Thursday, November 11, 2004

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Arjan,
first of all many thanx for your site - it pdovides a great "window" into the Netherlands chronical of daily events and hot issues and a good deal of reasoning and background info in addition to it.

I found a comprehensive overview of Dutch politic reactions here: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NETHERLANDS_TERROR_DEBATE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

let me provide a synopsis as well:
Verhagen (CDA): rather wants to see 10 innocents temporary in jail than one unaccounted bomber slipping thru the net of security.

Remkes (VVD?) : confirms that Dutch intelligence watches roughly 150 radical islamics but says he is lacking the resources to constantly track all their moves 24/7 - Judging from your blog's postings, I guess he is the main target of public scrutiny at the moment

van Aartsen (VVD Leader) : urges shutting down these mosques where radical imams are preaching and operating. Interesting his reasoning (which I tend to agree) "Not all Muslims are terrorists but a large number of terrorists in the world feel attached to an idendity as Muslim - they want to destroy us" - didn't MP Hirsi Ali say something siimilar in the NYT / IHT ??

Geert Wilders : called upon government to put these 150 suspects on it's watchlist into jail... Now I read that this MP is a populist trying to emulate Pim Fortuyn's story/position. Can anyone tell me about his position with regard to secularism ? I never read much about this aspect of him.

Donner (Justice) announced new steps to infiltrate terror cells. BUT - weren't the islamists already one notch ahead by placing a mole (a Moroccan translator) into rank & file of your intelligence agency ?

any insight appreciated. I'm an ardent watcher of political contests (mostly US but not confined to that..) around the world. While I am aware of the positioning of the major players in the Netherlands I'm still lacking some understanding of the more nuanced issues and subtleties..

all the best
MAXX (from Austria)

MAXX (ip:80.108.31.227) 11 November 2004 - 0:29 uur

Phew, addressing all those questions would require several pages :-) Remkes is fighting for his political life, see the main page. Maxime Verhagen is a very clever politician, I'm just not sure he's always to be taken at face value (I am being cryptical here for a purpose). Wilders broke with the Liberal Party (VVD), same party Van Aartsen still belongs to, because he wanted the Liberal Party to become more right-wing. I'm not sure how serious I should take him. He's been in politics for a long time, unlike Pim Fortuyn (who was, by the way, a very smart guy); on the other hand, Wilders has become extremely populist as of late, up to the point of looking very opportunistic. Fortuyn was no stranger to populism either, but he stuck to a lot of ideas he had had for many years already, rather than inventing them on the fly.

I'll leave it at that. I think you will be able to improve your understanding of the Dutch political situation from reading this blog regularly, as well as the sources I am referring to, and the international media. I'd rather have you draw your own conclusions as opposed to me telling you what to think.

Arjan (ip:82.161.93.35) 11 November 2004 - 0:40 uur

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