Mayors of Amsterdam
As promised in part 1 of this miniseries, this 3rd and final part is about mayors of the capital of the Netherlands, Amsterdam. (Link to part 2).)
Especially about the men and one woman who were appointed after the Second World War.
The emphasis is on those of the 21st century.
Yes, mayors in the Netherlands are not elected by the citizens of their city but appointed by the national government.
The municipal councils do have some influence these days. However, rarely are people appointed who have not been active in the older, nationally organized parties for years or decades.
Such an appointment is seen by many as a reward for the loyalty of those appointed. Not their loyalty to their city or country but to their party.
A fairly common process is that people start as a councilor or alderman in a city, then become politically active nationally as a member of parliament, state secretary or minister and then become mayor.
All things considered, the lady who is now mayor is only the ninth since the World War.
In addition, there were three observers.
Two of those observers were not affiliated with social democracy! All others were.
The career of the third observer –Lodewijk Asscher– receives relatively much attention here: the course of his career and views are painfully illustrative of the total decline of social democracy in the Netherlands, once a respected political movement.
Class of regents or just one regent clique?
The first two mayors after the Second World War were regents par excellence.
Both D’Ailly and Van Hall were in the financial world. And they knew each other. Van Hall initially appealed in vain to D’Ailly to financially support the resistance against the German occupation. Only after it became clear that the Nazis were really losing did he accept a new request (and subsequently did very useful work).
Shortly after his appointment as mayor, Mr D’Ailly canceled his membership of the Social Democrats…
This man had a good relationship with Queen Wilhelmina: the woman who fled her country during the Nazi invasion.
Because she chose not to flee to another part of the kingdom -Indonesia, Suriname or the Netherlands Antilles- but to the UK and the US respectively, she actually betrayed her status as monarch. However, nobody with any influence called her to account about this after the war.
Immediately after her return, this woman acted hostile towards the few Jews who had not been murdered in the German concentration camps.
By the way: from no other country occupied by the Nazis was such a large part of the Jewish population deported and gassed by the Nazis 1).
Her daughter Juliana married the SS man Bernhard: in 1937 the Nazi party song was sung at a party in her honor. Wilhelmina had demanded that and she fired the royal conductor who did not want that (Link to Dutch source).
The man who was mayor from 1994 to 2001, Schelto Patijn, also had a special relationship with the Oranges, but one of a completely different nature: his father – who sat in parliament for the Social Democrats – was a chamberlain (!) of the House of Orange.
Son Schelto was possibly the most decent mayor the city ever had.
He resigned before the end of his second term due to illness.
Eberhard van der Laan
The possibly least decent mayor Amsterdam had after the World War did not resign: he used it for his own political advantage!
After he announced his illness to everyone, he received even less criticism from politicians and the media.
He was mayor when I sent the city council that letter I wrote about in parts 1 and 2 of this miniseries.
Here’s a spicy part of that letter. I continue with a substantively related but much more painful dossier with which Van der Laan scores highly in the competition for the worst post-war mayor.
I concluded my letter with:
By speculating about filing a report, without filing a report and then referring to that ‘Argan letter’ [see immediately below], the impression has been created that the Municipal Council would prefer to intimidate De Balie over bringing people to justice who, according to SP councilor Kwint, were engaged in “spouting rancid hatred all the time“.
Would you like to remove that impression?
And if so: do you as a Council, or do members of your Council, still want to file a report?
This even more painful file, among other things, makes it crystal clear that intimidation really was this regent’s way of working.
That ‘Argan letter‘ was a very special letter that Van der Laan wrote to a youth center with that name. The existence of that youth center – specifically for young people of Moroccan origin (!) – was mainly due to another PvdA member, a certain Lodewijk Asscher. Yes, you already read that name above and I will come back to him later.
That letter was a response to Argan’s intention to provide a platform to Mr. Okay Pala of the Dutch branch of a global organization called Hizb ut-Tahrir.
The goals of that club are very similar to those of the Islamic State, except that the Hizb ut-Tahrir cultivates a non-violent image. Particularly successful in the Netherlands. Pala was already known from an interview with a major newspaper, in which he stated that the Netherlands “needs a major terrorist attack”.
Pala was not prosecuted for that statement and certainly not interned. (Btw: HUT is banned in many other countries)
The previously conservative and respected newspaper NRC reported at the time about Van der Laan and Argan:
On the other hand, the mayor speaks of “difficult trade-offs (..) when people use their right to expression in a way that causes pain or fear in others [sic!]”.
That consideration played a role in the issue of the canceled radicalization debate. (There you have it: the link to that even more scandalous file!)
Van der Laan advised Argan not to offer this extremist a platform and mentioned ‘casually’ that they received more than 300,000 subsidy from the municipality per year.
The organization subsequently canceled the debate, but note that there was no longer any question of prosecuting or interning Pala if he made such a serious mistake again: the intinidation had ‘worked out fine’….
De-radicalization in secret …
The entire Dutch press is in the hands of non-Dutch (mainly Belgian) hands.
All its editorials are steeped in hatred of Trump and against every European who opposes (de facto) open borders.
Yet even the former resistance newspaper ‘Het Parool ‘ recently published an on balance shockingly revealing text about the tampering of this Van der Laan in connection with the so-called ‘deradicalization’ of Mohammedan extremists. [Link to article in Dutch behind a paywall. It can be read via web archive].
I call it recent, but I could also write: only three years after the death of this Van der Laan…
In short, it came down to the fact that this mayor had fallen under the spell of a complete idiot named David Kenning.
The main thesis of this Irish gentleman was that there is nothing Mohammedan about Mohammedan extremism.
He had come up with a nice slogan for the project that he came to sell to the people of Amsterdam: It’s about the Islamization of radicals and not about the radicalization of Muslims.
And he advocated a ‘gray trajectory ‘: secretly guiding ‘vulnerable young people’ onto the right path. Above all, do not give them the idea that there is such a thing as the temptation of extreme Islam: never having to think for yourself and no longer being afraid of being rejected by a woman and having whores (or grapes) in abundance after death.
Van der Laan became so convinced of the genius of this idiot that a complete department was set up at the municipality, staffed by people with ‘the right profile ‘ but without notable qualities.
Kenning is also explicitly instructed to further develop his gray campaign, noting that ‘at no time are jihad, leaving or even Islam mentioned ‘.
Let this sink in for a moment.
Everything is done without informing the municipal council.
There is a policy of as little screening as possible.
One of those key figures of questionable stature is personally persuaded by Van der Laan to participate.
And then it comes:
The bomb exploded in December 2016. Van der Laan is presented with a compilation of new videos.
Suddenly he starts talking about religion. In November, the eighty-year-old muaddin (prayer caller) was tackled to the ground by the Salafist brother of the imam in the Al Ummah Mosque in Nieuw-West. Van der Laan was very shocked by this.
Please note: this is 12 years after the murder of Theo van Gogh.
The author of this text (Marcel Wiegman) gives an extensive description of the incompetence of those people ‘with the right profile ‘, but ultimately does not portray the Amsterdam population but these people as victims of Van der Laan…
Femke Halsema
I referred to Van der Laan as ‘possibly least decent ‘, but his official successor Halsema seems to be doing her utmost to surpass him.
She has already succeeded in this on occasion and she seems to want to continue in this competition.
Halsema experienced a high point in her political career in 2010: she received support from almost the entire House of Commons for her motion on protecting islam against criticism: ‘combating this [islamisation] should not be an objective of the policy of the incoming cabinet“.
After she left national politics, she announced that she would not return to politics. Not long after, she became mayor.
She is constantly ready to accuse people who raise issues related to the unsuccessful integration of many immigrants of all kinds of things. She also took her own children from a school dominated by poorly integrated (descendants of) immigrants. She was remarkably open about this in the media …
Nowadays many Dutch people know her from the misbehavior of one of her own children: owning an illegal firearm and possibly even using it to threaten someone.
I mainly know her from something completely different: from a text she produced when she did not formally hold a political position, but identified herself as a journalist.
In that capacity (!) she complained about too little attention from the media for what in her eyes could pass for a new kind of Mohammedan spring: a letter from ‘Islamic scholars’ to the leader of ISIS.
That letter from (exclusively!) Sunni professional Muslims entitled ‘LettertoBaghdadi ‘.
A letter overflowing with praise to this man who had placed himself at the head of the 21st century holy war.
I wrote an extensive article in Dutch about her hysterically shouted ignorance in Dutch entitled: Mind you, Allah does allow soccer.
I published a more extensive, English-language version of it in my book via Amazon published e-book IS, the Kurds and the Caliphate. Subtitled: Turkey: from sick occupant to paranoid neighbor.
I published the chapter on the intra-Mohammedan debate on dealing with jihadism via my Academia account.
About this mayor, see also this piece about her policy regarding police violence against corona dissidents.
Lodewijck Asscher
As mentioned earlier, I am not including the man who was only acting mayor in 2010 here because he would also qualify for that predicate ‘least decent mayor ‘, but because he is the personification of the electoral and moral decline of the Dutch social democracy.
Of course he absolutely can not be blamed for it, but it is important that his wealthy great-grandfather was a leader of the so-called Joodsche Raad: a group of Jewish Nazi collaborators.
They collaborated in the hope of saving themselves and their best friends.
And that seemed to work: it was not until September 1944 that the man ended up in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. And unlike more than 50,000 others, he survived that stay.
Among those others was also the famous Anne Frank, who only ended up there at the end of October, already ill, after first having survived Auschwitz. Great-grandfather was even formally charged for that collaboration.
Thanks to the resistance, Lodewijck’s father survived as a baby; an extremely drastic event for that man who never fully recovered mentally..
The great-grandson certainly did not want to collaborate with Nazis, but in a bizarre, twisted way, the behavior of that great-grandfather and the effect of the occupation on his father had a major influence on Lodewijck’s political career.
Like so many others, he ended up in national politics through Amsterdam municipal politics.
In 2017, he became party leader of the Social Democrats and the party PvdA suffered the biggest political defeat in Dutch history: it dropped from almost 25% of the votes to less than 6%.
Since the party’s founding, the PvdA had always been the largest or second largest party in the country, now they became 7th…
In a major interview with him in 2019, conducted because he had written an autobiographical book, Lodewijck Asscher was asked: “Why don’t you write about rising populism?”
He seemed to give a somehow sensible answer:
“Because I prefer to tell what I want and what we are for. The left has spent twenty years explaining why populists are no good. We would have been better off putting that energy into a credible story that makes people happy. “
The man who today, five years later, is the leader of a new party formed from the reunion of social democrats and communists, is a true embodiment of modern populism.
This idiot once publicly declared that Islam is already 2000 years part of Europe… I’m not kidding you.
Note:
1) OTOH, in no other country have so many people received the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations from Israel.
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