Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts
Netherlands: US Ambassador Hoekstra assailed in media over Muslim no-go zone comments
Jan 12, 2018 5:21 am By Christine Douglass-Williams 22 Comments
The Islamic supremacists along with their socialist leftist companions are out with their clubs. This time it’s in the Netherlands, and the hunted victim is US Ambassador Peter Hoekstra.
A mocking article in the Independent — “Donald Trump’s new ambassador to Netherlands struggles to defend claim Muslims ‘burned’ Dutch politicians” — zeroes in on a 2015 statement by Hoekstra, and he and Trump are now being bashed with it.
Hoekstra stated back then “about the chaos the ‘Islamic movement’ had brought to the Netherlands”:
There are cars being burned, there are politicians that are being burned….. and yes, there are no-go zones in the Netherlands.
Despite the hoopla about this old Hoekstra reference, the much larger issue is his accuracy in warning about “the Islamic movement” and “no-go zones.” In a Bloomberg report –-“Why the Dutch Turned Against Immigrants” — the demise of a once peaceful, respectable, picturesque neighborhood is described. It turned into a squalid place where “people started experiencing bad things — cars scratched, elevators urinated in.” A mosque with questionable ties to jihad terror was also built there.
Some more concerns for the Netherlands:
- In a parliamentary speech in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders stated: “In our country today, Christians are being told: ‘We want to murder you all.’ Jews receive death threats. Swastika flags at demonstrations, stones go through windows, Molotov cocktails, Hitler salutes are being made, macabre black ISIS flags wave in the wind, we hear cries, such as ‘F-ck the Talmud,’ on the central square in Amsterdam.”
- While no politician was literally burned in the Netherlands, there are certainly those who were “burned” in the figurative sense. Among them was Wilders, who has been dragged into court several times on spurious “hate speech” charges, and must travel with a team of bodyguards everywhere for the crime of offending Islam. Pim Fortuyn, “an energetic populist leader who had become one of the first Dutch politicians to actively criticize Islam, was shot dead in 2002.” Also, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was once a Dutch politician, who collaborated on the movie Submission, which was critical of Islam’s treatment of women, with film director Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street by a Muslim who said he did it because van Gogh offended Islam. He left a note including a hit list of future victims, including Hirsi Ali, who now also lives under guard.
- No-go zones are a real threat all across Europe, and the Netherlands is no exception. In neighboring Belgium, only 118 miles away, police have lost control of the dangerous no-go zone of Molenbeek ; a car fire epidemic was also recently reported to be raging in the also nearby no-go zone in Stockholm. Sweden is less than 800 miles from the Netherlands.
- Sweden is on the verge of civil war. Policing is so difficult that 80 percent of police want to quit their jobs. Sweden’s National Police Commissioner, Dan Eliasson, pleaded for assistance on TV, stating that “Swedish police forces no longer can uphold the law and therefore must ask all good powers in the country to support them.” Swedish Chief Prosecutor Lise Tamm has described the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby is like “a war zone”; Muslim migrants turned Sweden’s largest shopping center into a no-go zone, intimidating police, harassing girls and openly dealing drugs.
Pete Hoekstra is being disparaged wrongly for his important warnings, in a global climate that features a glaring double standard regarding public statements from those on the left and those on the right. Take some examples close to home:
- Leftist so-called feminist leader Linda Sarsour tweeted out about activists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brigitte Gabriel: “I wish I could take their vaginas away,” while she and her supporters ignore the practices of child marriage, polygamy, honor violence, FGM and the overall inferior status of women under the sharia.
- Islamic hate preachers who call for the death of Jews and Zionists and the destruction of Israel, even in the U.S. and Canada, also escape accountability.
- University of California professor Hatem Bazian co-founder of the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine, called for an intifada in America. He suffered no professional consequences.
- Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized to jihadist Omar Khadr and paid him 10.5 million dollars for allegedly being treated too harshly in Gitmo. The Prime Minister also welcomes returning Islamic State jihadists back home, and meets privately with Joshua Boyle, a suspected jihadist with 15 criminal charges.
- Canadian Liberal MP Chris Bittle has labeled anti-Islamic State protesters “white supremacists.”
Hoekstra, meanwhile, is mocked in public. Political reporter Roel Geeraedts states that “he believed that Hoekstra’s behaviour confirmed some suspicions the Dutch have about the Trump administration.” Geeraedts wasted no opportunity to bash Trump as he made himself out to be spokesperson of “the Dutch” in a broad sweep. Dutch reporters focused on the one inaccuracy in Hoekstra’s statement:
Mr. Ambassador, can you mention any example of a Dutch politician who was burned in recent years?
Public space for discussion, intellectual investigation, inquiry and even necessary scrutiny in the West is narrowing. Woe be unto anyone who warns about the hijrah, the jihad threat and the Muslim Brotherhood’s ambitions. He or she will be accused of racism, Islamophobia, white supremacism, xenophobia, intolerance, etc. Even Ayaan Hirsi Ali was called “a white supremacist” by a group of Muslim women ahead of her planned visit to Australia.
Hoekstra stated before Christmas: “I made certain remarks in 2015 and regret the exchange during the Nieuwsuur interview. Please accept my apology.” That wasn’t enough. The gang-up against Hoekstra at his “first conference with the Dutch media” is reminiscent of the days of witch-hunts and mob lynchings. Did he make a mistake? In the details, yes, but were his warnings to the Netherlands false or unwarranted? No.
Mass rapes of infidel women across Europe are real, the Islamic vision of the conquest of the House of War is real. The accuracy of Hoekstra’s warnings should far overshadow his mistakes.
“Donald Trump’s new ambassador to Netherlands struggles to defend claim Muslims ‘burned’ Dutch politicians”, by Eli Rosenberg and Amar Nadhir, Independent, January 11, 2018:
Peter Hoekstra, the newly minted US ambassador to the Netherlands, held his first conference with the Dutch media at his new residence in the Hague on Wednesday.
It did not go well.
Dutch journalists peppered Hoekstra, who became Donald Trump’s ambassador after serving 18 years as a Republican congressman from Michigan, with questions on unsubstantiated claims he made in 2015 about the chaos the “Islamic movement” had brought to the Netherlands.
“There are cars being burned, there are politicians that are being burned,” he had said at a conference hosted by a conservative group. “And yes, there are no-go zones in the Netherlands.”
The comments have widely been described as inaccurate, and reflect certain conspiracies about sharia law that crop up in some circles of the far-right in the West. When pressed by the Dutch reporters, Hoekstra declined to retract the comments or give specific examples to back them up.
In fact, after saying that he would be “revisiting the issue,” he simply refused to answer the question at all.
But the reporters were not done with the line of questioning yet. Instead of moving on, another reporter would simply ask a variation on the question again.
“Everybody there had one question: that crazy statement you made, are you going to withdraw it?” said Roel Geeraedts, a political reporter at the Dutch television station RTL Nieuws in a phone interview about the event. “We were not getting answers, so we all kept asking it.”
Geeraedts published a segment with video of the remarkable exchange on social media.
After at least one person had asked the question, Geeraedts followed up to ask Hoekstra about a John Adams quote – Adams was the United States’ first ambassador to Holland – that was mounted right behind the ambassador. Hoekstra said he had read the quote, which expresses Adams’ hope that only “honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”
“If you’re truly an honest and wise man, could you please take back the remark about burned politicians or name the politician that was burned in the Netherlands?” Geeraedts asked.
An uncomfortable silence followed the question.
“Thank you,” Hoekstra said, before trying to call on someone else over the clamour of the reporters in the room.
“Excuse me, I asked you a question,” Geeraedts said.
Another journalist jumped in.
“Mr. Ambassador, can you mention any example of a Dutch politician who was burned in recent years?”
Again, silence, as Hoekstra stared around the room.
“This is the Netherlands, you have to answer questions,” another reporter said.
Sherry Keneson-Hall, an embassy counselor who was helping run the news conference, pushed back, asserting that Hoekstra was answering the questions.
At least one more journalist fired the question off. Reporters had asked the question at least five times.
“We were all astonished that he didn’t want to take back the comment. It was simply untrue, so why not take it back?” said Geeraedts. “It was awkward, to be honest.”
Hoekstra has been in hot water in the Netherlands for the remarks since he was first confronted by a Dutch journalist, Wouter Zwart, in December. Hoekstra falsely claimed to Zwart that he had never made the remarks and called them “fake news.” Moments later, he denied that he had called them fake news.
Video of the bizarre exchange, juxtaposed with his “no-go zone” remarks, went viral, and the episode drew a slew of critical headlines in the United States and the Netherlands.
Hoekstra’s silence when faced with reporters’ questions on Wednesday drew a similar response….
Hoekstra pointed to the public regrets he had made for the exchange with Zwart on Wednesday. But he did not clarify whether the apology was meant to include the no-go zone comments when asked on Wednesday. At one point, he seemed to indicate that he was most concerned about the interview, not the statements.
“It is not about my personal views anymore. This is about the views on the policies of the United States of America as directed by this administration,” he said. “One interview is not going to have an impact. The other thing I just want to reinforce, this relationship has been maintained by countless people over the last 400 years, this is not about me.”
A CNN report published this week documented multiple times Hoekstra had referred to “no-go zones,” in European cities during appearances on conservative media, including talk radio, and a print op-ed, and unearthed other instances where he had given fuel to conspiracy theories about Muslims.
He speculated that some 10-15 percent of the Muslim community in the world – 270 million people – were radical Islamist militants and appeared to imply that Huma Abedin had “egregious” ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a claim that The Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, and other publications, have determined as “bogus.” On another far-right show, Hoekstra said he had considered the possibly that President Barack Obama might be intentionally aiding the rise of Muslim extremists….
Geeraedts said he believed that Hoekstra’s behaviour confirmed some suspicions the Dutch have about the Trump administration.
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