03 April 2010
From
Expatica:
Candid but demure, an online sex shop for Muslims has been launched in the Netherlands to tap into a demand for erotica that does not offend Sharia law. "We had about 70,000 hits in the first four days," founder Abdelaziz Aouragh told AFP of his site that went online last week and claims to be the world's first erotic webshop for Muslims. The 29-year-old Dutch national said it targets married Muslim couples as an alternative to sites "that focus on pornography and the extravagant side of erotica" -- things forbidden in Islam. The home page of
El Asira, which means "Society" in Arabic, is a sober black and grey street with a line down the centre, inviting women to enter on the left and men on the right.
In one sense, it is also a very Dutch product -- like Aouragh himself. Of Moroccan parentage, he was born and raised in Amsterdam and remains a practicing Muslim while embracing typically Dutch tolerance and search for consensus. He says he, like many, used to think Islam looked upon sexuality as taboo until his friend-turned business partner Stefan Delsink prompted him to look further. "There is a very stereotypical idea both inside and outside the community on Muslim sexuality," he said. So Aouragh, who is married, set about consulting Islamic religious leaders and scholars to see what his business venture could sell and to whom.
Read the full article
here
(It appears that the
website is temporarily disabled due to massive traffic.)
01 November 2009
From the
Financial Times:
Cycling along a street in the east of Amsterdam five years ago on Monday, Theo van Gogh, the outspoken Dutch film-maker, was shot and, as he slumped on the ground, his murderer slit his throat and pinned a letter to his dead body. The killing of Van Gogh, targeted by a second-generation Dutch Moroccan because of a film critical of Islam and notorious anti-Muslim remarks, shocked the nation and intensified an already heated debate about the "Dutchness" of the country's 1m Muslims. Five years later, Geert Wilders, the far-right politician who was among the critics of Islam threatened in the blood-stained letter attached to Van Gogh's chest, still lives under the permanent police protection hastily arranged after the murder. In a sign of prevailing sentiment, Mr Wilders' Freedom Party, which would seek to end all immigration by Muslims and ban the Koran, has seen a surge of support and is polling 17 per cent of the vote , enough to make it the second biggest party in parliament were an election held tomorrow.
Job Cohen, Amsterdam's centre-left Jewish mayor since 2001, acknowledged that little had changed since he used a Holocaust Memorial Day speech almost two years ago to warn that fear and suspicion among ethnic groups were at a postwar peak. But investment by the city in "anti-radicalisation" programmes has made a tangible, if unverifiable, difference, he says. "We're more able to find people who might radicalise and we have found methods to bring them, as much as we can, to a more normal path," he said. "I think the risk of [a Van Gogh-style murder] happening again is much lower." As well as encouraging teachers, youth workers and others to signal concerns about the 2 per cent of young Muslims seen as at risk to radicalisation, the city has sought contact with mosques and religious organisations and tried to foster "social networks".
Read the entire article
here.
05 October 2009
From the
Los Angeles Times:
The veiled women clutch their children's hands as they scurry past the liquor store, ignoring rows of vodka bottles on their way to the Muslim butcher's next door. Across the street, male customers emerge from the Climax sex shop with their purchases and quickly stride away without a second glance at the Turkish kebab restaurant just opening for lunch.The conservative and liberal, religious and secular, Dutch and foreign stand side by side here in Rotterdam, in a contrasting and at times uneasy coexistence where social and cultural middle ground can be elusive.
The job of finding that middle ground has now fallen onto the shoulders of a thoughtful Moroccan-born Muslim who arrived in Rotterdam just nine months ago. His address: the mayor's office. Ahmed Aboutaleb is the first Muslim immigrant to lead a major Dutch city.
How the 48-year-old Aboutaleb fares as mayor could well have an effect beyond Rotterdam's borders. With ethnic minorities accounting for almost half its population, the city serves in many ways as a laboratory of demographic change for the rest of the Netherlands, and potentially other parts of Europe. Thus far into his six-year term, analysts say, the bespectacled Aboutaleb has trod softly, getting a feel for Rotterdam's tricky political landscape. Though he is a member of the city's ruling left-wing Labor Party, as mayor he is supposed to hold himself above party politics. Within the last several weeks, however, Aboutaleb has said that he intends to step into the debate on integration. Although he has not specified how, it will mean navigating a minefield of competing beliefs, agendas and power plays by politicians, activists and bureaucrats.
As mayor, Aboutaleb must gingerly maneuver a cultural war pitting those who believe Dutch liberal, secular society to be under threat from a growing religious minority against others who say that Muslims and other immigrants have been unfairly scapegoated. Right-wing politicians demanded that Aboutaleb demonstrate his loyalty by giving up his Moroccan passport (he holds dual nationality). Geert Wilders, the country's most inflammatory public figure, declared that Aboutaleb's appointment was "as ridiculous as appointing a Dutchman as mayor of Mecca."
Read the entire article
here
28 June 2009
From the
New York Times
Of all things, historical and cultural, that link Amsterdam to New York, there is a particular bond that strikes a personal chord with Carolien Gehrels. Mrs. Gehrels, the deputy mayor of Amsterdam, will be among a delegation of officials from the Netherlands who are flying to New York this weekend to attend gay pride celebrations and to embrace efforts to legalize same-sex marriage in New York State. “We talk about the shared DNA of the two cities, the legacy of tolerance, the openness and the international orientation,” Mrs. Gehrels said in an interview, “and that’s exactly what we celebrate this year.” Mrs. Gehrels brings a personal perspective to the issue: she is married to a woman. She said that while the approval of gay marriage in the Netherlands that took effect in 2001 was “a milestone in equal rights,” even eight years later “equality and freedom are never self-evident.” Same-sex partnerships were legalized in 1998.
She said the legislation pending in Albany deserved a full debate. “This is exactly what happened in the Netherlands before the legalization of same-sex marriage,” she said. “The debate as well as the legal recognition meant an enormous step forward in the acceptance of homosexuality in Dutch society.” On Friday, she is expected to join advocates for gays and lesbians at New York University to mark the Stonewall uprising, which helped inspire the gay rights movement, and to endorse equality for gays and lesbians, including the same-sex marriage legislation.
Her visit this weekend reflects a broader collaboration between the two cities as they celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival in New York in September 1609 of Henry Hudson, an English explorer commissioned by the Dutch East India Company. “Amsterdam, like New York, is more progressive than the rest of the country,” Mrs. Gehrels said, “and Amsterdam, like New York, is a gay capital. It’s a key part of the policy of the city, though not every citizen likes it. There’s always a struggle when you are a minority, but Amsterdam has a history as a city of minorities and in Amsterdam almost everyone is a minority.”
Read the entire article
here.
30 January 2009
From the
New York Times, by Ian Buruma:
If it were not for his hatred of Islam, Geert Wilders would have remained a provincial Dutch parliamentarian of little note. He is now world-famous, mainly for wanting the Koran to be banned in his country, “like Mein Kampf is banned,” and for making a crude short film that depicted Islam as a terrorist faith — or, as he puts it, “that sick ideology of Allah and Muhammad.” Last year the Dutch government decided that such views, though coarse, were an acceptable contribution to political debate. Yet last week an Amsterdam court decided that Mr. Wilders should be prosecuted for “insulting” and “spreading hatred” against Muslims. Dutch criminal law can be invoked against anyone who “deliberately insults people on the grounds of their race, religion, beliefs or sexual orientation.”
Whether Mr. Wilders has deliberately insulted Muslim people is for the judges to decide. But for a man who calls for a ban on the Koran to act as the champion of free speech is a bit rich. When the British Parliament refused to screen Mr. Wilders’s film at Westminster this week, he cited this as “yet more proof that Europe is losing its freedom.” His defenders, by no means all right-wingers, also claim to be standing up for freedom. A Dutch law professor said he found it “strange” that a man should be prosecuted for “criticizing a book.” This seems a trifle obtuse. Comparing a book that billions hold sacred to Hitler’s murderous tract is more than an exercise in literary criticism; it suggests that those who believe in the Koran are like Nazis, and an all-out war against them would be justified. This kind of thinking, presumably, is what the Dutch law court is seeking to check.
The lawsuit against Mr. Wilders has been hailed in the Netherlands as a good thing for democracy. I am not so sure. It makes him look more important than he should be. In fact, the response of Dutch Muslims to his film last year was exemplary: most said nothing at all. And when a small Dutch Muslim TV station offered to broadcast the film, after all other stations had refused, the grand champion of free speech resolutely turned the offer down.
Read the entire article
here
29 December 2008
From
The International Herald Tribune:
Two years ago, the Dutch could quietly congratulate themselves on having brought what seemed to be a fair measure of consensus and reason to the meanest intersection in their national political life: the one where integration of Muslim immigrants crossed Dutch identity. In the run-up to choosing a new government in 2006, just 24 percent of the voters considered the issue important, and only 4 percent regarded it as the election's central theme. What a turnabout, it seemed - and whatever the reason (spent passions, optimism, resignation?), it was a soothing respite for a country whose history of tolerance was the first in 21st-century Europe to clash with the on-street realities of its growing Muslim population.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the Netherlands had lived through something akin to a populist revolt against accommodating Islamic immigrants led by Pim Fortuyn, who was later murdered; the assassination of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, accused of blasphemy by a homegrown Muslim killer; and the bitter departure from the Netherlands of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who became a member of Parliament before being marked for death for her criticism of radical Islam.
Now something fairly remarkable is happening again.
Two weeks ago, the country's biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch "tolerance." It came at the same time Nicolas Sarkozy was making a case in France for greater opportunities for minorities that also contained an admission that the French notion of equality "doesn't work anymore."
But there was a difference. If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims' obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor's chairperson, was exceptional. The paper said: "The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance." Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of "loss and estrangement" felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs. "Without a strategy to deal with these issues, all discussion about creating opportunities and acceptance of diversity will be blocked by suspicion and negative experience."
And that comes from the heart of the traditional, democratic European left, where placing the onus of compatibility on immigrants never found such comfort before. It's a point of view that makes reference to work and education as essential, but without the emphasis that they are the single path to integration. Rather, Labor's line seems to stand on its head the old equation of jobs-plus-education equals integration. Conforming to Dutch society's social standards now comes first. Strikingly, it turns its back on cultural relativism and uses the word emancipation in discussing the process of outsiders' becoming Dutch.
Read the entire article
here.
18 February 2008
'I don't hate Muslims. I hate Islam,' says Holland's rising political star. Geert Wilders, the popular MP whose film on Islam has fuelled the debate on race in Holland, wants an end to mosque building and Muslim immigration.
The Guardian's Ian Traynor met him in The Hague.
The Guardian
10 February 2008
The Netherlands frets about the likely impact of a new anti-Islam film. From
The Economist.
Of further interest:
A 2006 article about banning burqas in public space, Islam and Dutch tolerance:
Facing up to Islam in the Netherlands (OpenDemocracy.net).
A Wikipedia entry about Islam in the Netherlands:
Wikipedia.
04 February 2008
"When "tolerance" becomes a word of abuse in a place like the Netherlands, you know that something has gone seriously wrong. The Dutch have always taken pride in being the most tolerant people on Earth. And in less feverish times, no one could possibly have taken exception to Queen Beatrix's speech last Christmas, when she pleaded for tolerance and "respect for minorities." But Geert Wilders, leader of the right-wing, anti-Muslim Freedom Party, was so disgusted by the queen's "multicultural rubbish" that he wanted her to be stripped of her constitutional role in the government."
From "The politics of resentment" by Ian Buruma in the Los Angeles Times. Read the article
here.
31 January 2008
Porn classic Deep Throat is at the centre of a political row involving Dutch public television. From
Radio Netherlands.
And the outcome:
Minister Allows Porn Movie on Public Broadcasting.
