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"Facts can never be a criminal offense,” said Deputy Prime Minister Mona Keijzer, who has appealed after being charged with incitement to intolerance in July.
A Dutch court will need to determine if it’s illegal to discuss antisemitism in the context of Muslim culture, following an appeal by a deputy prime minister regarding hate crime allegations leveled against her.
Mona Keijzer, who is also the minister of housing and spatial planning, on Sunday announced her plans to appeal after prosecutors in July charged her with “incitement to intolerance” for remarks she made on a television talk show.
Speaking in defense of her policy of making Holocaust studies mandatory as part of new citizens’ naturalization process, she said, “What you see is that many asylum seekers come from countries with Muslim faith. We know that Jew-hatred there is a part, almost, of the culture.” She noted that not all Muslims are antisemitic.
Prosecutors said her statement “contradicts the foundations of democracy,” however, despite their assertion that she had broken the law, decided not to indict Keijzer, a leader of the right-wing Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB).
While Keijzer said she disagreed with the pronouncement, she decided not to appeal it because “I have a very busy job as it is,” she told the De Telegraaf daily on Sunday. However, when her ideological rivals appealed the decision not to prosecute her, she decided to appeal the pronouncement of guilt, she added.
The pronouncement “affects my own integrity, but also stifles the social debate,” she told De Telegraaf. “I based myself on facts and figures. Facts can never be a criminal offense.”
The issue of Muslim antisemitism has been reported on prominently in the Netherlands since Nov. 7, when gangs of Arabs and Muslims hunted for Israelis on the streets of Amsterdam. The Israelis were returning from a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the local Ajax club. The trials of seven alleged perpetrators revealed antisemitic agitation by hundreds of culprits who cheered what some of them called “Jew-hunt” on instant messaging platforms.
In a column in the left-wing newspaper NRC Handelsblad, columnist Martijn Katan, a professor emeritus at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in May asserted that Keijzer’s remarks were justified by research done among Muslims in Western countries.
“Dozens of polls among 38,000 Muslims found that antisemitic stereotypes were two to three times more common in the group than among non-Muslims. Typical percentages are 50% antisemitism among Muslims, versus 20% among the rest,” he wrote.
Afshin Ellian, a Tehran-born professor of law at Leiden University and one of the Netherlands’ top jurists, in October called the pronouncement against Keijzer “insulting and irrational” and urged her to appeal it.
During the talk show debate, another panelist, Arnon Grunberg, a left-leaning Jewish writer, condemned criticism of Muslim antisemitism, calling actions derived from it an attempt to “use the genocide of the Jews to punish newcomers.”
Keijzer prodded the panelists on the issue of Muslim antisemitism. “Do you deny that antisemitism is often part of the culture of people with an Islamic faith? I am simply surprised that this is denied,” she said.
In France, Georges Bensoussan, editor in chief of the Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, was acquitted of the charge of inciting hatred of Muslims in 2017, and again on appeal in 2018, for saying in an interview that “in Arab families in France and beyond, everybody knows but will not say that antisemitism is transmitted with mother’s milk.”
One of the complainants against him was the LICRA (International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism) group, which was founded in 1927 as a Jewish group fighting mostly antisemitism.
Also in France, Eric Zemmour, a former presidential candidate who is Jewish, was convicted several times of hate speech for criticizing Muslim immigration. In 2011, he was fined 10,000 euros for claiming on TV that “most drug dealers are black and Arab.” In 2018, he was ordered to pay 3,000 euros for comments about a Muslim “invasion” of France.
Geert Wilders, the leader of the Netherlands’ largest political party, was charged with incitement to intolerance or discrimination for saying in 2014 that he would make sure the Netherlands had fewer Moroccans. He was acquitted of that charge but convicted of insulting a racial group.
