Informed Comment: Wertheim: There is Racism and There is Racism-I
A new kind of racism is gradually emerging in the Netherlands. Not the classical contempt for others, but a cultural racism of distrust and fear.
In an ad in de Volkskrant, a leading Dutch daily paper, on 17 March 2008 tv-producer Harry de Winter compared how people talk about Muslims in the Netherlands with anti-Semitism against Jews. In recent years, anyone who ventured to draw this comparison was viewed as a nutcase. Islamophobia was the justified fear of Muslims and didn’t have anything to do with something as awful as the Holocaust. But De Winter’s comparison pertains to the preparations, i.e. how the inhabitants of European countries were gradually persuaded in the course of the 1930s that there was something really not quite kosher about the Jews.
Calling what the Muslims are dealing with racism still encounters strong reluctance in present-day society. There is another reason why. Racism means systematically looking down on certain people and there is little or no evidence of that here today. Racism is what happened in the colonies, what was done to the slaves, the blacks under Apartheid and Afro-Americans in the United States. All we are doing here is “calling a spade a spade and saying what we think. It is a question of the right to have an opinion, and without even being nasty. They ought to be able to cope with that and it should have happened a long time ago.”
A new kind of racism is gradually emerging in the Netherlands. Not the classical contempt for others, but a cultural racism of distrust and fear.
In an ad in de Volkskrant, a leading Dutch daily paper, on 17 March 2008 tv-producer Harry de Winter compared how people talk about Muslims in the Netherlands with anti-Semitism against Jews. In recent years, anyone who ventured to draw this comparison was viewed as a nutcase. Islamophobia was the justified fear of Muslims and didn’t have anything to do with something as awful as the Holocaust. But De Winter’s comparison pertains to the preparations, i.e. how the inhabitants of European countries were gradually persuaded in the course of the 1930s that there was something really not quite kosher about the Jews.
Calling what the Muslims are dealing with racism still encounters strong reluctance in present-day society. There is another reason why. Racism means systematically looking down on certain people and there is little or no evidence of that here today. Racism is what happened in the colonies, what was done to the slaves, the blacks under Apartheid and Afro-Americans in the United States. All we are doing here is “calling a spade a spade and saying what we think. It is a question of the right to have an opinion, and without even being nasty. They ought to be able to cope with that and it should have happened a long time ago.”
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