Our Flemish correspondent VH has compiled a report on a scandal which unfolded during the Christmas holiday and caused quite an outrage in the Netherlands. It seems that the socialist leader Job Cohen dusted off the time-tested comparison of European Muslims in the 21st century with European Jews in the 1930s.
Everybody remembers what was happening in 1939, right? All those Jews blowing up churches and train stations… demanding kosher food in schools… threatening anti-Semitic cartoonists with death… rioting and burning down German embassies…
Or am I perhaps confusing them with someone else?
The first translated article is from Elsevier:
Comparison of Muslims with Jews is incomprehensible
By Marlou Visser
The leader of the Dutch Labour Party [PvdA] Job Cohen calls the situation of Muslims in the Netherlands comparable to the situation of Jews in the early years of World War II. The Labour leader says this in an interview with [left-wing] opinion magazine Vrij Nederland.
In the interview Cohen talks about how his mother [in the early days of WWII] noticed that Jews were gradually being excluded, and that today he himself notices the same happening with Muslims. “Talk to Muslims and you’ll notice it. People are terrified because Wilders is in power now, and that he says simply that he’d rather have them being expelled from the country.” [something Wilders has never said — translator]
The chairman of the CIDI (Center Documentation and Information Israel), Ronny Naftaniel, finds Cohen’s remarks incomprehensible. “He compares the democratic society we have today with the situation in an occupied country. This is an equation that can not at all be taken seriously. I understand that he wants to touch on the subject of discrimination, but Cohen has other options to do that.”
Only recently Ronny Naftaniel had a discussion with Cohen on wrongly linking to the Second World War. “I thought he agreed that the war was not to be cited, as too hackneyed. I do not know if he realizes what he himself is saying here now,” Naftaniel said.
The PVV leader Geert Wilders finds Cohen to be completely lost. “Cohen’s comparison of Muslims now with the Jews in the Second World War is disgusting and too abject for words. Counteracting Islamization and cracking down, for instance, on criminal Moroccans, is cleaning up exactly the mess that was caused by the PvdA of Cohen, with pampering and dithering, tea-drinking [as Cohen used to do with imams to talk matters over — translator] and ‘keeping the bunch together’ [a well known expression of Cohen — translator],” Wilders replied to elsevier.nl in a text message.
Cohen also says in the interview that the CDA [Christian Democrats] are only spreading the argumentation that the CDA and VVD did not want to govern with the PvdA because they are ashamed of their cooperation with the PVV. “It is nonsense that the Labour Party ever rejected cooperation. I always said: nobody needs to cooperate with the PVV.” Cohen is disappointed that a government of CDA and VVD emerged, supported by the PVV, but he does not at all reproach himself. “I did my best.”
A reply by Prof. Smalhout (who also publishes in De Telegraaf) in the Hyves blog:
Cohen, Muslims and Orthodox Jews
by Prof. B. Smalhout
The opinion magazine Vrij Nederland published a big interview with Job Cohen, the current leader of the Labour Party (PvdA). He was until recently the mayor of Amsterdam. Job Cohen says the Muslims in our country are being excluded, particularly by the PVV of Geert Wilders. To this, Job makes the comparison with the Jewish population in the years before World War II. In principle, Cohen states that “Muslims are the new Jews.” Of all the mistakes Cohen has made in recent years, this is by far the most painful one.
The PvdA leader himself is of Jewish descent, but was born after World War II (1947). He therefore has never personally witnessed how the European Jewish population in the 1930s were gradually stripped of all rights and finally, in the 1940s, were deported and murdered.
Witness
Unlike Cohen, I did witness it. I am from a Judeo-Christian-socialist background. As a child I grew up in the Transvaal neighborhood in the Eastern part of Amsterdam. That was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in those days. There lived the people who in the early 20th century had left the poverty-stricken Jewish neighborhood in the heart of Amsterdam. They formed an educated class of specialized workers (such as diamond polishers), teachers, civil servants and small traders and shopkeepers.
They all read newspapers and were for that time very well-informed on what was happening abroad. In particular, they knew what was happening in Germany under the National Socialism of Hitler. But they felt safe there because they (quite wrongly) trusted the Dutch government. Soon the first German-Jewish refugees knocked on the door. I myself was then a little boy, but I will never forget the misery of the generally highly-educated refugees, who as peddlers with a poor briefcase tried to sell some pieces of soap or razors. Among them was a former Minister of Education, a concert pianist and a teacher of classical languages. My Christian mother, who spoke fluent German, often gave them something to eat and my Jewish father bought so many razors that I as a grown man was still able to shave for years with them.
When the German Nazis occupied the Netherlands, I saw how complete families with crying babies and children were chased from their homes and taken away with German trucks. The lively Transvaalbuurt became a kind of dead city where one could sometimes still see a set dining table in a living room and toys left on the floor. I witnessed how life of the Jewish population was gradually made impossible. In parks, gardens, swimming pools, cinemas, and theaters they were no longer allowed. Jewish children and Jewish teachers were dismissed from school. I talked with them. They were my schoolmates and my neighbors at the Transvaal Square.
With one exception, I never saw them again. Thirty years later, I visited Auschwitz. There I walked on sidewalks paved with their ashes. It crunched under my shoes. I only discovered that it was human ashes after I had picked up a little of it. I now keep that with great care in the desk at which I am writing this. So I still have the feeling that my murdered school friends and girlfriends are writing with me as they are dazed by the remark of Job Cohen that current Dutch Muslims are being discriminated against the same way they encountered back then.
Our pre-war Jewish community consisted of perfectly loyal Dutch people who worked hard and extensively contributed to our economy and our cultural and intellectual life. The concept of crime was not in their dictionary. By contrast, the Netherlands, and especially the large cities, nowadays face a plethora of Muslim immigrants who often do not adapt themselves well, or not at all, to our way of life. Their share in crime is extremely high and often of a violent kind.
Repulsive
The combination of a dark poncho, hood and scooter, is notorious. Their anti-Semitism is disgusting. Many native Dutch, and especially those of Amsterdam, have been harassed out of areas that are inhibited by North African immigrants. Job Cohen, in the years he was the mayor, did nothing against this.
He arranged even less for protection of Jewish Orthodox school children against the hooded scum. The Jewish community had to arrange, organize, and pay for all kinds of protection themselves. There never has been a Jew with us who robbed handbags, who raided jewelers and shot beleaguered shopkeepers, as happens regularly these days. The integration of Moroccan immigrants has proven to be a failure, with the exception of the Muslim girls. Who in general do well. One can see them everywhere as a secretary, a nurse, receptionist, dental assistant or student at a college or even university. It is their effective way to break free of a primitive desert culture that is suffocating for women.
The comparison of the Muslim immigrants to the Jewish population in the years before World War II is not only outrageous and stupid, it is — to use a Jewish expression — an absolute gotspe [chutzpah]. And with the last tiny bit of Jewish culture Cohen may still have, he will know that this is the superlative of a godforsaken brutality.
And another reply, from Elsevier:
What parallels with World War II, monseigneur Cohen?
by Liesbeth Wytzes
In the Christmas issue of Vrij Nederland, PvdA leader Job Cohen once again pulls an old comparison off the shelves. The Muslims are the Jews of today. Come on. When for a minute one does not know just what to do with the low position in the polls, luckily there is the Second World War!
The fact is that Cohen’s mother was in the audience during the famous lecture by the Leiden professor Cleveringa on November 26, 1940, when the Germans threatened to dismiss his Jewish colleagues.[1]
Sentiments
The fact that Cohen’s mother was present at that lecture, has been used by Cohen before to prove that the Jewish persecution shows a striking resemblance to the way Muslims are treated nowadays. My mother was there, he argues, so I am entitled to say this. In this way he uses a private memory of his mother — he was not even born then — for political reasons. With this he gambles with people’s sentiments. But, well, in politics seemingly everything is permitted. Facts don’t matter anymore.
1939-1945
Now I happen to be reading the book Berlin at War, by the British historian Roger Moorhouse. I can highly recommend it to Cohen. It is not a page turner, because you know how it will end, which certainly does not make it a pleasurable read. The book is an account of daily life in Berlin during the years 1939-1945, in which the net around the Jews and the non-Nazis is tightened ever further by means of terror, torture, brute force, intimidation, deportation etcetera, all well known. But there are many things that I did not yet know, and it’s very impressive to read — based on diaries and letters — how ordinary people in Berlin underwent that time of unimaginable terror.
Parallel
And in nothing, nothing, but then really nothing, there is in any way a parallel to be discerned in the way Muslims are being treated today. In fact, I actually find it insulting towards the Jews of those days and of today, that Cohen says such things. Are Muslims being terrorized here? Are the lives they live being made impossible? Do they have to wear a distinctive symbol such as the Star of David? Are their names on death lists, are they being rounded up, are traitors reporting them, are their windows smashed, are there organized gangs chasing them with bats, are there shops or restaurants they are not allowed to enter?
Well, monseigneur Cohen, I do not think so. Instead, we adapted education, we arranged for neighborhood fathers [neighborhood patrol by elder Muslims], put community organizers and herds of welfare workers at work in the many neighborhoods they are needed, we’ve been kind and tolerant. Maybe it was not always completely convenient, but it was well-intentioned, and in my view there has not been a case of any intentional exclusion whatsoever.
Aggression
And allow me to point out that Dutch gays and Dutch Jews are quite often harassed by Muslims. So if there already is mention of any aggression, it comes from the Muslim side. Yes, there are people who have built up some reservations regarding the ‘new Dutch’, and of course that is very annoying for many of those who actually like nothing better than leading a quiet life. But for those short fuses they have to fully blame themselves. Just look at the crime statistics
I don’t accept anyone telling me that we now live in a country that is in any whatever way comparable to Germany of around 1940. And certainly not by a hitherto unsuccessful politician. Anyone who says such things does not know his history, or gives an opportunistic twist to it. The first is stupid, the second is scandalous.
Note:
[1] Cleveringa was professor of commercial law and civil procedure law at the University of Leiden. Here he gave on November 26, 1940, a famous speech in which he protested against the dismissal of his teacher, supervisor and colleague Professor Eduard Maurits Meijers and other Jewish colleagues, by the German occupation authorities. Cleveringa was subsequently imprisoned. After the war Cleveringa and Meijers returned as a professor at the University of Leiden. In 1946 he acted as honorary supervisor in the granting of an honorary doctorate to Sir Winston Churchill in the Leiden St. Peter Church. On April 8, 1953, Cleveringa was rewarded by the U.S. government with the Medal of Freedom for his resistance work.
Chilling! The ignorance that pervades in many quarters is frightening. The article was gripping and I will be linking back to it and Gates of Vienna tomorrow.
Keep up the great work.
Mike
These attempts at drawing equivalence between Europe’s WWII Jews and it modern day Muslims is exactly the sort of disinformation that will continue to obstruct orderly counter-jihad measures until such a time as the bent bough snaps and these Islamic invaders are trundled off to their own concentration camps.
People like Cohen bear direct responsibility, second only to Islam itself, for facilitating the looming Muslim Holocaust.
Marlou Visser writes:
“Comparison of Muslims with Jews is incomprehensible”
It’s not in fact incomprehensible. There is a logic to this comparison, though that logic is irrational (as a madman’s logic may be irrational). The ingredients of this logic are the following:
1) Muslims are perceived to be ethnic.
(This is not wildly irrational: 98% of the time when we look at Muslims, they look ethnic, with the added spice of a Third World cutural aura.)
2) The dominant and mainstream paradigm of the West is PC MC. According to PC MC, ethnic peoples are always potential victims of the potentially evil white West — beginning with bigotry, escalating to hatred, and from there, various collective measures including lynchings, rounding up, deportation, ethnic cleansing, genocide. (The reverse is not thinkable for this paradigm: white Westerners will never be, cannot by definition be, the objects of non-white non-Western bigotry, hatred, etc.)
3. The PC MC paradigm, furthermore, is ever on high alert for the slightest signs of this evil white Western potential. The slightest indications that a collective bigotry is afoot is enough to sound the alarm and begin responding — first with counter-propaganda, and if legally possible, various legal measures to inhibit free speech and assembly, along with various paralegal measures of ostracization and vilification of the purported “bigots”.
4. The gold standard for the modern Westerner (and even more acutely, the modern European) of such potentially evil bigotry is the Holocaust. Any ethnic People who seem to be targets of bigotry can become the “New Jews”. It just so happens that there is only one ethnic People currently whose speech and actions are arousing the potential for collective condemnation: Muslims.
5. It matters little to the irrational logic of PC MC that Muslims have been hating, killing, lynching and torturing Jews (not to mention several other classes of non-Muslims including Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, etc.), and that their culture Islam is replete with codified anti-Judaism as well as ample literature of anti-Judaic hatred. For, in the meantime, Israelis (and by extension Jews) have become “Honorary White Westerners” through their persistent actions of self-defense against “Palestinian” Muslims. It matters little also that these actions are clearly self-defense. The mere spectacle of treating any Ethnic People with aggressive collective measures (such as checkpoints, putting up a wall, restricting immigration, searches and seizures, and — worst of all, shooting them) is enough for the PC MC: the ones taking this action are guilty, and the Ethnic People targeted are innocent and “oppressed”. End of story. No amount of data indicating otherwise is permissible to be processed.
[continued next comment]
[continued from last comment]
Then, Prof. B. Smalhout writes (and following him, Liesbeth Wytzes, similarly in her own way), of the Jews at the time of the Nazis:
“I saw how complete families with crying babies and children were chased from their homes and taken away with German trucks. The lively Transvaalbuurt became a kind of dead city where one could sometimes still see a set dining table in a living room and toys left on the floor. I witnessed how life of the Jewish population was gradually made impossible. In parks, gardens, swimming pools, cinemas, and theaters they were no longer allowed. Jewish children and Jewish teachers were dismissed from school. I talked with them. They were my schoolmates and my neighbors at the Transvaal Square. With one exception, I never saw them again. Thirty years later, I visited Auschwitz.”
Again, it matters little if the West has not been doing this to Muslims now. What matters is that they could begin to do this, any moment, because white Westerners, as we all know, always have that evil potential to act out their bigotry against some Ethnic People, and Muslims now are the ones attracting negative attention. And, similarly, it matters little that Muslims are in fact saying and doing horrible and dangerous things all over the world — and thus earning that egative attention (and, for that matter, earning far more critcism and condemnation than they are in fact receiving). All that matters is our negative reactions to them, and the horrible potential for “another Holocaust” which those reactions portend unless we nip our own evil inclinations in the bud.
More in-depth analyses of my point:
Fashionably Anti-Israel
The Muslim: The New Black and the New Jew
Israel and the Irrational Logic of PC MC
What is truly horrific is that Job Cohen is a JEW himself!!
A true kapo/dhimmi joo!! I hope he is proud of his treachery!
PS, I always agree with Zenster, but I feel these Job Cohens are the enablers of islam, they allow them to advance and therefore are actually far worse than mozlems, who could never get far in the West without their enablers, the Communazis as I call them.
Muslims are the old and new Nazis.
Older than Nazis, but newly invited by the millions into the heart of Europe.
I have read so many of these that I really don’t need to read any more.
My hat is off to zenster, et al for continuing to comment.
I personally don’t think there is much else to say… We need to wait until this movement emplodes on itself.
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of the Jews in 20th century Europe would see the lie here.
In the 1930s, Jews had assimilated Western culture and civilization.
They didn’t just understand the West, they believed in it.
Muslims have shown no knowledge of Western Civilization at all.
They have never assimilated.
False comparison.
@ Babs–
From your keyboard to God’s eyes.
This comparison can only be made by someone who is morally depraved, mentally deficient, or psychotic. No amount of condemnation is too great for something that is so insulting to both common decency and common sense.
Apuleius Platonicus: This comparison can only be made by someone who is morally depraved, mentally deficient, or psychotic. No amount of condemnation is too great for something that is so insulting to both common decency and common sense.
Worth repeating, verbatim. Thank you.
Thank you for this article. I, myself was given the same garbage in an email this summer by a creep from The Guardian. He wrote to me on Facebook saying: “How could a Jew be against Muslims when Muslims are in the same “predicament” as the Jews in 1930’s.”
He was such a coward his photo was his head completely wrapped in bandages.
To equate the Jews with Muslims and their stealth and violent jihad, their criminal activities, their caliphate agenda, is despicable.
I will also link this to my blog tomorrow.. Thank you.
In fact that proportion of hate crimes against Jews exceeds those against Muslims – so, if anyone, the Jews are the new Jews.
Left-wing fascists will spin any lie to support their propaganda, and conversely truth is no defence if one challenges them – as Geert and Elisabeth are finding out.
But what is really obnoxious about the statement that Muslims are the new Jews is that Muslims like Nazis have the hatred and killing of Jews codified in their founding texts.
The same “Nazi” accusations being leveled against the non-Muslims of Holland were being leveled against the Serbs a decade ago.
Casting Muslims as “the new Jews,” or as victims of anything other than their own evil ideology, was a lie then and it is a lie now. I knew that the lie would not end there, and I warned everyone who would listen.
Then as now, almost no one is paying attention.
Does no one recall how many of the original Nazis actually were Muslims? (See: Collaborating with Muslim Nazis)
Who are the new Jews of Europe these days? As Hugh Fitzgerald once noted, they’re the non-mahoundians.
The meme that any minority group, for instance Jews, gays, etc., have to make common cause with every other minority group is one of the most difficult things to counter. It seems to be hard-wired in some people.
Psychotic Jewish leftists like Cohen can never be fixed, but there are ways to prevent them from influencing others. Here, I have to complain about the extremism of some of the people on our own side, who keep minority groups stuck where they are, even though many Jews, gays, women, etc. are actually undamaged enough to process reality.
This “new Jew” meme would never work at all, if Cohen’s constituents didn’t have real, objective reasons to fear “old white men.” Witness the hysteria over gays in the military. When some people on our side lighten up on social issues, Cohen will be thrown out in the street by his own party.
There is an unmistakeable connection between the muslims of the 21st. century Europe and the Jews of WWII.
It is exactly the same connection as that between the NSDAP (Nazis) and the Jews during the early years of WWII.
For a parallel of the connection between the nazis and the Jews of later WWII years, just go to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia … in fact any islamic country!
IOW and to make a long story short. The Jews of Pre-WWII Europe were generaly contributing members within th national communities where they lived. The Muslims,
NOT SO MUCH! Dr. Shalit
This comment has been removed by the author.
@all,
When you know the actual background-story, it gets even more bizarre. Of course to us in the Netherlands it is no surprise that Job Cohen, the former mayor of Amsterdam, is at the centre of this tale.
I’ll give you the short version:
– May 2003: Right after the traditional short memorial service for the victims of WW-2, Moroccan youths in Amsterdam are caught playing football (soccer) with the memorial wreaths, shouting “Kill all Jews”.
– November 2003: Mayor Job Cohen starts the so-called “ambtswoning gesprekken” (talks at his municipal office) with representatives of Moroccan and Jewish organizations. Goal: learn Moroccans to use legal means of voicing dissent instead of taking to the streets. Jewish organizations are to be the role model to learn from.
– May 2005: End of the “ambtswoninggesprekken”.
– February 2006: Founding of the Jewish-Moroccan Network Amsterdam, as a direct result from the talks initiated by Job Cohen.
Main goal [orig. quote]: “The Jewish Moroccan Network sees as its most important goal the redirection of intolerance in the Netherlands towards a climate of respect. Together the participants fight against the expression of antisemitism, islamophobia and other forms of discrimination”.
[emphasis added, Sag.]
[..continued]
Yes, you read that right: islamic youths cause one antisemitic “incident” after another, and the Jews have been invited, and agreed to, combat “islamophobia”.
So there you have it already, Cohen’s conflation of antisemitism and islamophobia, all because of rioting Moroccan youths back in 2003. I’ll explain his ideological reasons later on.
But as if this isn’t surprising enough, among the participants mentioned in the “ambtswoninggesprekken” was the CJO (Centraal Joods Overleg, i.e. Central Jewish Platform). One of the seven members of the CJO is mentioned in this article: the CIDI.
So the lesson here seems to be, that you can bend over backwards to appease Muslims and agree to combat “islamophobia”, and all you get as Jews is more antisemitism.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag
I recently read an excellent book about the antisemitism in the Netherlands, Het Verval. In it, there were a 20 or so interviews with prominent people, both jewish and non-jewish. It’s clear anti-semitism is on the rise again, and one interview the person interviewed recalled a speech Job Cohen gave to a group of jews. He spoke of ‘You jews’. Not ‘we jews’. He doesn’t even consider himself a jew anymore, he has never shown any such sentiment. Cohen is a lost cause, he doesn’t represent this country or the people, he now serves a new electorate, the muslim voters of the PvdA.
As an important aside, I’m heartened to see (as far as I can tell) one certain propensity in this context left out of this article and this comments thread — namely, whenever a PC MC or Leftist Jew voices his PC MC or Leftist view on Muslims (which, perforce, will be pro-Muslim and anti-“Islamophobic”), it becomes wickedly ironic “evidence” of the supposed Jewish conspiracy to subvert the West.
Two things are necessary for such a propensity:
1) a penchant for conspiracy theory
and
2) a neglect of the fact that PC MC/Leftism is the cause of such Islam apologetics, not Jewishness.
About the fact that we do see a considerable number of Jews who defend Muslims: that may be chalked up to the fact that Jews, tending to be progressive about intellectual and social matters, have naturally become participants and proponents of PC MC (and at times of Leftism). Their underlying motives in this regard are not significantly different from the motives of any other Westerner who champions (or, on a relatively more passive level, regurgitates) PC MC: a sincere and decent concern for the values of Western progress. That this concern has become more or less deformed into irrational excess is beside the point of the Jewishness of the Westerners in question.
@Hesperado,
Thank you for making one important point I was going to make, which is that it is not Job Cohen’s “Jewishness” that explains the policies he is pursuing, let alone in some kind of conspiracy.
You probably remember the photo of our friend Mr. Keller embracing Mr. Arafat? Well, here’s another one, a true and dedicated believer, though I think Cohen is more of a progressivist and Keller a true and orthodox believer in socialism. Cohen is a champion at social engineering through the power of state, and the one thing explaining why he has done what I described: his decidedly progessivist view on religion.
He and other progressives share a certain elevated and polite disdain for religion, thinking it is for “the masses” and slightly vulgar. But Cohen has openly stated (no conspiracy here) that religion can be used by the anointed in power as an important tool to reshape society, just like “global warming” can be used as a tool for change.
So no conspiracy here, nor perceived “ethnicity” of Muslims as an explaining factor, it is just one dedicated bureaucrat trying to use religion as a vehicle for “social change”.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Yes Sagunto, good summary description.