Mid-Week Update

How the day after in Amsterdam and the Oscars are framing the global narrative

First, welcome to all the new readers following Monday’s piece on the chaos in Amsterdam where the opening of the Holocaust Museum got out of hand. It brought out a lot of feedback, so thanks for commenting, liking, e-mailing and of course subscribing. The war in the Middle East and its impact on the rest of the world has drowned out some of the other subject here like US elections, Ukraine and Indonesia, but if you think it through there is no other conclusion than that everything is so interconnected. So we go with the flow of the news here and if you can join me on the journey, think of the global context and how all these events interact.

Aftermath

It is probably useful to give a bit more colour to what happened the day after as Dutch media were on fire and almost everyone from the prime minister on down weighed in. A lot of it was of course incredibly unhelpful as authorities tried to smoothen the way the police handled the protest. Yet this exactly underlined the thesis I put out on Monday: most political leaders and authorities do not even have the faintest idea of how the Anti-semitic rot has permeated society. At best they were all deeply surprised, at worst they let it all happen as it served their agendas.

The fact that Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema paid a visit to Holocaust survivor Rudie Cortissos on Monday to apologize for the abuse he and his great-granddaughter had to endure during the ceremony does not change anything. It only highlights the cluelessness we got to witness here on so many levels and that politicians and civic leaders are essentially out of their depths. And in an even more bizarre twist Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen was on the same day visited by no less than six police officers following a parody video he did on social media about Halsema using a fake gun. And no, not to threaten the mayor, but to give a nod to the scandal the mayor was involved a few years ago when her then husband actually was found to have an unlicensed gun in their official residence. Of course the ask was: how come police were so on top of this issue and not on the wild and threatening protests the day before?

Oscar Time

And the events in Amsterdam had only just come to an end when the next incident presented itself: artists making political statements during the Annual Academy Awards. From Jonathan Glazer refuting his Jewishness to Billie Eilish wearing a lapel pin calling for an immediate ceasefire, it was abundantly clear from which direction the wind was blowing. Don’t get me wrong, the humanitarian disaster in Gaza deserves attention and an acute resolution. And in that regard it may be helpful if, in particular the artists that influence a younger generation, point out the real origins of the Gaza misery: the role of Hamas. It is disparaging to see how one-sided the matter is interpreted with little regard for context and history. At eighty-one we will not have Barbra Streisand around for all that much longer to speak out on behalf of Jews and the state of Israel.

So?

Yes, this is, again, the steady mainstreaming of Hamas and if you have any idea how the group’s actions are polling among Palestinians, check out some of the interviews Bari Weiss conducted on the West Bank. Even their voices recognize the impossibility of a two-state and, yes, even a one-state solution. But they’re fine with Hamas doing the legwork.

So with an inept political class and a popular culture that is educating the uneducated, there is less of a balanced playing field where we could strive to find real solutions for the conflict and its increasing impact on the rest of the world. We are sinking away in a morass of hopelessness and are trying to bake solutions based on a total misunderstanding of the facts on the ground. The resulting vacuum is filled with radical positions and violence, in the Middle East and across Western cities.

Context: it is all helping the anti-Western forces that now have so much less to fear and can sit back and see how the drama unfolds itself. So if you see protests in Amsterdam, think Iran. And if you witness a fracturing American consensus over Gaza, think Russia. Or even China. Rudie Cortissos’ great grand-daughter does not have the wherewithal yet to make these connections, but she will ask herself why an angry horde of adults were screaming at her and her family on an early spring day in Amsterdam.