I briefly interrupt my regular “weekend away from the computer to do other necessary stuff” to bring you an item that made my blood, if not boil, at least warm up to dangerous levels. Here comes The New York Times to my neighborhood, in a poignantly titled piece, Immigration and Islam Raise Questions of Dutch Identity. And they interview one of the very few colorful locals they could find around:
In Slotervaart, a majority immigrant neighborhood in southwestern Amsterdam, Maria Kuhlman and her friends watched Muslim families stroll by on a Ramadan afternoon, some of the men in robes and beards, the women wearing headscarves. A large blond woman shouted, “Go Wilders!”[…]
Ms. Kuhlman has lived in the Slotervaart neighborhood for 36 years but says, “I no longer feel at home.” Built in the 1950s, Slotervaart is now about 60 percent immigrants or their children, most from Morocco or Turkey. Crime rates are high, especially among the second generation.
She remembered sunbathing topless on her balcony in the 1980s. “It’s inconceivable now,” she said. “Now my next-door neighbor doesn’t even greet me in the hallway, he can’t look at me, and it’s been 28 years,” Ms. Kuhlman said.
Then she laughed bitterly. “He doesn’t work; I work. I work all shifts. I pay taxes. I work for them!”
Willem Stuyter, nursing a beer, broke in. “It’s already too late,” he said. “In 10 years this will be a Muslim state.”
There is much more simplistic and short sighted analysis at the link. However, I find it quite telling that, of the many, many Dutch Native, White people living in my neighborhood, they would pick these “representatives” of a Dutch identity seemingly fixed in time (a time, mind you, when there were none of them lazy Muslims slacking around). I suppose the thousands of others are not interesting enough to repeat Wilders inflammatory rhetoric.
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