place for such expressions in our society. Demonstrating is a fundamental right.

Several mayors, with the exception of Ahmed Aboutaleb, however ironic given his signature, react fearfully and negatively to planned demonstrations and even at times they want to ban them. It says something about the tense behaviour and thinking of the mayors involved.

Returning to the Muslims in the Netherlands itself. In the Netherlands, we have a strict separation between church and state. The discussion about a headscarf for Muslim police officers was already too much for this. This already mortgages and undermines the separation of church and state. An exponent of the invasive nature of Islam in the Netherlands. There is no room in the Netherlands for religion to have an influence on public life. Certainly not if this is accompanied by an organizing vision of society. It is really time to ask a few existential questions about how we want to further shape society without falling into cramped thinking and reacting.

According to the research of the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, Muslims do not feel at home in Dutch (secular, free, open and therefore hedonistic -ed.) society. Prime Minister Rutte once said it and I quote him freely: “you don’t have to stay in the Netherlands if you don’t like it here”. In all fairness, you can therefore say that if Muslims do not feel at home here, in the open, free, tolerant and hedonistic Netherlands, they are free to pack their bags, hand in their possible benefits and then move to countries where their religion and society-organizing vision are embraced. If these Muslims don’t want to do that, then these Muslims should adapt and not the other way around.

The government is utterly failing to prevent undesirable xenophobic behaviour and to protect those who wish to leave their faith under the threat of social exclusion but also honour killings. By actively protecting “apostates” you send a clear signal that in the Netherlands you are also free not to believe in Allah and that you do not have to fear for your safety when you make that choice. By sending out this signal as a government, it really contributes to integration and the prevention of undesirable discrimination.

The more religious one becomes, the more one turns away from and segregates from the society in which they people find themselves. The risk of acting in which the laws of faith take precedence over the normal order in a country then increases. In the case of Islam, that danger is very great, as the letter of the written doctrine is very clear about apostates and infidels. As a society and as a government, you cannot and must not tolerate this. Austria, under the leadership of the young Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has already set a good example here by planning to close Salafist mosques and expel ditto imams. This is a first step in the right approach to this problem. Austria, the new presidency of the EU for the next six months, is setting a tone and sending a signal to other European countries. The invasiveness of Islam, the backbone of Islam, must be broken and Europe must return to its roots, which are Judeo-Christian-humanist, even if this leads to clashes with Islam on European soil. That’s the crux.