Saturday, November 06, 2004

Is this Commandment racist?

An incredible item from Holland. An artist in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, Chris Ripke, was upset by the murder of fellow artist Theo van Gogh. So he painted a small picture on the outside wall of his studio with a picture of an angel and the text of the commandment "Thou shalt not kill".

A pretty reasonable response you would think. But some members of a nearby mosque found the text "offensive" and complained to the mayor. The mayor ordered in the police to destroy the "racist" painting. A courageous news journalist stood in front of the painting in protest, but was arrested. A camerawoman was ordered by the police to erase part of her film of the event.

The journalist, Wim Nottroth, remarked later in an email about his arrest: "Wat een land. Het is echt niet to geloven." Which means, putting my limited knowledge of Dutch to use, "What a country. It's really unbelievable."

I haven't seen anything yet about this in the mainstream media. But there's a bit of discussion at conservative websites. There's an item at Vdare and one at Majority Rights.

By the way, thank you to the various people who emailed me with the text of Theo van Gogh's last newspaper article. My impression is that van Gogh was a liberal, but one who realised that an older liberal Holland would not survive mass Islamic immigration.

To his credit he did not shut his eyes to the situation, but was willing to speak out and criticise the open borders type of liberal. He was even willing to publicly defend the rights of the ethnic Dutch majority. So, in his own way, perhaps he can be remembered as a defender of the West.

No comments:

Post a Comment