Amsterdam mayor finally smelling trouble?

Job Cohen, the Labor Party mayor of Amsterdam, has officially started worrying. In his New Year's speech held on Tuesday night, he called the 'underachievement of some youths' one of Amsterdam's biggest issues. The policies on juvenile criminals, the mayor added, have failed. Hearing this from a mayor, who by many is known as a politically correct radical, can be recorded as the first break-through of 2008.

But for most people in the Netherlands the mayor's outcry is old wine in even older bottles. Real life people have known for a decade or so that the problem is the Moroccan street terrorists, who are dying to start another mini-jihad against Dutch society. The very night before Cohen's speech, these youths had attacked the police station at the August Allebé square in West Amsterdam. Windows were crashed and three police cars went up in flames.

Some of the Moroccan youths are the children or grand children of the guest workers recruited from Morocco in the 60s and early 70s. But when the recruitments stopped in 1973, the number of Moroccans in the Netherlands stood at a mere 22 thousand. The largest part of the Moroccan community entered the country through marriage immigration (the socalled right of family reunion), bringing the population to 329 thousand in 2007.

While billions of euros have been spent on literacy programs, Dutch language and integration courses, additional school subsidies, neighborhood hang-outs and multicultural street parties, Moroccans are notoriously 'underachieving'. The Dutch journalist Fleur Jurgens in her book Het Marokkanendrama summarized that 60 pct of the adults live on welfare, and that 70 pct of the youths drop out of school without a useful diploma. According to a 2006 research, 40 pct of the same youths reject a Western lifestyle, and 6 pct is even willing to use violence to defend Islam. The tolerant welfare state, celebrated as a role model to the world in the multicultural 90s, seems to have created a monster.

The police station at the Allebé square was no random target, by the way. It had already been the focus of Moroccan rage following the death of the psychotic Moroccan Bilal Bajaka. On 14th October of 2007 Bajaka walked into the Allebé station with a large knife in his hand, stabbing two random police officers before they could shoot him. While the officers had to go through life-saving surgery and weeks of slow recovery, the Amsterdam Moroccans sought revenge for the loss of their clan member, and launched a mini-jihad against civil society. During the next two weeks, dozens of civilian cars were torched, journalists violently ousted from the neighborhood.


Report on West Amsterdam troubles by EenVandaag (in Dutch).

As usual, the mayor's reaction was dangerously appeasive. While the Amsterdam chief commissioner Bernard Welten openly dreaded 'Parisian conditions', referring to the annual riots in the French suburbs, Cohen ordered the police not to intervene. Intervention, after all, could disturb the peace in the neighborhoods!

When the media later revealed that Bajaka was a close friend of Mohammed Bouyeri, the islamist murderer of the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, the question arose whether the onslaught on the police station wasn't simply a clumsy terrorist attack. Yet Cohen categorically denied any terrorist motive being involved, proclaiming that the attack was the mere act of a madman. Any possible commotion over a terrorist act, after all, would pose a serious threat to... peace in the city.

As a citizen of Amsterdam, it is frightening to see that the mayor is willing to sacrifice both the law and the truth on the altar of peace. A peace, I am afraid, that no longer exists but in the mayor's head. Is Cohen finally smelling trouble in 2008? Probably not. Yes, the mayor for the first time publically expressed his worries about the city's future in his New Year's speech. The larger part of his speech, however, was just a variation to the same old riff about the 'growing gap between the rich and the poor', which - as the socialists tend to think - is the real cause of crime and all other types of underachievement.

Exclusion is another one of those root causes. Exclusion by society (which is usually portrayed as too intolerant, too capitalist, and - especially - too Western) is supposed to be the trigger for people to become a criminal or an islamist. The cure-all to societal problems, the socialists therefore believe, must be unconditional inclusion. No wonder mayor Cohen in his speech frantically emphasized that the underachieving youths are in fact all 'Amsterdammers that the city can't do without in the future.' Can't do without? Uh, I don't know about that... What I do know is that the Moroccan street terrorists can't do without their mayor.