Mick Hartley

The Times of Israel on the debate in Holland after the Amsterdam violence, and the reluctance to discuss the religion and ethnicity of those who attacked the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans: 

Dilan Yesilgoz, leader of the center-right liberal party, brings a unique perspective to the events in Amsterdam. She served as justice and security minister under former prime minister Mark Rutte, fought antisemitism as an MP, and started her political career on the Amsterdam city council.

Yesilgoz was born in Ankara and is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. Like Kreuger, she noticed a tendency among left-leaning parties to avoid mentioning the ethnic or religious background of the attackers of November 7.

“It’s bad enough that Jewish institutions like schools and synagogues need to be protected, but now youths are demanding to see citizens’ papers to check if they are Israeli or Jewish. If they are, they get beaten up,” Yesilgoz told The Times of Israel.

“This is an absolute low point for Amsterdam and an example of bad integration of migrants into Dutch society. The attackers were probably of Moroccan background, and police are investigating this,” she claimed.

Yesilgoz said such tiptoeing around identity has been a frustrating experience throughout her career.

“I can speak freely about antisemitism among the extreme left and right, but as soon as I mention Islam as a motive, everybody freezes up and starts talking about exclusion and Islamophobia,” said Yesilgoz. “But how can you fight the problem if you’re not allowed to talk about it?”

Sound familiar?

Many Moroccan households receive their news on the Israel-Hamas conflict through satellite television stations in North Africa and the Middle East. Teachers in the Netherlands’s bigger cities often find it difficult to speak neutrally about the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to their Muslim students, who in some areas of Amsterdam form a majority in their classrooms.

Although the city was home to the famous young Holocaust diarist Anne Frank before she perished at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, history teachers frequently find themselves unable to teach lessons on the Holocaust because of racist and sometimes aggressive reactions by their students.

David Beesemer, chairman of Maccabi Netherlands and Europe, says Dutch Jews are “gravely concerned” that they will be targeted next….

“It’s a disgrace that the city of Anne Frank has become world news because of violent antisemitism and the city council’s priority seems to be to blame Israelis or the government in The Hague,” said Yesilgoz, leader of the center-right liberal party. “Damn it, I’m a citizen of Amsterdam. Show me you can and want to guarantee my safety. Show us at least that you care.”

Well OK, city of Anne Frank – but she was betrayed in the end. The Dutch had the worst record of protecting Jews of any country in German-occupied Western Europe.