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Radio ReOrient 14:8: Dutch Islamophobia and Muslim Exceptionalism, with Martijn de Koning, hosted by Marchella Ward and Amina Easat-Daas
00:54:47
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- [00:01]
Chella Ward
Welcome to the new books network.
- [00:32]
Claudia Radovan
Foreign.
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Martijn de Koning
You're listening to Radio Reorient, the decolonial podcast in partnership with the New Books Network.
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Amina Isat Das
Salaam Alaikum, listeners, and welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient. In this episode, we are joined by Martine de Koning to discuss Islamophobia in the Netherlands.
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Effy
Our conversation centered on a recent example of Islamophobia in the Netherlands, exploring the surveillance and securitization of Muslimness and questioning national myths of tolerance in the Dutch context.
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Chella Ward
Dr. De Koning is an associate professor in Islam, politics and society at Radboud University in the Netherlands and has written on Dutch Islamophobia and foreign fighters in Syria.
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Claudia Radovan
The conversation covered a wide breadth of topics. So without further ado, let's listen in.
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Effy
Assalamu Alaikum, listeners, and welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient. In this episode, we are really, really delighted to be joined by Martijn de Koning, who's gonna be telling us a little bit about some of his work on Islamophobia in the Netherlands. My name is Chella Ward. I'm joined by my co host, Amina Isat Das, and we're going to be having this conversation with Martijn. So, Martin, welcome to Radio Reorient and thank you ever so much for giving us your time to join us. I wondered whether you might start perhaps just by telling our listeners a little bit about who you are and the work that you do.
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Martijn de Koning
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thank you both for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here. Yeah. So my name is Martijna Koening. I'm associate professor of Islam, Politics and Society at Rappard University in Nijmegen. In my teaching, mostly dealing with Islam in Europe, the histories of Islam in Europe, and also the contemporary political developments. So, as I say to my students, never a boring day. And in my research, I have been working on Salafi Islam, Salafism, also Salafism as a topic of counter radicalization policies. Done a little project with the Dutch front fight Dutch, Belgian and German foreign fighters in Syria, and I think for the last, I don't know, five, six years, perhaps a little bit longer, focusing mostly on Islamophobia and in particular, institutional Islamophobia, the impact upon Muslim communities and how Muslim communities engage with that.
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Effy
Great, thank you. And I've been aware of your work for some time now. We met at a international conference on Islamophobia a couple of years ago. There are a number of different aspects of your work that I hope we'll we'll get the chance to come on to. But I wonder whether we might start with something that you. You have been following more recently, which is a. I'm going to call it the NTA affair. I think that's what it often gets called. Our listeners in all likelihood will not have any idea what that is or what happened there. And would you be able to tell us, you know, what is this thing that we're talking about? And then how does it relate to Islamophobia in the Netherlands?
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Martijn de Koning
Yeah.
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Chella Ward
Yeah.
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Martijn de Koning
Thank you. Yeah. And I mean, what is this thing? I think we're sort of still discovering what it actually is, but to sort
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Amina Isat Das
of
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Martijn de Koning
break it down in very clear and brief part. So on the national level, we have the National Coordinator for counterterrorism, the nctva. The NCTVA ordered the municipalities to commission research on terrorism and radicalization among the local Muslim communities. First thing you have to keep in your mind is the national coordinator has no jurisdiction here whatsoever. They should not have. It was not legal for them to ask this. The municipalities then, and officially about 10, but I actually think it's about 20, commissioned that particular research with a private consultancy firm. Again, municipalities have no jurisdiction here, are not allowed to commission this kind of research. The private consultancy firm is actually, however, allowed to carry out the research. So what did they do? They basically went to organizations of Muslims, Moscow organizations, women's organizations, student organizations, not announcing that they were doing research on terrorism and radicalism, but basically as visitors, just plain visitors. In some cases, they also visited people at home or were invited at people's home. Also important, these investigations did not take place among Moscow organizations that were sort of publicly suspected of being radical. No, these were the organizations the municipalities cooperated with, because it was unclear, and this is about 2015 through 2017. 18. It was unclear how, as they called it, resilience. These communities were against terrorism and radicalization. And I think you can see some of the dynamics in relation to Islamophobia here. First of all, and that's not specific for Islamophobia, but nevertheless, it's important how national security gets framed as a sort of extraordinary issue, legitimizing extraordinary measures. And in this particular case, so extraordinary that they actually went beyond that jurisdiction. So what did we do afterwards? We have now legalized these practices. They can actually do it at this point. Second, and I think we come closer to the core of Islamophobia. We do not do this kind of things with the far right. We're not going to look at like Say football clubs with non hooligan fan base like this. I mean police intelligence service may be active, that's definitely possible. But that's different than the municipality actually ordering a private consulting. Apparently we do this with the mosques. And the reasoning was there were attacks by Islamic State, so there were concerns about the local Muslim community. This was also used afterwards as a legitimization of this particular practice. But the whole reasoning is in fact Islamophobic in itself. And also, of course we don't respond to any, to every is attack, only the ones in Europe. I mean, yeah, we can already see a sort of selection and we also saw something interesting in the sense, I think, and that's something, for example, Sheri Na Mo often speaks about sort of this interrogation of Muslims. None of these investigations yielded any signs of concern, serious threats on terrorism and radicalization. Which was not to say, okay, that's it, that's the conclusion. No, in some cases it was said, oh, we haven't found anything. Yeah, perhaps we should look further. And I'm quite sure they're not going to come up with anything then as well. So that basically it never stops, the interrogation never stops. And it's not by definition that they're. They're saying, okay, Muslims are terrorists. That's not their point. The point is Muslims are risk and we do risk assessment. But it's really, I mean, I'm not going to say that I'm not a risk in, I don't know, 50 years from now on. Okay, 50 may be a bit exaggerated but because I don't know, I can't predict the future. So basically you're asking to, you're asking people to defend themselves against something they have no clue about.
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Chella Ward
Yeah.
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Martijn de Koning
And that's the sort of policy design that is developed with Muslims as a sort of experimental group which is applied mainly to Muslims and also sort of legitimized through an Islamophobic reasoning. So I think there you have the connections.
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Effy
Yeah, I love that idea that not being suspicious might in itself be suspicious.
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Martijn de Koning
Right.
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Effy
We need to look into this further because we found nothing suspicious. That is such a perfect encapsulation of some of the ways that those policies that get referred to as counter terror policies can be completely fly in the face of any kind of sensible logic or kind of calculation of risk. Sorry, Amini, did you want to come in? I cut you off.
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Amina Isat Das
Absolutely fine. Absolutely fine. I think it's quite interesting the sort of, the exceptionalizing of Muslimness and the exceptionalizing of measures to then set precedent in The Dutch context. And I was also thinking for our listeners, so we talk about the UK quite a lot on the podcast, given where a lot of us are based. We look at France, we look across other European cases, but we're not as familiar with the Dutch case. So we've kind of begun to touch on this a counter terror radicalization aspect. And at the same time, I'm sure for many people, the stereotype that exists about the Netherlands is it being an incredibly tolerant, liberal place. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about the nature of Dutch Islamophobia.
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Martijn de Koning
Yeah, yeah, great point. Thank you. Yeah, so I think it's one of them more, it's a steady myth of Dutch society that it's a tolerant society. So in 2002, far right populist rights politician Bim Putine was killed and some international newspapers sort of headlined Dutch Tolerance got killed. Two years later, Eric was murdered, the Islamophobic TV director and writer. And then some newspapers came up with the same headline, Dutch Tolerance murdered. So how, I mean, how often can you actually murder Dutch tolerance? Well, quite often. And I call it the myth. Not so much, by the way, as saying that's not true at all. I mean, there's definitely a sort of norm of having to tolerate. Having to tolerate something particular that could be acceptable or can be made acceptable. So it's also a sort of national origin story. It sort of tells the story for the Dutch. Where do we come from, what are we, who are we and where are we going to? And basically, in all those episodes, Torrence is sort of the keyword. So that's bits. What I mean, with myth, the origin is not entirely clear, but it definitely have a sort of normative take. It doesn't mean at all that it's actually true in every sphere of society. But here does play an important role because one of the things national security has to protect is our tolerance. And we can't be tolerant to the people who are intolerant. So the terrorists and the criminals and what have you, they hate preachers and what have you. So, exceptional measures. And of course, exceptional in this case very much from the point of the state and the rule of law, because I think for the racialized communities, minorities, it's actually not that exceptional. Definitely, if you look at the longer history, definitely, if you look, I think for France, for example, the Algerian community, they have sort of had their history with a lot of exceptional stuff, but here the exceptional is sort of justified by saying, okay, in order to save our tolerance, we have to be intolerant against those who are intolerant. There's no other option. It's almost as if saying to the radicals or the extremists or whoever, see what you make me do. But it's really sort of, we have to save Dutch identity, Dutch liberalism, the freedom, the tolerance and so on. And here you can also see, of course, the sort of securitization logic that we have to sort of save one group security at the expense of another group, sort of the, basically the suspect community. And I think in terms of neoliberalism is important for the Dutch context because it's very much focused on, on individual, individual and collective responsibility of the Muslim community. So basically you could almost say, I think integration policy is responsibilizing the Muslim community, that sort of the attempt and also in relation to counter negotiation. So Muslim community and many actually want to take up responsibility for combating radicalization, for promoting integration and so on. But again, it's specifically and most of the time explicitly targeting the Muslim communities, problematizing them, seeing them as a direct or indirect threat. And basically you could say this whole tolerance aspect is on the one hand, the sort of idealization of white supremacy, white Christians supremacy, and a very antagonistic racialization of Muslim communities. But in the past, also the Jewish community, still the black communities, and so on.
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Effy
It's interesting how in the story that you're telling there about Dutch Islamophobia, we see a characteristic that we're quite used to seeing in other patterns of global Islamophobia, which is the idea of the Muslim as opposed in some way with the national character. Right. So, so Muslim. So Dutchness becomes kind of synonymous with tolerance, with liberalism, with this kind of idealized live and let live attitude. And so the Muslim, by contrast, you know, is, is that which is intolerant, is that which, you know, and I suspect that we, that we see a kind of, kind of over emphasis on these sorts of Islamophobic ideas, like that Muslims are homophobic, for example. And you know, we get Muslims positioned as that which attacks sort of national character of the Netherlands. And it doesn't seem to matter what that national character is. You know, that can change depending on where the Islamophobia is. We get this repeated pattern of, of the Muslim as that which cannot fit within the, the national character which is a function of.
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Claudia Radovan
Of.
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Effy
Of the nation state. Would you say that's the case in the Netherlands?
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Martijn de Koning
Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, I think that's definitely the case. And, and sometimes quite directly, quite clearly but sometimes also a little bit more subtle and also even in academic circles because sort of what you get, and it's also sort of the origin story told in academic circles is Muslims came to the Netherlands in the 1950s and the 1960s as guest workers. Later on as refugees. They were supposed to leave, but hey, they didn't. And now we have third or fourth generations and it's basically an Islamophobic story because what you do is you put Muslims as being people who are not from here, read, do not belong here, who also something, for example, Sakhan Baraka has also written about. They are sort of late to the party. So they came in the 1960s when the Netherlands was still sort of pillarized Christian nation. Also in itself identification. And we rapidly lost it after that to a certain extent. And yeah, tough luck for the Muslims actually. I mean they could have made use of all those rules and regulations for religion. They can actually still, it's still quite robust actually. But they're just late to the party or in a little bit more sort of toxic way of saying that they're backward. They're backward, they come from a different time and therefore, because they are from elsewhere, come from a different time. They are, they are actually different than us in this, in this way. Okay, that strongly you, you won't see it a lot in academia, but basically also I could. If you look at the, the school books, if you look at academic articles or books, you often see the history of Islam in Netherlands starting somewhere in the 1950s and 1960s. Well, you can actually go back to centuries before if you include the colonies. Of course we're talking about Muslims in a sort of oppressed state. But yeah, I mean that's actually exactly my point. They were part of the Netherlands because we took them and then oppressed them. But it also means a lot of like mosques stuff in language. Yeah, it's basically there that it's that it's that it's much older and sort of telling this. The post second World War story basically reinforces the whole Islamophobia myth of Muslims being out of place and out of time.
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Effy
I'm really struck by how that echoes this kind of narrative of the Muslim as the late comer, which you know, is, is in a sense the history of, of or the, the way the story of so much European Islamophobia specifically is told. The idea of this kind of pre Islamic white Europe that gets tainted, you know, by this late coming Muslimness that has arrived after the national character has already been shaped, when everything is already already done. People already have their identities. Muslimness comes. It interrupts that. And so it sort of, like you said, comes from a different time as well as a different place. And so that difference, you know, can never really be engaged with in any kind of productive way. And, and, and we could map that. And in fact, you know, you and I, Martine, in, in our project are mapping that onto kind of bigger Eurocentric narratives of, of history, like the way that the fall of Rome is narrated as a, as a problem of Muslimness. Right. As Muslims coming to destroy this kind of great European civilization. So there are many different narrative historiographically kind of get. Gets played out, I think. But I wondered whether I could ask you to come back a little bit to the NTA affair, because as I understand it, Muslims did not let themselves be had by this process. There was a fight back, was there not?
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Martijn de Koning
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's. That's really important point, basically. It's also. So when I work on Islamophobia and the impact of surveillance and stuff, my starting point is basically the perspective and sort of responses of those individual Muslims and Muslim organizations who engage with these kind of things. So that's always my starting point. And yeah, and people can talk back. And they did, but it's actually quite difficult in this case to talk back. But nevertheless, they did. To give you another example to the one I'm going to come to. So one municipality had also commissioned their research, which they shouldn't. They had a draft report of the investigation which was not anonymized, completely illegal. Then after this whole thing blew up in the media, and the local mosque there filed a freedom of information request, the municipality destroyed the draft report, which is also illegal. So they couldn't have it. That was illegal already. They shouldn't have destroyed it because that was also illegal. And now because of course they don't want to release any information about it, they are saying no, but according to the law, we can't actually give you. So they broke the law twice and now to not give any information, they actually hiding behind the law. In another case was also a municipality, Feynmanal, sort of in the center of the Netherlands, that was very reluctant at best to share any information, let alone to apologize and stuff. So one of the mosques who were. They were in the report together with an organization, Muslim Rights Watch, which I often work with, they basically went to court and they actually won. Quite surprising. But it's also quite surprising, I'm saying, because the municipality still did not want to Give a lot of information, but apparently they gave enough. And there the court actually made an important ruling in the sense that I think it's the first time that in the Netherlands the court has said that reasons of security do not immediately justify going beyond the rule of law. And I haven't seen that so far. And we had several cases in the past also with financial monitoring, involvement of youth workers, sharing information with youth care, stuff like that. And no court has said. But in this case the court has said that. And also I think what was interesting, it worked really well. So the mosque sort of teamed up with Muslim Rights Watch. Then basically Muslim Rights Watch handed their position over to a strategic litigation collective, pilp and they actually took over and they, yeah, sort of cooperated with one of the, I don't know, the sort of highbrow law firm somewhere in Amsterdam who did an amazing job. So you had the sort of the legal expertise, the political support, of course, the mosque in itself. And in all those layers, Muslims have been very visible and active. And I think that really has shown away a sort of one way, not ideal. There are some problems, I think, but it's definitely one way of fighting back to this exceptionalizing and racial securitization.
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Amina Isat Das
It's really interesting, the idea of sort of reclaiming Muslim agency in spite of the positions in which Muslimness is placed through these exceptionalizing measures. And I was wondering, given the kind of far right presence in the Netherlands as well, how was that verdict received? Because I think about the British context and when there are these small wins in the UK context, it does then tend to result in uprisings or discontent within the far right sphere of society. So how did that verdict go down in. In the Dutch context?
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Martijn de Koning
Yeah, good point. Not very well. There was a lot of critique called, some people call them, which is sort of an old trope by now. They courts which they say sestic then refers to one of the political parties, basically the number one from the last election, which is sort of progressive liberal party. And then of the course the judges are all progressive liberals. And there was also. And that was really one of the interesting things. So before the court case, the Ministry of Social affairs, who actually had no business at all in this scandal, but still they came up with a sort of project Restore Trust and they had a research and gathered Muslim communities and spokespersons and stuff. And there was this, of course, this court case and then a reaction to the court case, the one thing that came back in all spheres. So basically with the ministry, their research together openly with the Muslim Communities in the court case and also in the reactions on the court case was one particular reasoning that sort of circulated at the time. So 2015, 2018, there were attacks, terrorism attacks, and therefore, I've already said it before, and therefore we were concerned about the local Muslim community and we had to assess whether there was a risk or not and we had to do something. And it's the way the municipality of Henninal defended itself. It's a way the Ministry of Social affairs basically tried to excuse the practices by the municipality and it was a way to criticize the verdict of the court. So basically this Islamophobic reasoning and it come back so often, we can actually call it a trope by now, I think sort of was indeed the reason for the whole project in and of itself. It was the legitimization of the project and it has also been a part of the critique on the court's verdict which basically crushed the whole thing. So yeah, I mean there are so many different layers to unpack here, but this basic Islamophobic reasoning is basically part of everything.
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Effy
Effy, I love the idea that those Muslim communities essentially fought back in a way by using that same mechanism. Right. In, in a sense by, you know, you explained to us at the beginning that these so called, you know, counter terror or securitization measures often funct by saying something exceptional is happening. So we're going to use whatever it is, exceptional violence, exceptional surveillance, exceptional, you know, incursions on people's privacy, for example, and those that that exceptional circumstance then subsequently becomes a normal circumstance in this case. You know, the legal mechanism is almost working, it's almost a mirror image of that right that what ends up being said is, you know, not only was that inappropriate in this case, you know, and in fact it becomes a precedent for being able to say, well actually perhaps it's always inappropriate for security to be used as an excuse in that sense. So there's something there maybe about the kind of the political gains that Muslim communities can occasionally make through, you know, combating these kinds of securitization processes.
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Martijn de Koning
Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I mean, I think in that sense it's actually really, really important for this mosque and also Muslim Rights Watch, but also other organizations smelt Islamophobia, what they are doing because basically they are not defending only the constitutional rights of Muslims. They are basically defending the constitutional rights of all Dutch citizens. Because this is really. And of course it's sort of the lower court. We'll have to see what's, what's happening further on. But it is the first time that the court has clearly said, no, security does not justify everything. And that's an important ruling, not just for this mosque, but basically for the whole Dutch population.
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Effy
Yeah, and that makes me think about the relationship between tolerance and justice because, you know, you explained that the way that this, that Muslims in the Dutch state are kind of narrativized is that Muslims are in, you know, Dutchness is qualified by this kind of tolerance or the myth of tolerance at least, versus Muslimness. And Muslims are intolerant because Muslims are that which is in opposition with the kind of ethno nationalist myth of, of Dutchness. But here we've got an example actually of Muslimness defending itself and in the process defending the freedoms, the right to expression, you know, the, the. In other words, I can't think of the way to phrase it. What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say what's interesting here is that we've seen Muslims kind of coming out in defense of freedom when Muslims are being depicted as kind of anti free. So what it does is sort of undermine that myth of tolerance. It sort of dethrones tolerance, you know, from its position as the kind of ultimate liberal value. Right. By suggesting that there are other kinds of freedoms that might be important. So maybe this is sort of a small way of tapping a small hole into the wall of this kind of huge. I think you called it the origin myth of Dutchness in a way.
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Martijn de Koning
Yeah, I think it is. You know, and to a certain extent it's also tragic. I mean, it also means basically that there is no Muslim who can actually, you know, go through life unnoticed because you're always sort of a dangerous or problematic political subject. But yeah, I mean, you're completely right. I mean, if you look at those organizations, even if they are focusing almost exclusively on Muslims such as Muslim Rights Watch, but also, for example, melt Islamophobi in the context of the pro Palestine activism. They're definitely also focusing on people who are not Muslim, basically, because people who are not Muslim and who are participating in those protests are being called Muslims because, you know, I mean, you have to be Muslim to be anti genocide or something. So. And then. Yeah, no, in that sense they are really at the forefront and that is to a certain extent tragic. But I think we also have to be actually thankful they are at the forefront of defending constitutional rights in, in a time when through authoritarian government, through also the digitalization of surveillance has extended the state's possibilities to such an extent that really, I think Our liberties and our constitutional rights are being jeopardized.
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Amina Isat Das
Absolutely. I think that that's really interesting, the idea of Muslims using state tools that are allegedly so far out of their reach and their comprehens to challenge these myths. But also I think it comes back to a point that we repeat. I think quite often the idea that challenging Islamophobia is not just about protecting Muslims, it is about protecting society and the fundamental rights to which we all kind of want to uphold. And it's crucial we uphold. I feel like we could continue talking for quite some time longer, Martin, but unfortunately we have to wrap up here. So thank you ever so much for joining us today on another episode of Radio Reorient.
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Martijn de Koning
Now let's discuss what we've heard with
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Chella Ward
Claudia Radovan Chella Ward and his Amir. Welcome back, listeners. I hope you enjoyed this really exhilarating interview regarding the Netherlands and particularly this issue of surveillance, which of course is not limited to the Netherlands, but has become almost a global phenomenon. Cjella, you were involved in interviewing Dr. De Koenig. For me, when I think of the Netherlands, I think of certain tropes that have become iconic. Clogged shoes, cheese, windmills and tolerance. These seem to be almost the main factors when we look at the Netherlands. But what you have really exposed through Dr. De Koning is not so much a reputation of the windmills and the clogs and cheese, but certainly this idea of tolerance. How did you respond to his research and his scholarship on this?
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Effy
I think, for me, that's what's really, really interesting about Martijn's work is that we were able to go into this example that's often called the NTA affair. NTA refers to the company that we're tasked with with doing the surveillance of these Muslims who were illegally surveilled in the Netherlands. But we were able to go into this NTA affair through Martin's work on it. And because Martin's work is also at the same time so historiographical, so political, we're able to have much broader conversations that are really about how nations imagine themselves and how they produce these kinds of myths and imaginary. And in the Netherlands, a lot of that revolves around, and you heard this in our conversation, it revolves around ideas of tolerance, this kind of essentially liberal myth, which is that, you know, everything is acceptable and everything goes. And of course, what we've got here is a situation where Muslims are made the exception of those promises of liberalism, where it's essentially Muslims who do the work of countering Those myths of liberalism. And because Martijn's work is so involved with history, you know, he's the co editor of a book that's called Histories of Islam in Belgium and the Netherlands. And his work is so involved with history that we're able to kind of extrapolate out from those specific examples of Islamophobia some of the ways that Muslims can do that work of standing against liberal myths, not just of nation, but other kinds of liberal myths too.
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Chella Ward
Amina so you were also involved in the interview, and this whole idea about mythology, particularly about liberalism, was something that was already known to those in the colonial project and in many ways, particularly to Muslims. The legacy of the Dutch East India Company, for example, going to Indonesia, enslaving people and then moving them around the world to places like the Cape in South Africa, creating in fact, the group the Cape Malay. This paradox, this contradiction isn't really a contradiction, but it's a continuity, isn't it?
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Amina Isat Das
Absolutely, absolutely. I do think that the colonial legacy very much shapes this myth of tolerance in Dutch society, but also shapes that sort of shroud or cloak of respectability that it's given itself, that this is part of what a civilized liberal, quote, unquote, society does. So it's very much a continuity. And I think this continuity, although we spoke a lot about the Dutch context in this interview, this continuity of that liberal myth is something that's very much apparent in other contexts, right? The civilizational burden, the white man's burden, et cetera, are part of this sort of liberalizing project. And that paradox isn't seen in the eyes of the imagined state. The illogical nature of it isn't apparent. So I think it's very much historically rooted and a continuation of what we've seen in the past.
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Chella Ward
I always find it fascinating. People like the Dutch and the French and others, they always talk about allowing people into their country, giving them citizenship as emancipation, as though they were being liberated from. From themselves. Claudia One of the, I think, iconic examples of, of. Of Dutch intolerance, if you will. And that then brings us into this continuity that tolerance really is the myth. And the intolerance is the fact occurred in modern times in Srebrenica with the fact that here over 7,000 Bosnian Muslim males, both adults and children, are murdered. And it was in fact Dutch, quote, unquote, peacekeepers that were involved. I know that a lot of your work focuses on genocides. Speak to us about how you felt with this interview and with what Amina and Chella were bringing out regarding The Dutch and the way that they see themselves when it comes to tolerance.
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Claudia Radovan
I think drawing on what, you know, both Chella and Amina have just said, this kind of imagined history that states have about themselves and thinking in a broader European context as well. I don't by any stretch think this is something sort of exclusive to the Netherlands, but the idea of these sort of great savior nations, all the amazing work they've done, even the way that narratives around coloniality are reframed. And the UK is infamous for this. The quote, unquote, we brought trains to India. This kind of benevolence. We're almost like a liberating force, the colonizing force, you know, and if we take, if we take the example of Bosnia, one of the chief complaints of the victims, or rather the victims families, is how, you know, many different individuals and organizations were held to account for this, but the Dutch bat forces relatively little accountability. I think, you know, these stories that nations tell about themselves, there's the obvious reasonings, the kind of survival of a great nation story. How can you continue to talk about yourself as a great European nation if you acknowledge all of these wrongdoings? But how that then translates into sort of the contemporary, into our modern understandings of ourselves as nations is. You then have the outcomes that were discussed in the interview that we're discussing now, that you have whole portions of society that are entirely marginalized, that then, you know, I think there was sort of a really interesting point made in the interview, which was that the idea of saving Dutch tolerance by being intolerant of those who are intolerant. And it comes back to those paradoxes around what is actually intolerant behavior and what is allowed. And it becomes this kind of great circle of, of nations not acknowledging what they're doing, which, you know, if we think about colonialism and empire as a whole, that's. That's very par for the course.
- [42:34]
Chella Ward
Well, historical revisionism is nothing new, Cella. And I mean, here you see as, as Claudia said, there are major gaps in, in, in the British narrative, for example, in schools, the partition of India is not, is not taught. That that little thing that happened in the Americas in 1776, the War of Independence or the United States States is not taught. And while there was a certain kind of glorification, I mean, here you have Lord Nelson up on, on the column in London. What about those aspects which are, for lack of better words, the darker history, the idea of violence, the idea of brutality, the idea of genocide. From the Dutch standpoint, I suspect that not A whole lot is taught in the schools about the enslavement of the Indonesians and the brutality of, in, during the Boer wars of the indigenous people of southern Africa. How do you see this in the longer arc of history, especially when you look at the history of antiquity, how these tropes get formed, the glorification that gets formed and the vilification that gets formed of certain societies and civilizations.
- [43:42]
Effy
Well, I think while we were having that conversation with Martin, I was thinking about the way that ethno nationalism is constructed by, you know, these myths of identity, these myths of, of nation. And I'm actually working with Martin separately on, on a project that's about the Belgian historian Henri Piren. And we're working on his, his book Muhammad and Charlemagne, which is the book from which the myth is often said to come that it's Muslims who cause the end of antiquity. Right. Muslims cause the fall of Rome. That's the, the so called Perenn thesis, this. But through that project we've been reading sort of other books by Perrin and one of the things that Perrin did was write a seven volume history of Belgium where, and remember Perrin is writing only a generation after Belgium becomes formally speaking a nation in the 1830s, but he writes this book about the history of Belgium as if there's some kind of ancient civilization called the Belgians, you know, that's formed with the Romans. So these ideas of nation are often retrojected, right? They're often presented as having much longer histories than they in fact have. And in the Dutch context, specifically because I don't want to be held to account by listeners for having confused Dutchness and Belgian ness. I grew up in Belgium, so I'm aware of how live an issue that can be. But I think in the Dutch context where that for me plays out. And I'm going to take now a very unacademic example, but where that plays out is around the beginning of December every year where in the Netherlands, like in many other places in Europe, there's the celebration of someone who in Dutch is called Sinterklaas. We could translate that as, you know, Saint Nicholas. In French he's sometimes called Saint Nicolas. And Sinterklaas, you know, when I was growing up was accompanied by white actors who used to black up. They used to apply makeup to represent black enslaved people who were, you know, the, I guess the slaves of this person, Sinterklaas. And that has become in the Netherlands a really live issue because of the obvious racism of blacking up. But there's been real resistance to stopping the character who is usually portrayed by this kind of blacking up performance is called Swartha Pete. Right, Black Pete. And the kind of resistance sense to what to me is totally logical, which is that we should stop this kind of minstrel re performance of blacking up. The resistance to the idea that we should stop that has often drawn on the notion that this is some kind of ancient Dutch cultural practice and you know, that we're applying to it modernity in order to end what is this really long lasting practice. So, so that idea that the racism of nationalism and ethno nationalism is actually something ancient still continues in all of these kind of, very kind of day to day ways when we know that that ethnonationalism is actually relatively recent within the history of the world.
- [46:50]
Chella Ward
So Amina, on that point, I mean, here you see then that clearly we can dispel with the myth of Dutch tolerance. At the same time, I wonder that those who are part of the right wing movements in the Netherlands will actually take this as a badge of honor to say that they're continuing this long held tradition of intolerance, that it's not really as though they're pushing back on their society, being tolerant, but in fact being the preservers and the protectors of a legacy.
- [47:24]
Amina Isat Das
Well, I think in so many ways that underpins a lot of the culture wars we're seeing being borne out at present, right. The idea of this legacy and this history that must be protected. And I see that also in work that I do around Muslim women and the idea that regulating their bodies is a way of actually furthering the feminist project, which anyone with sort of logically looking from the outside can see that the general consensus is that we don't regulate women's bodies or bodies in society in that way as part of furthering the pathway to equality. And I think so many of these culture war type myths and narratives, that is definitely seen as a badge of honor. We are regulating practices that essentially target, demonize, stigmatize marginalized groups, be that post colonial communities, be that Muslim communities, as a mark of their progressiveness. So you have this paradox of, of intolerance control as part of a mark of a respectable, tolerant, liberal society. I think that irony escapes many of the far right agitators perhaps.
- [48:41]
Chella Ward
Well, one word that is of course always bandied about in these kinds of discussions, Claudia, especially with European countries, is migration. And I recall that the Dutch had made it so that for anyone who was migrating to the Netherlands, they had to watch a, a CD in which sexual tolerance was, was something that had to be acknowledged and respected for incoming migrants. And of course this was really targeted toward, toward Muslims who had certain sensitivities and sensibilities about this. And similarly, when it comes to drug tolerance with, with Amsterdam being seen as this bastion for, for certain drugs, I'm wondering about the whole idea about the Dutch having to mutate their values. I mean, as we started this conversation talking about windmills and cheese and, and, and wooden clogs. Now to say that what we really are defined by is, is our sexual parameters and permissiveness and our permissiveness for low category drugs, that metamorphosis just really intrigues me.
- [49:50]
Claudia Radovan
I think this is a really interesting point. I think it's very much related to these broader discourses around,
- [49:58]
Effy
well, more of
- [49:58]
Claudia Radovan
an Islamophobic trope than anything, that wherever there is a conversation about Muslims, especially in a migration capacity, that the topic of sex sexuality has to come into it almost like a fixation. And we see that in much broader discussions as well, in terms of recent acts of violence internationally, that there is always sort of this overtone, particularly in conflicts where people are told, oh, if you support them, why don't you go over there as a non CIS person, as a gay person and see how you'd fare. And so much of this has been proven to be false, but particularly it comes from, comes out to a lot of those discussions around kind of the Orientalist exoticization, the dangerous brown man, that wherever you have Muslim populations there is a threat to sexual sensibilities or women's kind of safety. And it's just wrapped up in this whole Orientalist history about the threat that Muslims pose. And it's, you know, they are both a threat sexually, but also a threat to other sexualities. And it's, it's been disproven and well, been demonstrated as kind of this major Islamophobic trope in so many different contexts. We see it in the UK with the narratives around grooming gangs, there were recent sort of riots, recent violence in Ireland as well around the threat of Muslim migrants. And it's all been proven to be part of that broader Islamophobic trope.
- [51:42]
Chella Ward
Well, also I would add that it's about a Europe that went from defining itself affirmatively to now Europe defining itself as to what it's not. And oftentimes that's juxtaposed against Muslims. Well, we could of course go on with this, this conversation, but we want to thank you for listening to Radio Reorient and this particular episode. And we look forward to to listening in on another episode. And we hope that you do as well.
- [52:08]
Martijn de Koning
This is Radio Reorient exploring the east atmosphere and navigating the post Western. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism?