EclectEcon

While I have much admiration for Ms. Ali, I regret I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the utterly evil Theo Van Gogh. This is why:

"Van Gogh also wrote many anti-Semitic articles. In an article in the Amsterdam university magazine Folia in the beginning of the eighties he had Jewish writer Leon de Winter perform the “Treblinka love game” with “a piece of barbed wire” around his “dick”. He also fantasized about “copulating yellow stars in the gas chamber”. In this way he reproduced the anti-Semite myth of the perverse sexual drives, which supposedly completely dominate the Jewish existence. According to Van Gogh, even in the gas chambers this drive got the better of them. He also wrote that Jewish historian Evelien Gans had “wet dreams” about having sex with Mengele. In the anti-Semitic tradition Jews always sought contact with the devil, in this case with the unscrupulous concentration camp doctor.

Van Gogh liked to wrap his anti-Semitism in ‘humor’. For instance, he had Jewish TV talk show host Sonja Barend say outside a camp barrack: “And tomorrow a healthy awakening”. (Which is what she always said at the end of her shows.) He also proposed to make a happy family movie “about a small girl, who, during half of the war, keeps calling the Gestapo: come and get me, come and get me, my dairy is ready!... and they do not come.” He also ‘joked’: “What smells of caramel here? Today they are only burning Jews with diabetes”. (Diabetes is called “sugar disease” in Dutch.) Van Gogh argued that Jews abuse their black past, and wanted to end their “whining” about the Shoah. With this kind of ‘jokes’ he wanted to banalize the concentration camps. But by doing so he cooperated in denying the misery of Auschwitz."

http://www.gebladerte.nl/30097v01.htm

What particularly gets my goat about this is the way Holland has lived a lie since World War II about its role in the Holocaust. In complete contradistinction to the myth of the philosemitic Dutch, the reality is that the Jews of Holland: were betrayed by their Dutch neighbours, rounded up on Dutch orders by Dutch policemen, taken to a Dutch-run concentration camp, shipped to Auschwitz on Dutch trains operated by Dutch drivers. After the war was over, the few Jewish survivors were treated like lepers by the Dutch state and people. Virtually all of the property of those Jews who had been murdered was stolen by individual Dutch citizens and the Dutch state - little has ever been returned. No Dutch collaborator was ever imprisoned for his or her crimes against the Jewish people. Indeed, the few Dutch policemen who had refused to collaborate were ostracised by their colleagues.

100,000 Jews, around 70% of the Jews living in Holland at the time of the German/Austrian invasion, were subsequently murdered.

I spit on Holland. I piss on Van Gogh's memory.

More on Dutch collaboration (link again no longer works):

Film makes case against Holland

When most of us think about which countries were most acquiescent with the Nazis' Final Solution, Holland doesn't usually come to mind.

In Goodbye Holland a two-part documentary on the destruction of Dutch Jewry, Amsterdam/Jerusalem-based filmmaker Willy Lindwer tries to change that.

"The Dutch have always been given credit for playing a heroic role during the Nazi occupation of Holland," says Lindwer, who was born in Amsterdam in 1946 to Polish/Ukrainian Jewish parents who had fled from their home countries because of anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

"I believe Anne Frank is pivotal to this notion," says Lindwer. "She is the single most powerful icon of the Holocaust, whose family was hidden by Dutch citizens despite the great risk they faced."

"But," he says, "what most people don't realize is that Anne Frank was betrayed by a Dutch citizen, arrested by Dutch police, imprisoned in a Nazi camp guarded by Dutch military police and deported to Auschwitz on a train operated by a Dutch crew."

According to Lindwer, Frank traveled the same route as 107,000 Dutch Jews - about 80% of the Jewish population in Holland - who were systematically rounded up, imprisoned and deported with the active participation of Dutch citizens, administrators and politicians. About 104,000 Dutch Jews ended up dying in Nazi concentration camps. Of thousands of Dutch civil servants, only 17 refused to sign the German Loyalty Act, and of the scores of Dutch newspapers, only three ceased to publish rather than accept German supervision.

Says Lindwer: "In short, the Dutch Holocaust was carried out almost entirely by Dutch citizens. In actuality, Holland holds the worst record among Western European countries in regards to the fate of its Jewish population."

Lindwer decided he had to prove this. He traveled to Groningen, a provincial city in the northern part of Holland where all but 150 of the city's 3,000 Jews were killed, and to Varsseveld, a countryside village on the eastern border where Lindwer's own aunt and uncle were turned in to the Nazi authorities by a local family.

During his travels, Lindwer interviewed two former Dutch policemen and one train conductor who were involved in the massacre of Dutch Jewry; one Dutch survivor, who now lives in Israel; and the current mayor of Groningen, Jacques Wallage, who helped Lindwer finally uncover the government's records of its participation in the destruction of the city's Jewish population.

The end result is Lindwer's 18th film about the Holocaust, Goodbye Holland which was made by and shown on Holland's Channel 1 NCRV-Dokument slot.

Lindwer recalls trying to air his first film, about the dubious role of the Dutch police during the occupation, on public television in The Netherlands in 1969.

"While I was working on the film, many police officials with a doubtful war past were still sitting in high positions," he explains. "They refused to show it because the subject was too delicate and too controversial."

According to Lindwer, not much has changed since then.

"Thirty-five years later, I have once again encountered enormous opposition."

In addition to its television screening in The Netherlands, Goodbye Holland will be shown on Channel 2 on Holocaust Remembrance Day; the first part on April 18 at 10 p.m. and the second on April 19 at 7 p.m.

"We have never shown anything on television about the Jews of Holland during the Holocaust," says Yossi Mulla, Executive Producer at Channel 2, which also screened the film. "Here in Israel, most of us don't think beyond the story of Anne Frank, but Lindwer's investigation tells a whole different story."