Decoy Jews to Disrupt Dutch Bigotry, Anti-Immigrants Not Included

Violent anti-Semites in the Netherlands have inadvertently triggered an eerie new security response that exposes the double standard of inclusion or exclusion in the Dutch polity, one of the instigators of the now Europe-wide anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim policy reform. The acting Amsterdam mayor recently agreed to the proposition of a Jewish lobbying group seeking further protection of Orthodox Jews who are afraid of physical and verbal intimidation.

The strange measure goes something like this. In sting operations involving drug dealers, an undercover buyer tries to incriminate a seller in the act of selling. In these new anti-anti-Semitic operations, a decoy Jew (yarmulke, curls, robe and all) walks around trying to incriminate anti-Semites in the act of violence. The head of the Center for Information and Documentation Israel, the group that has lobbied for the idea, stressed that this is not a solution to the problem of anti-Semitism generally, just a response to escalating violence against Orthodox Jews.

Indeed, such bigoted violence in the Netherlands more than doubled in a year, from 17 to 41 cases, which spurred a Moroccan-born politician to sponsor the decoy Jew measure as an effort to stop this kind of hate-crime. However, these numbers, too high as they are, hardly compare to anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant (mostly from Morocco and Turkey) violence, which came in at 336 cases, up from 232 last years. Reasons given for the latter include the economic crisis and rising political tensions domestically and worldwide, but rarely does a Dutch official point to anti-Muslim, anti-Immigrant bigotry as the source of the problem, thus precluding them from hate-crime status.

More of one wrong in no way makes the lesser right. But the innovative, rapid-response of Amsterdam city officials to address threats to Jews exposes a double standard by underscoring the lack of any such inclusivity-based policy urgency and innovation when it comes to Muslims and immigrants, of which there are more than 600,000 in the Netherlands, and millions more throughout Europe. On the contrary, the Dutch immigration minister recently went on a rampage about Muslims and immigrants not integrating themselves into mainstream Dutch society, putting the future of "their" nation in jeopardy in likeminded eyes.

The strict exclusivity-based immigration reform that followed, which some call the "Death of Dutch Multiculturalism," included the mandatory viewing of an indoctrination film which includes scenes of the country's famous nude beaches, intended to offend (meaning, "integrate") Muslims. These policies are known as assimilative because they seek to erase cultural, linguistic, religious and other differences in the name of national unity, or homogeneity. Had this rule been applied equally across the differentiated board, living as an actual "non-integrated" Orthodox Jew would be illegal, let alone decoy Jews.

Being selective in immigration policy or assimilation policy is nothing new either for Dutch or for Americans policymakers, and all too easy for xenophobic citizens to comply with and champion even if they make the lives of immigrants difficult or deadly. In this way, all immigrants and those who lie beyond the inside of a nation's self-image become decoys of sorts, decoying what they actually are: rejected outsiders, and as such already united and ready to be mobilized in common causes, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans... alike.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons