The Dutch Civil War, 2004
I just can’t think of anything else. I feel the need to rant again, the need to cry, or whatnot. I know that elsewhere in the world, the Palestinian prime minister is dying, and I’ve even read about some Iraqi business that would normally shock me beyond imagination, including the finding of Falluja-city rooms where the beheadings all took place, but it just doesn’t get into the thinking part of my brain. It sits there for a while, disappears until I re-read the “other” news headlines. And I really just read them because I already read the other headlines, those that I was looking for, those about… The Hague.

Apparently, this morning 3:00 AM, a dutch special force team from the police tried to enter a building in which terrorism suspects were hiding to arrest them. One explosion, several gun shots, three wounded policemen and a few hours later, the whole block is shut down from existence. TV shows me images of tens or hundreds marines, heavily armed, keeping a close eye on that building. All TV channels give new updates every few minutes and even radio is united in content. Scary thought. What the hell is going on here? It’s like living in a dream. Until the moment that one of them is shot (he’s alive) and both are captured, around 6:00-7:00 PM. Until this very moment, we know pretty much nothing except that these persons are terrorist suspects and that there’s believed to be explosives in the building.

This is unreal, really.

Impressions
There’s apparently a bunch of terrorists in this country. They should die the most horrible death, no doubt about that. We should stab their eyes out, feed their flesh to the dogs while alive and throw the leftovers in the sea. There’s no place in this world for terrorists. So far for the easy part.

A whole population, particularly marrocs, but basically all muslims in this country, are being looked at as if they’re the terrorist threat themselves. There’s fights all over, muslim schools burn, mosques are attacked and churches likewise, to get even. “We” and “they” fight, with words mostly, and agree on something: this is wrong. We’re both at issue here. The whole fact that everyone uses that same words “they” and “we” implies how bad we’re really doing. The cynical thing is that every dutchman will tell you that he definately knows that it’s not all muslims that are that bad, he’ll even tell you that he has one, and exactly one, in his group of closest friends.

“They” will tell “us” that we’re stigmatizing and discriminating. And “we” will tell “them” that “they”‘re segregating and terrorizing. And we both damn well know it’s just a subgroup of the others that’s torturing society, so why are we making such a big deal out of it? The fact that we do, implies how bad the situation is. And the worst part of all is that we’re point at each other and therefore fail to identify those that cause it.