By Rachel Avraham
It was recently reported that ahead of Sukkot, the Dutch police are refusing to protect Jewish sites including the Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. According to the Jerusalem Post, Marcel de Weerd and Michel Theeboom, representing the Jewish Police Network, expressed concerns over changes they were seeing in the Dutch police force, where police officers refused to provide protection to the local Jewish community despite their obligation to protect all Dutch citizens.
“There are colleagues who no longer want to protect Jewish targets or events. They talk about ‘moral dilemmas,’ and I see a tendency emerging to give in to that. That would truly mark the beginning of the end. I’m concerned about that,” Theeboom said. Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders condemned officers refusing to guard Jewish institutes. “Unacceptable. If an officer does not want to guard Jewish objects, that is grounds for dismissal,” Wilders wrote on X/Twitter.
Five out of six Jews in Holland claim that anti-Semitism has worsened over the past five years, the Dutch media reported. The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel has noted that there has been an 800% increase in antisemitic incidents in Holland since October 7, yet precisely at such a time, the Dutch police do not want to protect the Jewish community. According to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, a Jewish woman in her thirties in the Netherlands stated: ““I noticed that my Jewish people from my generation (including myself) experience a strong increase in the sensation of insecurity and not being welcome/accepted as a Jew in the Netherlands.”
Another Dutch Jewish woman in her fifties reported: “The government is much too lenient in fighting antisemitism, they call an attack vandalism instead of antisemitic terrorism and that’s really frightening; it again gives the feeling we are outlawed and the only solution is going on Aliyah, but I’m too old for that (59 years).” Another Dutch Jewish woman in her fifties proclaimed: “I am confronted with antisemitic comments from colleagues at work. And I actually work at the police department.” Nearly a third of Dutch Jews have considered immigrating out of the Netherlands due to the high rate of anti-Semitism and how the Dutch government has responded poorly to it.
Meanwhile, while the Dutch authorities mistreat the Jews who live within their borders, they have the audacity to condemn Azerbaijan’s treatment of the Armenians in Karabakh by adopting biased resolutions on the subject. Azerbaijan has always protected all Armenian holy sites within her borders, including an Armenian church in Baku. They have done more to protect Armenian heritage sites than the Dutch have done to protect Jewish holy sites in the Netherlands. Yet, the Dutch parliament has the audacity to condemn Azerbaijan and to also maintain neocolonial policies in the Caribbean, highlighting how it is not acceptable for Azerbaijan to reclaim her territorial integrity but it is acceptable for the Dutch to violate the sovereignty of other nations.
It was recently reported that the new Dutch Cabinet’s program asserts that legislative and strategic initiatives will be implemented in Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba, allegedly aimed at improving their welfare. However, the Baku Initiative Group has blasted this move, arguing that these territories, while supposedly autonomous, are fully dependent on the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Furthermore, these territories have been removed from the UN list of non-self-governing territories, raising concerns about premature and unjust exclusions from decolonization efforts. BIG has requested the Dutch government to respect the freedom and self-determination of the Caribbean islands and not to impede their pursuit of independence. So far, the Dutch have not heeded BIG’s request, while they continue to condemn Azerbaijan and fail to protect the Jewish community in the Netherlands. This highlights how much the Dutch are hypocritical. The time has come for the world to stand up to Dutch hypocrisy by insisting that they stop to colonize islands in the Caribbean, refrain from harassing Azerbaijan and start to protect the Jews living within their borders. Until they do this, the Dutch have a lot of reckoning to do.
