" No tolerance, please, we're Dutch"

Spectator UK:

...Holland is the country where everything is allowed, where everything is tolerated, from dope in the coffee houses, to fat-thighed whores baying for your money in frowzy shop windows, to imams suggesting that it's OK to beat up women every now and then. The Dutch model seemed to be this: we'll have our whores and our homosexuals and our cannabis over here and you can smack your women around over there in your Maghrebian ghetto. Live and let live. Mutual tolerance.

But all that is changing. What's happened in Holland is a warning: one commentator calls it "Education By Death" - the process which made the silent majority in America become militant after 9/11, which galvanised the Australians after the Bali bomb, which led to the fall of the Aznar government after the Madrid train bombing. The transformation of achingly liberal and endlessly tolerant Western people into resolute neocons. And in the case of Holland, the death which has been doing the educating was that of an iconoclastic film-maker and broadcaster, Theo van Gogh, a distant relative of that one-eared painter...

...Shortly after the murder of van Gogh, the Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, clambered aboard a bandwagon which had been set rolling by a bunch of "concerned" media moppets. This was for everyone in the country to wear an orange wristband signifying unity and tolerance. You can also buy badges bedecked with a picture of a little bumblebee in support of the government slogan "Bee Tolerant" (geddit?). But it has not done much to pacify the country. Right now, Dutch tolerance is in short supply.

There are broader fears at large. One recent study suggested that within six years at least three large Dutch cities will have an effective Muslim majority. There's also the nightmare scenario of the Low Countries' caliphate. There are enormous and growing Muslim populations in towns and cities dotted along the coast from Lille to Rotterdam - populations which will one day be in the majority...

The new citizenship exam is described here. I could probably pass it even without the video.

Immigration_euro · Fri, 02/04/2005 - 13:53 · · Importance: 1