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The November 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by Dutch-born Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri has set Holland on edge. The Netherlands has approximately three million legal immigrants (including their children), almost 20 percent of the population. About one million are Muslims, mostly Moroccans and Turks. The latter originally arrived in the 1960s and early 1970s when Netherlands was recruiting “temporary” labourers.
Many of the Moroccan immigrants were, even in their home country, isolated by poor education and their own rebelliousness, and Holland made no effort to integrate them to Dutch culture—or even to encourage them to speak the language. For official social policy was that different cultural-religious groups should live in mutual isolation. The government was simply not interested in making Dutchmen out of Muslim immigrants.
"The Dutch Model: Multiculturalism and Muslim Immigrants" by Jane Kramer appeared in the 3 April issue of The New Yorker. She explains that mutual separation of different Dutch cultural-religious groups promoted social peace in the past, but it has not worked with more recent immigrants.
[T]he Dutch had been dividing themselves into "pillars" (meaning the pillars of different faiths holding up the country) since the Catholics and the Protestants stopped fighting in the seventeenth century and decided to live "separately" together. By the early twentieth century, pillar society was for all practical purposes institutionalized. Holland had a Catholic pillar, a Protestant pillar, and a "humanist" pillar—each with the right to its own neighborhoods, unions, hospitals, and schools, and, in time, its own state-supported media. You could grow up Catholic . . . in a big Dutch city and inhabit an entirely Catholic world; you could grow up secular and liberal, like van Gogh, and never look at a paper or watch a channel that wasn't yours.
Pillar society was permissive. It let you alone. You didn't have to love your neighbor, or even accommodate to your neighbor, only to "tolerate" him and occasionally come together with him in places where the rules were clear, like parliament. It had nothing to do with the hybrid adventure of contemporary urban life, and, inevitably, it was crumbling before the Rifians [Moroccans] and the Turks arrived. The Catholic pillar all but collapsed after Vatican II. But the ethos, and the legal structures, of separateness persisted, and it was the first and often the most enduring lesson about living in Holland that immigrants learned. In the nineteen-seventies, when [labour] recruitment stopped and the Muslims who stayed were allowed to import their families, the world those families entered could, with very little effort, be made to resemble home.
The façade of multicultural social harmony has been torn away. Radical Islamist Web sites have proliferated since 11 September; today there are fifteen to twenty jihadist organisations in Holland. As many as twenty liberal Dutch Muslim writers and politicians are under around-the-clock police protection due to death threats. Now the Dutch are wringing their hands over their “immigrant problem”, but no answer is in sight.
Read the whole thing (pdf document).
via The Free West.
