Can The Netherlands Be Saved?

At yesterday's Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation Day) celebrations in the Netherlands, junior foreign affairs minister Frans Timmermans used the opportunity of giving the traditional 5th of May lecture to tell the Dutch people the following:

'If you know who you are as a country you can better understand others,' Timmermans said. The Dutch must realise they are part of a society which no longer operates as separate religious and political groupings and which is becoming increasingly universal.'

The theme of this year's celebration, which marks the liberation of the Dutch from Nazi tyranny and kicked off in the lovely town of Zwolle, was 'freedom and identity'.

Like most mainstream politicians in Europe, Mr Timmermans seems to be reassuring people that their culture and identity are important on the one hand, but on the other lecturing them that the world is changing and societies must now be 'universal'; anyone who says otherwise is small minded, or possibly a racist extremist.

It seems to me that this is an obvious contradiction in terms; 'cherish your identity whilst giving it up to any who demand it'.

Events on the ground seem to back up my assertions rather than those of Mr Timmermans, however.

Just hours after he had delivered his speech, fights broke out in the crowds of revellers in Rotterdam. Police reported that the clashes appeared to be between 'skinheads and dark-skinned youths', and the mood turned so sour that an early end was brought to festivities.

The troublemakers then turned their ire on the police, pelting them with bottles and other missiles until they felt so threatened that they took the highly unusual step of firing into the air in an attempt to disperse the crowds.

Just one day previously, it had been announced that native Dutch are well on the way to becoming a minority in Rotterdam. Currently standing at 52% of the city's population, natives will be a minority by 2012.

On Saturday, two Dutch girls cycling harmlessly through the city of Gouda were accosted by a gang of five Moroccan males. These individuals began shouting insults at them, calling them 'whores' and 'cancer'.

When the girls tried to cycle away, their path was blocked and stones were thrown at them, several of which hit them on the head. They were then knocked off of their bikes, and the machines were thrown on top of them.

The police caught two of the culprits - they were 13 and 15 years old. Gouda has been in the news before because of the tendency of immigrant gangs to assault and rob bus drivers and stone police, paramedics and the fire brigade.

It seems that there are many such stories out there. In February 2009, Moroccan youths went on the rampage in the town of Gorinchem, near Rotterdam. A policeman was struck in the face, and his colleagues who tried to arrest the perpetrator were stoned. The youths then set fire to rubbish bins and threw missiles at Dutch passersby.

This is business as usual for the town, particularly the suburb of Haarwijk. The youths are fighting a turf war with the police and any symbols of the Dutch state. Even journalists who come to report are physically attacked or have equipment smashed or stolen.

Dutch citizens are harassed and find their way into shops barred by aggressive Moroccan males. The youths have all but taken control of the streets, and the Moroccan community leaders decided this might change if their demands were met. So, in November a new mosque was opened.

Predictably, this did not placate the street gangs - to them it made their ownership of the area official. A Moroccan youth worker, paid for by the Dutch government in order to help give the supposedly bored youths something to do, resigned in despair because he was met with ridicule and aggression.

Things came to a head in December, when a large gang of Moroccans burnt down the local Protestant school and a Dutch-owned supermarket. When the fire brigade arrived on the scene, they were viciously attacked with stones, and the youths managed to steal a fire engine and take it for a joy-ride.

The fire brigade refuse to answer calls from the area without a police escort; many Dutch families are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals. When Geert Wilders demanded that the streets be taken back, by the army if necessary, and that criminals with Moroccan passports were deported along with their families, he was met with cries of derision.

This is a large part of the problem - mindset and will. So many people simply do not have the will to do what is necessary to tackle this problem.

The Dutch have had more warning than most about this - when anti-immigration politician and critic of Islam Pim Fortuyn was murdered in 2002, there seemed to be some stirrings. He raised many legitimate issues which ordinary people were afraid to talk about; he was murdered for his beliefs, which as far as I can tell is the antithesis of everything Dutch.

Back then, I was in Sixth Form, and just beginning to get interested in politics. On the day the murder made the papers, my English teacher implied that Fortuyn had brought his fate upon himself. She didn't go as far as saying he had it coming, but it was clear that she thought any politician who dared to question mass immigration and multiculturalism was playing with fire.

Coming from a mild-mannered, educated Englishwoman, for me this was much too close for comfort to the statement in court by Fortuyn's killer, extreme animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf, who said:

'I killed him to stop him from exploiting Muslims as "scapegoats" and targeting "the weak parts of society to score points" in seeking political power.'[2][3][4]

The problem is that Fortuyn was right. Mass immigration and no integration had been changing the face of Dutch society for years, accommodating every Third World nationality under the sun whilst making the Dutch strangers in their own land.

They ignored soaring brutal violent crime whilst they simultaneously criminalised anyone who spoke out as a racist. Incidents like the cover up of a gang-rape in Amsterdam in 1999 - perpetrated by 14 mainly Moroccan youths on a 'mentally challenged' 13 year old girl.

It took two years for the truth to emerge. When it did, the local government insisted they'd only wanted to protect the youths from 'civil justice'.

After the tragic killing of Islam critical film maker Theo van Gogh in 2004, I was certain that something would change in the Netherlands - but it has not. British journalist Peter Hitchens travelled to Rotterdam in the wake of the killing to report that even Dutch liberals were waking up to the follies of mass immigration - but if it happened, it was short-lived.

The Dutch government are still busy lying to the Dutch people and attempting to destroy anyone who does not.

Geert Wilders lives in fear of his life and is facing prosecution for telling the truth, whilst polls suggest that more Dutch people than before are receptive to the country taking in more immigrants.

This despite the fact that asylum applications doubled last year and municipalities in the big cities are begging the central government to disperse immigrants more widely - Rotterdam, which as we discovered will be majority non-Dutch in a mere three years, has a population which grows by up to 900 every month.

This despite the appalling crimes which have been perpetrated by Third World immigrants over the past few years - sexual assaults in swimming pools (which often just lead to 'counselling' for the perpetrators), and the murders of many Dutch such as Floor Garst, kicked to death by a Turkish immigrant for defending his girlfriend, or Rene Steegmans, beaten to death in a supermarket car park for asking Moroccan youths to have respect for the elderly.

So what is the Dutch government doing about all this? Well, recently the authorities in Amsterdam recognised that assaults against city officials and public service workers was a growing problem.

They spent taxpayers' money making a video about this phenomenon. Only, it was slightly less than honest. It shows a middle-aged, middle class Dutch man becoming violent towards a young, dark paramedic because his ambulance is blocking the road - and he is late to see his film at the cinema. Here it is:

Obviously, it might have been politically incorrect to point out that the vast majority of attacks on ambulance crews have been carried out by immigrant youths.

With wilful blindness such as this, I really don't hold out much hope, and that's a real shame. The Netherlands is a fantastic place, full of warm, friendly people - to see it all so wantonly destroyed or given away is simply heart-breaking. But as Muslim and Third World immigration and Dutch emigration step up, as the politicians try to crush all dissent - it's hard to see a positive outcome.