New Statesman – The next holocaust

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  1. Sardar doesn’t know what he is writing about. His piece just oozes prejudice. For instance:

    “That the Dutch see Muslims as a separate community is not all that surprising. Holland has a brutal colonial history just as long as Britain’s, and the jewel in its crown was the most populous Muslim nation on earth: Indonesia. The Islamist insurgency in Aceh is a legacy of the people’s long war with the Dutch, a war the colonisers never won and never ended. Slavery and compulsory labour on Dutch plantations underpinned a strict system of separating the rulers from those they ruled. The Dutch were interested in categorising and neatly arranging the Otherness of those they ruled, the better to maintain their separateness and dependence. Colonial policy now reverberates at home.”

    Sardar is saying that because there was a seperation between the Dutch and the indigious people of the Netherlands Indies, there’s a separation between muslims and non-muslims in Holland today. That is ridiculous nonsense.

    First, there’s no law in Holland separating muslims from non-muslims, on the contrary.

    Second, it’s funny how Dutch policymakers are accused of racism and xenofobia because they are trying to integrate muslims into Dutch society, while Sardar accusses them of wanting to keep muslims APART from the rest of the population.

    Sardars view on the colonial period is a very old fashioned view, by the way. There was no slavery in the Netherlands Indies, their WAS compulsary labour, but in service of the indigenous leaders of the Indonesian people, not the Dutch.

    Around 1840 the ‘Cultuurstelsel’ was introduced, according to which Indonesian farmers where obliged to grow a certain kind of crop (sugar, coffee, tea or Indigo) for which they were paid. They were allowed, however, to grow whatever they wanted on their own piece of land. This enabled them to save some money, whicj allowed an indigenous, ‘unofficial’ economy system to exist alongside the ‘official’ economy. This fact was never recognised by the critics of the Cultuurstelsel at the time.

    The unison of the different Indonesian islands into one state, by the way, is not an invention of the Dutch, but of the medieval Hindu rulers. So the insurgency in Aceh is not a legacy of colonial rule either.

    And of course it infuriates people when you compare the situation with muslims today with the Holocaust. Today, muslims can move freely in Holland. There are no signs that say muslims are not allowed. The handful of people who set fire to mosques and a school are now safely in prison. Muslims are not threatened.

    Let’s never forget that it’s the critics of islam and the muslim community who are threatened and have to hide, not muslims. It was a critic of islam who got slaughtered in Holland, not a muslim. So if a comparison with the Holocaust has to be made, a comparison between the growing intolerance towards ‘others’ within the muslim community and the events that led to the Holocaust seems more apt in my opinion.

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