Street fighting, arson, and scenes more reminiscent of a civil war than a demonstration: in several French cities, political protest has devolved into organised street violence. Those who turn streets into battlefields, assault police officers, and set fire to town halls are not exercising the right to demonstrate; they are waging war against the state. Cities in Germany, Spain and Belgium have also recently become the stage for violent confrontations. Is the Netherlands sufficiently prepared for similar levels of disruption?
By Oscar Hammerstein
Amsterdam, in particular, where political tensions frequently run high, warrants special attention. Let there be no misunderstanding: a free society must endure a great deal, including the most radical viewpoints.
However, tolerance ends where political convictions are enforced through violence. The freedom to demonstrate does not encompass the freedom to intimidate fellow citizens. There is ample evidence that, in France, far-left and radical Islamist organisations were jointly behind this uprising against the Republic.
The central figure in this crisis is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical-left party “La France insoumise” (LFI). Mélenchon views the social unrest not merely as a protest movement, but as a political opportunity.
With the 2027 presidential election on the horizon, he is attempting to translate the discontent among young people, residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and voters with a migrant background into electoral support. His party maintains close ties with radical-left protest movements.
LFI has explicitly targeted voters in multicultural suburbs, many of whom are French citizens with North African or African roots, and predominantly Muslim. In this respect, its electoral strategy resembles that of PRO in the Netherlands. Mélenchon, an admirer of Castro and Sánchez, and an avowed antisemite, presents himself as the necessary response to a potential victory by Marine Le Pen.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, unless you happen to be Jewish. During the Holocaust, France deported more than 75,000 Jews to their deaths, with the eager cooperation of the Vichy regime, which had them crammed into cattle cars from the Vél d’Hiv while Parisians looked on.
And after the war? No justice. No accountability. Only decades of indifference and empty words. Today, Jews are being stabbed on the streets of France, synagogues and shops are being set ablaze, and yet Macron still has the audacity to lecture Jews on morality? What a grand deception.
From people who fail to protect the Republic against hordes of marauding jihadists, but who still insist on dictating to Israel how it should defend itself against genocidal terrorists, terrorists who attack the country under that same accursed Palestinian flag. France is bankrupt, morally and otherwise, and in cultural decline.
Our political leaders have failed to listen to Israel, the West’s vanguard against barbarism. Instead, they chose to condemn its right to self-defence, to whitewash its terrorist enemies, to deny the horrific crimes of October 7, and to spread lies about genocide.
Today, those who are wreaking havoc in European cities wave the very same Palestinian flag that was hoisted in Gaza to celebrate the rape, torture, and murder of more than 2,000 innocent civilians on October 7.
The periodic outbursts of destructive violence in France stem from a distinctly French pathology. Yet these phenomena are present throughout Western Europe, the Netherlands included; the Poles, who have their own affairs in good order, know better.
Second- and third-generation Muslim youths are becoming increasingly hostile toward the countries in which they reside; the many Palestinian and Moroccan flags carried by protesters in France are a testament to this.
Amsterdam also celebrated the anniversary of October 7, 2023, exuberantly, with cries of “Long live Hamas.” The far-left has formed an unholy alliance with Islam. In this “Islamo-leftism,” the parties involved share nothing in common, save for an aversion to the United States and the Free West, and a hatred of Israel.
In such a context, who can take talk of a “European defence” seriously? Certainly not the outside world. It sees a Europe where young men were not instilled with resilience or patriotism, but rather with an aversion to the “white man.”
It sees nations that, in the event of war, would be threatened from within by a “fifth column” of Islamo-leftism. Amid the widespread violence in France, it was not only historic buildings that went up in flames; a “European paper tiger” was consumed as well.
This trend of antisemitism has long existed in Amsterdam. Jewish citizens must be cautious when in public. Criticism of Israel, a nation that has been fighting for its survival in the Middle East since its founding in 1948, is being repurposed by the political left into antisemitism.
At the forefront are ‘students’ who smash everything in their path, alongside fearful, cowardly administrators who believe they are pacifying the situation, while in reality, they are only making things worse. It is a slippery slope toward times that once seemed consigned to the past. In the Netherlands, too, a myriad of left-leaning parties have formed alliances with jihadist activists to curry favour with Muslim immigrants.
In Dutch politics, nothing is as it was before. A state that fails to properly maintain bridges, schools, or swimming pools is nothing more than a nanny. Those who parade their morality like a monstrance must themselves live up to the standards they set; anything else is hypocrisy, the very speciality of D66, the party of our current prime minister Rob Jetten.
This party bears a striking resemblance to Germany’s SPD, which expresses outrage over right-wing extremists while simultaneously preparing a coalition in Berlin with the far-left party Die Linke. D66, in turn, is increasingly focusing on cooperation with Progressief Nederland (PRO), a radical-left alliance in the House of Representatives, rather than with its coalition partner, the liberals.
The major debates no longer revolve around classic economic or distributive issues. Instead, the focus has shifted to socio-cultural topics such as identity and migration. ‘Queer’ is deemed good; Jews and Israelis are deemed bad.
The subjects themselves are not even the point; rather, they serve as markers to distinguish between the ‘right’ camp and the ‘wrong’ one. Left-wing politicians are prepared to die on the hills of nitrogen policy or the taxation of savings and investments (Box 3), yet they prove incapable of providing young Dutch people with housing. While distribution and economic policy matter, they hardly set anyone’s heart racing.
They need to fit into a broader narrative, rooted in either a liberal or a conservative political vision. Where is society headed? The chief accountant within the cabinet is effectively stripping citizens of their savings. Meanwhile, not a single promise to curb immigration, the primary culprit across all political policy areas, is being kept.
Voters are flocking in droves to parties that the cabinet has excluded from the national discourse. A vote for the Geert Wilders PVV or the relatively young Forum for Democracy (FvD) is, therefore, primarily a vote against the tiresome, know-it-all attitude of the coalition parties and the left-leaning media, a group that has effectively entered into an unholy alliance with jihadists.
It seems that no one in government feels any sense of responsibility for running the country anymore. The moribund coalition is just as barren as the bunch of ‘bunglers’ that make up the former cabinet led by Dick Schoof.
This cabinet can swiftly enact legislation to block the import of dates and keychains from Jerusalem, yet it refuses to prevent Hamas sympathisers from desecrating a national monument with their glorification of terrorists. Minister of Justice David van Weel, whose temperament is akin to that of a Labrador, offers a brief bark, then immediately wags his tail, rather than sink his teeth into the ankles of these spineless officials.
In Amsterdam, Mayor Femke Halsema, an ‘intifada mayor’, has done nothing but facilitate the city’s jihadists ever since the opening of the Holocaust Museum. She even provided police escorts for ‘intifada’ activists who, channelling the Nazis, rode in a massive convoy of motorcycles, flying the accursed Palestinian flag, toward Dam Square. Meanwhile, decent citizens holding signs that read “Fuck Hamas” found themselves confronted by the police.
The radical left PRO party is organising yet another Gaza-related event in Amsterdam. My objection to these kinds of mass political rituals lies in the moral conformity they seek to impose. Those who join the march are deemed ‘the righteous,’ while anyone who dares to ask questions is forced to prove their own innocence first.
This threatens to draw a sharp dividing line right through the heart of society itself. Dialogue is being replaced by a public profession of faith.
PRO ought to ask itself what value it still adds with this style of politics. A social-democratic party should bring together people with diverse convictions, united by a focus on economic security, emancipation, and public services.
When a party derives its identity primarily from the language and rituals of activist vanguards, fulfilling that broader mission becomes impossible. While the remaining hard core may feel addressed, the party’s former base is left to wonder who, if anyone, still represents them.
Eighty-one years after the end of the extermination of the Jews, PRO has formed a coalition with antisemites and other Israel-haters, such as Amnesty International and Oxfam Novib.
Once again, the site chosen for a book burning, this time on November 8th, is the Museumplein. Just as people marched from the Brandenburg Gate to the Opernplatz back in 1933, this monstrous alliance will now parade from Dam Square to the Museumplein.
It is a new iteration of Nazi-style theatre: a hybrid of a torchlight procession and a book burning. If Amsterdam’s shop windows remain intact this time, it is not because the authorities have stood tall, but because the political establishment has bowed down. It was not the courage of those in power that preserved order, but their willingness to yield to a minority that has no desire to live within our free society and instead seeks to bend that society to its own will.
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