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The Netherlands: A Cautionary Tale

The Netherlands: A Cautionary Tale
By Jack Kinsella

In 58 BC, Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, a region comprising modern-day northern Italy, all of France and Belgium, western Switzerland and parts of the Netherlands and Germany.

In 1648, under the Treaty of Westphalia, the Netherlands was granted independence from Spain following history’s Eighty Years’ War.

One of Rome’s earliest military outposts was in Maastricht in the Netherlands, where the treaty that formally created the European Union was signed in 1992.

During the 15th century’s “Eighty Years’ War” the Dutch provinces became the most important trading centre of Northern Europe.

The Dutch nation flourished culturally and economically, creating what historian Simon Schama has called an “embarrassment of riches”. The first stock market crash in history was the Dutch stock market in 1637.

In 1688, William III of the Netherlands invaded England, leading to the English revolution that swept King James II from the throne, installing William the Dutchman as King of England.

It was the Dutch who settled New York City. Many of the place names around eastern New York are Dutch — (Amsterdam, NY comes to mind).

It was the Dutch unit of financial measure – the thaler — that loaned its name to the almighty American ‘dollar’.

When America was little more than a collection of coastal villages dotting the Eastern Seaboard, the Netherlands was among the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations.

While the Americans were struggling to break away from their own colonial masters in 1776, the Dutch already ruled the vast colonial empires from Indonesia to Africa. There were no doubt Dutchmen serving in the Roman Army in the time of Christ.

The British invaded and tried to conquer the Netherlands in the 15th century. The Belgians invaded and tried in the 19th century.

The Nazis invaded conquered, occupied and even tried to erase the Netherlands from the map in the mid-20th century — but the Netherlands remained Dutch, tulips, dikes, wooden shoes and all.

Until the youth movements of the 60s and 70s abandoned Dutch traditional values, rejected Dutch nationalism, and embraced multiculturalism, sexual ‘freedoms’, abortion, women’s rights, legalized drug abuse, euthanasia, the environment,and especially, unrestricted immigration.

The once-great Dutch empire was reduced, said Princess Maxima, wife of Holland’s Crown Prince Willem, to what she described in a speech last month as a place where;

“A typical Dutch person doesn’t exist.”

Assessment

Her comments have tapped into a growing feeling among many Dutch who fear the rise in Muslim extremism in their midst and the loss of their own national identity.

“Unfortunately, the debate about Dutch identity is too often held at a very trite and trivial level, as if the discussion is between Brussels sprouts and wooden shoes on the one hand, and couscous and caftans on the other,” according to Bart Jan Spruyt, founder of The Edmund Burke Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“What is really at stake, due to a frivolous immigration policies and decades of multicultural indifference, is the identity of the Dutch nation, Dutch history and culture as a part of the history of Western civilization.”

The Dutch model for immigration allowed new immigrants to separate into ethnic groupings known as ‘pillars’, meaning people of different ethnic backgrounds, faiths or political persuasions had their own churches, schools, newspapers, television and radio broadcasters and labor unions.

The result was a hodge-podge of unassimilated ethnic groups loyal only to their communities, their home countries — or Islam.

On December 23, 2004, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior published a 60-page report entitled; “From Dawa to Jihad.”

The report concluded that there are close to one million Muslim immigrants, out of a population of just sixteen million, and that of that number, it estimated roughly fifty thousand of those are radical jihadists.

It also concluded that recruitment in The Netherlands for the armed radical Muslim struggle – mainly among descendants of immigrants – is not incidental but rather a trend.

Holland — with its disproportionately high Muslim population — is the canary in the mine. All across Europe, debate on Islam is being stopped.

Italy’s greatest living writer, Oriana Fallaci, was facing trial in her home country on charges of defaming at her death in September 2006, and in Britain the government seems intent on pushing through laws that would make truths about Islam and the conduct of its followers impossible to voice.

The governments of Europe have been tricked into believing that criticism of a belief is the same thing as criticism of a race. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly difficult to discuss the threats posed by the malignant ideology in their midst.

It is not racist to want to preserve one’s national culture, anymore than it is racist to want to preserve one’s family culture. Culture isn’t rooted in race, but in common beliefs. values and goals.

My family racial line is Irish. I have members of my family who married in from different ethnic backgrounds than Irish, but they are still part of my unique family culture.

We all tell stories to our kids about where we came from, and why family ties and family values are important. A national culture is merely the expression of a larger version of the family unit.

Holland is a country whose culture was invaded with the enthusiastic support of its citizens who blindly and blissfully embraced the liberal Marxism that led to its cultural occupation.

They never saw the iron fist inside the velvet glove of multicultural madness until it hit them squarely between the eyes. But by then, they were already on the way down.

Holland is now a nation without national definition. It is too late for debate. It is too late to try and stuff the genie back into the bottle.

Those few Dutchmen who have tried have died. The rest are in hiding.

When Theo Van Gough attempted to produce a film critical of Islam written by Somali-born ex-Muslim and Dutch citizen Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Van Gough was murdered in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street.

The Muslim jihadist who killed him pinned a warning to others about insulting Islam on Van Gough’s chest. It was pinned there by a knife.

The Van Gough murder sparked a number of reprisal attacks by the Muslim community in The Netherlands, and Ali joined the growing group of intellectuals forced into hiding by the terror they invited into their midst.

It’s been said that ‘a liberal is a conservative who has never been mugged.’ Holland’s new rising political star is Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Freedom Party. He rose to power on the strength of statements such as the one he gave in a British interview in February:

“Islam itself is the problem. Islam is a violent religion,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “The Prophet Mohammed was a violent man. The Koran is mostly a violent book. We should invest in Muslim people but they have to first get rid of half the Koran and half of their beliefs,” he said.

(That statement earned him the sobriquet of ‘anti-immigrant politician’ in the liberal Telegraph’s lead sentence.)

Here in America, those who oppose the kind of unrestricted immigration that killed Holland face the same blind knee-jerk liberal reaction as their Dutch counterparts.

To liberals, restricting immigration is racist and selfish and xenophobic and any other insult they can think of. If one opposes unrestricted immigration, then such a person is selfishly depriving of the benefits they themselves enjoy.

I listened to liberal queen Susan Estrich last night on Hannity and Colmes defending a California law that would extend free education benefits to illegal aliens that it specifically denies members of the California National Guard, for example.

Dr. Estrich is no intellectual lightweight — she is a professor of law at Loyola University. I even met her once. But it is mindless babble nonetheless.

Susan Estrich lives in a gated community. So do most California liberals. They see no conflict in the fact that they themselves lock the doors to their own homes at night. They put up fences around their own yards. They lock their cars when they park them. Don’t they want others to enjoy the same benefits that they have?

Of course they don’t. They want to give away yours. That is what makes liberal ideology so insidious. Liberalism is like a Tootsie-Roll Pop with an arsenic center.

Holland is a typical liberal success story. Other countries where liberals rule find themselves more or less following Holland down the tubes, some more than others, but all in the same direction.

For America in 2008, Holland serves as a cautionary tale. The root of liberal thinking is that man is his own supreme being, and therefore, it is up to man to provide what a ‘mythical God’ cannot.

Take your own mental poll: Those who trust God tend not to trust government. True or False? Those who put their trust in big government tend not to trust God. True or False?

If you picked ‘true’ for both questions, then you are in line with the Gallup poll that found conservatives are twice as likely to self-identify as born-again Christians as liberals are.

The Scriptures warn us (twice): “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” (Proverbs 14:12, 16:25)

Just ask a Dutchman — if you can still find one.

This Letter was written by Jack Kinsella on November 21, 2007.

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