The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [48]
Many immigrants have experienced extreme pressure and constraint. I wonder if this might be a useful experience to help turn Memorial Day into more than just a ritual that loses its true meaning as time goes by. The culture of free speech is shaping whole generations of immigrants and forces many to rethink and sometimes dismiss old customs. But it also allows them to ask questions about the collective memory as it developed over the years in the Netherlands, a memory that is resistant to many questions. Some of these were officially acknowledged for the first time when Queen Beatrix made an official speech for the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war: “For an objective account of what happened we must not conceal the fact that the occupier encountered the heroic resistance of some, as well as the passive acceptance and active support of others.”
Indeed, it is true that the Netherlands is still struggling with its colonial past. What is more, if you look at it from an immigrant’s point of view, it was the Europeans who colonized parts of Africa and refused to let go of these colonies even after World War II. And did the Dutch not go on the rampage in Indonesia almost immediately after they themselves had been liberated from the Germans? I still struggle to understand this behavior.
The arrival of immigrants has revived an intense discussion about freedom, safety, and especially freedom of speech. A number of minor as well as major conflicts are going on between Europeans and immigrants from countries where the events of World War II are seen in a different light. And virtually all of these conflicts trigger some association with World War II for native Europeans: statements and political programs of extreme right-wing parties remind us of Hitler’s raids: never again must we repeat Auschwitz. Yet third-generation Arabs, who identify with so-called Arabs in Palestine and march in demonstrations at Amsterdam’s Dam Square, chant enthusiastically: “Hamas, hamas, Jews to the gas!”
Every immigrant struggles with a divided sense of loyalty between his native country, his family and past, on the one hand, and his country of the present and future on the other. As a child I used to hear nothing but negative comments about Jews. My earliest memory dates from the time we lived in Saudi Arabia in the midseventies. Sometimes we would have no running water. I remember hearing my mother wholeheartedly agreeing with our neighbor that the Jews had been pernicious again. Those Jews hate Muslims so much that they’ll do anything to dehydrate us. “Jew” is the worst term of abuse in both Somali and Arabic. Later, when I was a teenager and living in Somalia and Kenya, from the mid-eighties onward, every prayer we said contained a request for the extermination of the Jews. Just imagine that: five times a day. We were passionately praying for their destruction but had never actually met one. With that background experience, and my loyalty to the political, cultural, and religious variant of Islam, which I (and millions with me) inherited from my childhood, I arrived in the Netherlands. Here I came into contact with an entirely different view of the Jews: they are human beings before anything else. But what upset me more was learning about the immense injustice that had been done to the people labeled “Jews.” The Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that led to it cannot be compared to any other form of ethnic cleansing. This makes the history of the Jews in Europe unique.
More understandable is the motivation and determination with which people commit genocide. The Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Serbians against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia are proof of how hatred