Big Trouble in Little Holland

Holland, my adoptive land, is in trouble, and I think the trouble there is indicative of a wider problem with Western style democracies. The Dutch are having a difficult time maintaining their famous emphasis on social justice and everyone getting along (samenleving) in the face of a growing and increasingly militant Muslim population.


The problem is Holland is complex, so here’s some background.

The Muslim's in the Netherlands come from three main nations: Indonesia, Turkey, and Morocco, and immigrants from each group form distinct subpopulations within the Netherlands that have very little in common with one another. This distinction is the first crucial thing to understand: when the Dutch speak of the "immigrant" or "Muslim" problem, they are mainly talking about people from Morocco along with a much smaller number of folks from a handful of other Muslim nations. The Indonesians and Turks are more often than not second or third generation Dutch by now, and most are fully assimilated.

It's important to distinguish between the related but often conflated problems of "criminality" and an unwillingness of some Muslim groups to assimilate. The Dutch perceive the former as problem with all immigrant groups in Holland including (and some would say especially) with recent immigrants from the Netherlands Antilles. It's difficult to gauge just how accurate a perception this is, especially as, e.g., the Amsterdam police refuse to release crime data by race or country of origin. Still, there is no doubt that crime, especially violent crime, has been on the rise for over a decade, and the, for wont of a better term, Dutch Dutch overwhelmingly blame recent immigrants, fairly or no.

The criminality problem - much of which in my opinion can be ascribed to the usual problems of recent immigrants everywhere: poverty, language difficulties, prejudice - gets conflated with the much more serious one of unwillingness to assimilate because many of the criminals come from the same pool of unassimilated immigrants. Like recent arrivals in many countries, Muslims in Holland have frequently become more fundamentalist in their beliefs and customs. Often poor and lacking meaningful economic and social connections outside their immediate group of fellow immigrants, these recent arrivals have been easy prey for those teaching intolerance. Essentially, Holland now has Muslim enclaves within the major cities that are becoming semi-autonomous entities by claming that their way of life, like all others, must be tolerated.

This means the Dutch must tolerate these groups denying women and girls the rights they enjoy under Dutch law; they must tolerate their artists and politicians being assassinated for speaking their minds about Islam and Muslim culture while Dutch Muslim leaders sit complacently by; they must tolerate calls by these same leaders to do away with secular democracy and replace it with theocracy.

And that's the problem as I see it with Western Style democracies: what do you do with a group of people who would use the very mechanisms that make a tolerant, democratic society possible to create a non-tolerant, anti-democratic one? That was a lot of exposition to reach a rhetorical question, but I think that question has wider implications here in the States, and I’ll get to that in a future post.