Women

More liberal, tolerant Dutch news – don’t you just love the VVD?

“Cut benefits to burqa wearers”
27 June 2007

THE HAGUE – A majority in Parliament wants the government to allow municipalities to cut benefits if the recipients are unable to find a job because they wear a burqa.

A motion to this effect from Liberal VVD MP Atzo Nicolaï and Labour PvdA MP Hans Spekman was passed on Tuesday.

Coalition party PvdA and opposition party VVD are concerned about a verdict from the court in Amsterdam earlier this month. The court found in preliminary proceedings that the municipality Diemen had unlawfully docked the benefits of a Muslim woman who wears a burqa because she had been unable to find a job after four job applications.

If this verdict becomes a precedent, Spekman and Nicolaï want to know what state secretary for social affairs Ahmed Aboutaleb plans to do to ensure that municipalities will be able dock benefits in cases like this.

The state secretary first wants to wait for the final outcome of the court case before drawing conclusions. But he will “of course” inform Parliament of any steps he plans to take.

Aboutaleb has said in earlier debates with Parliament that the case in Diemen should be put in perspective. He says it is just “one case,” while there have also been court verdicts that have found in favour of municipalities in cases where the behaviour of the job seeker prevented him or her from finding a job. One of these cases also concerned the wearing of a burqa.

[My emphasis]

I expect a Moslem woman could wear a bloody bikini and they still wouldn’t give her the job. Discrinmination is inherent in Dutch society, as we see from these following two reports:

AMSTERDAM, 03/07/07 – Primary schools in Amsterdam will no longer accept enrolments of children under two years of age. The measure is intended to prevent ethnic segregation in education.

White parents often enrol their child for a school without immigrant pupils straight after birth. In doing so, they ensure that the child does not end up on a waiting list. Immigrants, who are often unaware of the waiting lists, usually enrol their child once it has reached school-going age and can then only find a place at ‘black’ schools.

The current situation contributes to schools increasingly becoming one-sidedly black or white, considers the Amsterdam local council. Most of Amsterdam’s primary schools have now signed a covenant with the municipality in which they pledge to reject enrolments of children under two years of age.

Universities draw few minorities
28 June 2007

AMSTERDAM – Universities are still not managing to attract more students of ethnic background. This has emerged from a study commissioned by the Association of Universities in the Netherlands

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Discrimination against non-whites and non-Christians is built in to the fabric, the normen and waarden of Dutch society, but the Dutch themselves can’t bear to be accused of prejudice or direct discrimination – it might hurt their smug self-images.

Rather than ban the burqa outright, which is what much of the white majority want, the VVD and their supporters prefer to use nasty, underhand tactics like docking the already meagre unemployment benefit, directly affecting women and children.

The men who are imposing (in some cases) the burqa on women? Not so much.

I’ve been living in Amsterdam for several years – I’m here by necessity rather than choice, so perhaps this affects my objectivity, but I feel can say with some confidence that, from my own observations, despite its much-vaunted liberal and feminist image, that the Netherlands is deeply mysogynistic, racist and paternal.

The concepts of normen en waarden’ or cultural norms and values by which all must abide, are embeddded in all public discourse. To overstep the bounds, especially as a woman, is to attract negative attention and open criticism. To be a woman here, and a foreign woman at that, is to be invisible in political terms and subject to whatever the white male majority decide.

Most schools are religious, many political parties are religiously based, as are tv stations and broadcasting companies, and all are overwhelmingly, horribly white. Without the embedded white patriarchy the country would collapse.

So it’s women bearing the brunt, both of Dutch Islamophobia and of the religious and cultural misogyny within their own cultural and ethnic communities.

Lidewijde Ongering, Deputy National Coordinator for Counterterrorism has been in Congress this past month briefing Joe Leiberman and his committee about the ‘unique’ way the Netherlands deals with radicalisation and potential terrorism.

Yup, that’s the way to do it alright, starve those pesky Moslem women out. That’ll really work.