Two minutes of silence for Western hypocrisy – Joop

“People remain sensitive to scapegoats. Not much seems to have changed, only the scapegoat is different. Now many people speak ill of Muslims, but back then no one stood up for the Jews.”

Lately I have been working a lot on novels, I feel like writing poetry, I think I should capture my reflections on Israel, the Palestinians and Remembrance Day in an essay and in the meantime I am also working for school and the government and I muse a bit about the insights I gained during a trip to Morocco. My head is a bit overflowing with all that. I don’t really know where to start. Maybe nowhere. Perhaps it is better to let everything go and do nothing. Then everything in my mind can evaporate, so that in a few weeks I can start with a clean slate.

I think it would be a good idea to do that. Otherwise it just makes me angry. For example, about MPs who see anti-Semitism where it is not, about people who refuse to look at themselves and blame others for all the misery in the world, about people who talk about a good business climate for entrepreneurs and call for tax cuts and at the same time complaining about inadequate investments in healthcare, education, roads and whatever else. I hate it all. That lack of logic, those incongruities, not distinguishing between main and secondary issues, not having a helicopter view, the lack of a long-term vision, that eternal thinking in terms of friend and enemy, the general lack of nuance, the mixing up of form and content, playing around without arguments. It doesn’t stop. Van der Plas’ nonsense, Yeşilgöz’s lie, that people sentenced to prison terms of more than four years are walking around freely, that the government is messing around with PFAS, that the minister is allowing Schiphol to mess around with extra nitrogen emissions and so on. I’m completely done with it for now.

And I am also done with the eternal support for Israel and the blindness of still far too many people to what the Israeli government has been doing for decades. Action and reaction are completely reversed. The West has allowed a state to be founded on territory where people already lived, this new state has oppressed these people for decades and the resistance to this is called terrorism and anti-Semitism. That’s madness. It makes you despondent.

And I’m already despondent. Lately I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the West and that doesn’t make me happy. Western countries speak ill of almost everything and everyone who is different from them (than us), while for centuries they have mainly taken good care of themselves and disrupted everything. Europeans traveled the world to discover and appropriate everything they encountered. They founded America, Australia and South Africa on the territory of others, they professionalized slavery and the slave trade, turned genocide into an industry, oppressed countless peoples and exploited countries and then made them pay for their independence. Western countries still have developing countries in the grip of an enormous debt burden and continue to force countries to privatize, decentralize and open up markets and threaten sanctions and violence if they do not do so. With these economic motives in mind, Western countries, including America, have been carrying out military interventions in sovereign states for decades, deposing heads of state and at the same time talking about the nuclear threat from other countries, while they are the only country in the world to have ever used an atomic bomb. I wonder how such a country can call another country the axis of evil. She imposes her will on everyone and calls anyone who resists a rogue state. That’s special.

My head remains full of it. There is so much hypocrisy in so many different areas. Tonight we can again be silent for two minutes to commemorate the Second World War and, as always, I think of the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that preceded it. That gives me a stomach ache. We live in a time when more and more people are following a political leader who would prefer to see headscarves, mosques and the Koran disappear from the streets. I wonder whether these people would have chosen the leader who wanted yarmulkes, synagogues and the Tanakh out of the streets ninety years ago. Apparently these people are sensitive to scapegoats. Not much seems to have changed, only the scapegoat is different. Nowadays many people speak ill of Muslims, back then no one stood up for the Jews. Not even the institutions that are piously laying a wreath tonight. We seem to have forgotten that.

Or maybe we consciously forget. Perhaps the Dutch shout so loudly about alleged anti-Semitism among Muslims and Islamic countries to conceal the fact that their own royal family, government and people did virtually nothing before, during and (immediately) after the Second World War to protect and assist their own Jews . It could well be. I’m going to work on that again. Two minutes in silence tonight and probably for a long time afterwards in some form or another.