If you’re involved in political campaigns, you know there are always a few people on your side whose heart is in the right place, whose dedication is absolute, but who are absolutely the last persons you should trust to argue your point of views, because they will fuck it up. Gretta Duisenberg is one of them.
For those who don’t know her, she campaigns for Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories and for the right of the Palestinian population to self determination. A cause which has my sympathy as well. Unfortunately, she has an incredible tin ear, lacks tact and has a tendency to speak before she thinks. She first came in the news when she flew a Palestinian flag from her Amsterdam home, something which her Jewish neighbours took umbrage with. In her attempts to resolve the situation, she showed herself to be less than tactful.
Recently, she canalised her unease with the situation into real action and went on a mission to Israel and the Occupied Teritories with the Dutch Stop the Occupation action group and again became the centre of a row. In an interview with a Dutch newspaper, she stated that “with the exception of the Holocaust, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian areas is worse than the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands“, which may not be the stupidest thing you can say on the subject, but certainly comes close.
It’s not that Gretta Duisenberg is an anti-semite –at least not as far as I know– it’s just that she has a poor impulse control and doesn’t think before she says something. Quite apart from the inherent tackiness of Nazi comperisions (especially in this context!), it just isn’t true. Taking the Holocaust out of the equation is as silly as saying that with the exception of the WTC attacks, Al Quaida has not managed to kill many Americans.
Furthermore, the best way to get neutral people to stop listening to you and think of you as either a kook or an anti-semite is comparing Israel to the Nazies. It is borderline anti-semitic, it denigrates the Holocaust and it makes you look like an ahistorical dork. Israel’s occupation is awful and the suffering it causes innocent Palestinians is wrong, wrong, wrong, but it’s not genocidal. Israel is comparable to Apartheid era South Africa, not to Nazi Germany, like South Africa it can change. But it won’t happen because of Gretta Duisenberg, if she continues this way.
What also irritates me is how she, just because she’s the wife of the president of the European Central Bank gets all this media attention. If she was more competent it wouldn’t be such a problem, but because of her antics she’s doing quite a lot of damage to the cause she supposedly supports.
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