Friday, February 17, 2006

Even in Auschwitz, dialogue should remain


The management of the Auschwitz concentration camp museum has refused entry to a special committee of the Iranian government, assigned to investigate the Holocaust.

This must be a mistake. It was the British prime minister Tony Blair who saught to diverge international tensions, caused by the Iranian president's denial of the Holocaust, and advised the Iranians to go and see for themselves. He was very right in making this suggestion.

Of course, having to allow entry to a committee with an evident bias against the unprecendented historic event of the holocaust is not an easy task. But then, the whole idea of the Auschwitz museum is not mere remembrance, but also the wish of our civilization that nothing like the Holocaust will ever be repeated. So, in my view, the management of Auschwitz has a very critical responsibility, which includes confrontations such as the one now at hand.

So again, it is a huge mistake not to have Iranians come and look for themselves. It is a missed opportunity of vast proportions.

I do hope that the Polish government understands this mistake and will act swiftly to correct it. But I also know my hopes in this respect cannot go very far. Perhaps other European governments can step in, even only whispering in the ears of their Polish colleagues, and suggest - if need be, with great emphasis - that here is an opportunity for diplomacy with Iran that cannot and should not be missed.

And yet again, I do not raise my hopes beyond reality. Unfortunately, most European governments have responded in extremely weak and evasive terms to the many uproars across the Muslim world over mere cartoons.

The Holocaust thing is not about satire or differences in sense of humor. It is about a fundamental reality in the history of the European world. We better see to it that everybody else on our planet keeps full understanding of that historic reality.
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Note 19-2: I wrote an email to the management of the Auschwitz museum with above content.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Scoring our dislikes


When thinking about the havoc caused by the Arab misunderstanding of our sense of humor (see my previous blog posting), I can’t escape the nagging feeling that, really, I don’t very much like Arabs. I have no problems with the Islam, I have lived peacefully among Muslims, but Arabs – as a rule – rub me the wrong way.

So yes, I do think we should strive for friendship, but no - I don’t see that happening in a general sense very soon.

Am I alone in this? I have no clue. I therefore decided to google the sentence ‘I don’t like Arabs’ and see how many hits this sentence gets on the Internet. The answer is: nearly 3400.

The next question is: is this a normal hit, a high hit, or a very low hit? You can build up some kind of scale, I thought, if you relate this score for the preference of Arabs, against other scores.

I then did the same thing for ‘I don’t like the Dutch’. Well, let’s see. I can take a blow. The score for the dislike of the Dutch according to the Internet (or Google) is 800.

It should therefore be concluded that, roughly speaking, there are less people who express their dislike for the Dutch than people who do the same as regards the Arabs. It is not an unexpected outcome.

Here is the score on other preferences:

- I don’t like Americans-------------------15700
- I don’t like Arabs------------------------3400
- I don’t like the French--------------------880
- I don’t like the Germans-------------------950
- I don’t like the Dutch---------------------800
- I don’t like the schoolteacher------------none (!)
- I don’t like my boss----------------------2500
- I don’t like my husband-------------------1200
- I don’t like my children------------------1100
- I don’t like sex--------------------------1300

Our dislike for Americans by far outweighs our dislike for Arabs, or at least there are more people willing to put this dislike in writing. That is an interesting outcome. It suggests to me that Americans face a far greater challenge to brush up their image than Arabs do. I do not dislike Americans, I only thoroughly dislike their current Administration.

However, broadly speaking, the dislike for Americans but also for Arabs is relatively strong compared with any other negative feeling that people can harbor, even between wife and husband.

I would say that scores like this one are food for thought only, but I do find it an intriguing way of polling opinions across the world wide web.

In my dislike for Arabs I do not stand alone. It doesn’t make me feel proud, but at least I am not an exception.

It is highly desirable that people in the Arab world seriously look at their overall image. The Arab world is full of history, intellect and civilization. But what the Arabs allow us to see today, to me seems a more horrible caricature than any Western cartoon can depict.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Humor is the fabric of friendship


A great Dutch cultural historian, Johan Huizinga, of the first half of the 20th Century once wrote a sizeable essay titled ‘Homo Ludens’ – the playful man. He wrote it in the decade of hate, in the years of the rise of NAZI absolutism when everything people called ugly was to be eradicated. The last thing Hitler and his cronies would think of was making fun of themselves, let alone of all their horrid dogma’s.

Humor, the ability to laugh at one’s own weaknesses, yes – even one’s own ugliness – defines every society. Don’t expect you can attain stability, in any group of people, whatever its cause, if there is no laughter to accompany it.

I was strongly thinking about Huizinga’s thesis when I read of the emerging outrage among Muslims caused by Danish and French cartoons ridiculing the prophet Mohammed.

I haven’t seen the cartoons. I do not know their intention or what characteristic of the Muslim world they wanted to depict. Generally, I hold cartoonist in high esteem. I can’t believe they were insulting by our own standards. And yes, I do think that even God can be subject of a cartoon. But I also think a good cartoon – rather than being insulting – should be intelligent. The best cartoons demonstrate a truth that otherwise we don’t see. And it gives us an additional insight, it opens our eyes, it makes us understand difficult issues, conflicts, or contradictions, a little better.

Our ability to be critical about ourselves and to accept that we are not the representatives of any absolute truth, is key to the cultures of the western world – and we also consider this a fundamental prerequisite of our freedom, including freedom of the press. Perhaps we do not always realize it, and perhaps at times we still harbor prejudices against people of other cultures, but at least we have been educated with this understanding of ourselves.

Cartoons, intelligent ridicule, are essential in our culture. They may provoke, but they should not be designed for the mere purpose of insult.

Muslim absolutism is an object par excellence for provocation. If Muslims wish to live along side people in the Western world, this is the price they will have to pay in order to gain our friendship and in order to gain our love for their strengths and weaknesses.

Without the ability to make jokes about one another, it is impossible to think of stable multiculturalism (or whatever label we attach to it) any time in the future.

So I agree with those who will not heed to the outrage that recent cartoons have caused. Muslim absolutism is unacceptable. And in this respect I care less about the outrage in other countries than about potential conflicts in our own countries, where Muslims and Christians live alongside one another. Official response in Europe, e.g. from the British Foreign Affairs minister Jack Straw, has so far been too restrictive. It suggests that we should be more prudent when it concerns the sensitivities of the Muslim world. I disagree. He got it all wrong. This is not a free ride. Muslims want to be part of our world. Fine. But if need be, I would be the first to take on a Crusade to defend humor, including humor directed at the habits of the Muslims and their religious icons. Not because I wish to ridicule them, but because I profoundly wish to be their friend.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

One road to permissiveness: a dead end?


Most of us who have grown up in the sixties tend to view the evolution of morality in our time as just one road straight ahead. With many conflicts we struggled our way out of the legacy of the Victorian age which had imbued us with huge inhibitions and which had created a society of emotional rigidity and moral intolerance unparalleled in history. Never again would we allow ourselves, or our children, to be denied the full experience of life, however trivial, however damaging perhaps to our health, however destructive to the fabric of society. First and foremost are our spiritual freedom and the claim of each individual to pursue his or her own leisure, whether in the cerebral, social or sexual dimensions of our lives.

The Dutch in particular have become rather infamous in taking this quest for freedom and permissiveness to the extreme. We have been very true to our role in history in this respect. Yet even in my country, the tide has turned. To some extent, this development is influenced by the greater complexity of our society as compared to the situation in the sixties. Most notably, the influx of people of vastly different cultures has created new conflicts and has increased sensitivities on how people behave, even in private, and thus it has raised the issue of tolerance, including the tolerance of people’s behavior within our own, indigenous culture at the same time. To put it bluntly: if our permissiveness especially stimulates destructive behavior of people of other cultures living in our own country, how can we contain this if we do not restrict the behavior of everybody? When it comes to it, discrimination is a far greater evil than permissiveness. Murders have been committed that shook society, and they have been committed by a white Christian male and a brown Muslim male respectively..

But even without this additional ethnic or cultural issue, it seems our tendency towards freedom and permissiveness has reached the end of the road. In particular this is the case in respect of our lenient policies and practices on drugs. But it pervades the other realms as well.

Only recently, within a weeks time, Dutch cabinet ministers and senior party officials came up with no less then three proposals limiting our civilian freedoms. First, there was the minister who aired the idea of forbidding the sale of alcohol to all minors; secondly another minister wanted to introduce the rule of Dutch language only in public spaces (good for tourism!), and third there are people who want to limit religious freedom, especially where it concerns religious expressions that are hateful to women.

It is obvious that any public incitement against the integrity of women is already forbidden by law. There is no need for any additional safeguard, let alone for some frantic limitation of our religious freedoms. In particular, thoughts like these, coming from people who claim responsibility for our government policies, illustrate most clearly that we are gradually losing sight of the essence of freedom and tolerance in our society. Xenophobia is taking grip even of people who would normally have reasonable opinions, and in giving in to it we are setting the most horrid examples particularly to whose of whom we wish that they accept our rules of law and of decent behavior.

To me, permissiveness is not the ultimate issue. We should continue to ask ourselves whether as human beings we should be in the business of permitting or forbidding any other human being on any aspect of his or her behavior. Obviously there are limits, and to a large extent the ancient rules suffice: Thou shalt not kill etc. Nor do I feel that speaking about permissiveness in general terms is at all helpful. In some respects the Dutch may have been highly permissive, in other respects we are not quite as tolerant as some make us to be.

The larger issue in my view is the degree to which we wish to encourage cohesion in morality and behavior, and to what extent we allow individuals in ours society to have their own experiences. In both dimensions, serious interests – in every society – are at stake. I also believe that behavior is not a static phenomenon. Most people go through certain phases in their lives, and some of us want to learn from ‘bad’ behavior in order to – eventually – find the ‘good’.

All of this, to me, would tend to a twofold approach at all times. Permissiveness – allowing for freedom in a large measure for everybody – should go hand in hand with greater public awareness of morality, social cohesion and social responsibility. We all cross the thresholds at one or more points in our life. What really matters, is whether we learn from it.