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Dutch Media Also Downplay Amsterdam Gay-bashing

Posted by GayPatriotWest at 9:53 pm - June 9, 2008.
Filed under: Gays in Other Lands

More familiar with the current situation in Europe than I and more knowledgeable of the state of the media in the Holland, Bruce Bawer observes that the Dutch gay-bashing story we reported last week “had not appeared in major newspapers in the Netherlands” Just as the attack went unnoticed in American media,

apparently it also went unnoticed in the Netherlands, except by the gay community. Did the mainstream media even hear about this? Is it their attitude that such things are only of interest or importance to gay people?

In an update to his initial post, linking a blog report on media coverage of the beating, Bruce notes the most media reports on the attack “are from marginal publications; none are from top-level national media.” Sounds like the Dutch MSM is not much different from our own.

It wasn’t just the media, Finding “no indication in the Dutch articles that there was” any resistance, Bruce observes:

that’s the scariest part of all this, the sheer passivity. It’s like when Anna Lindh was murdered in Stockholm. People just stood there, waiting for somebody else to do something. Somebody whose job it was. Hayek was right: the capacity for resistance — the capacity of even conceiving of resistance — is bred out of people in social democracies. And it’s not as if gays in Amsterdam can say they were taken by surprise. In the last decade, conditions for gay people in that city have been heading steadily south. It was just about time for something like this to happen. Amsterdam gays should have been prepared.

Sounds like they need to set up an Amsterdam chapter of Pink Pistols, but I doubt European gun laws would allow such an outfit.

Read the whole thing. Since I couldn’t find a post-specific link, you’ll have to scroll down to do so.

Related: Bruce’s essay in Pajamas: First They Came for the Gays.

UPDATE: Bruce writes this morning alerting me to an update on his blog. It turns out that the assault was covered in NRC Handelsblad, a major newspaper–although that story did not appear on the paper’s website.

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5 Comments

  1. The reason for so much downplay is because it would start a mockery of their legal system. We have that problem in the united states.

    Comment by Gluttony — June 10, 2008 @ 12:02 am - June 10, 2008

  2. Columbia University MidEast Studies professor blames West for gays in Muslim lands

    Columbia University professor Joseph Massad numbers one more mark against the West. This professor hails from the same department that hosted Edward Said and now hosts, in the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies chair, Barack Obama friend and fierce critic of Israel Rashid Khalidi.

    Jamie Sneider of the Weekly Standard captures the madness:

    …Massad belongs on a psychiatrist’s couch, not behind a podium. In Desiring Arabs, Massad asserts that the West “produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist.” But for colonialism, Massad contends, there would be no gay people in the Middle East for the tyrannical governments of Egypt and Iran to persecute. Although Massad says he opposes hanging gay people, he shifts the blame from the hooded executioners to the United States.

    When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Columbia last fall and made a similar claim (“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”), students laughed and booed. They recently, however, elected to award Massad the Lionel Trilling Book Award for making the nearly identical claim.

    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/06/columbia_university_mideast_st.html

    Comment by Vince P — June 10, 2008 @ 1:25 am - June 10, 2008

  3. In fact I read it in ad.nl, which is a respectable site. I’m not saying that gays in the Netherlands are hated, but the Dutch themselves don’t exactly embrace them, either. They may have more rights in the Netherlands than in some other countries, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that an entire nation condones homosexuality.

    You can see that mentality reflected in this situation.

    Comment by Dee — June 10, 2008 @ 3:25 am - June 10, 2008

  4. #2 – So Vince, let me see if I understand this: we in the USA and the rest of the Western World are responsible for producing gays and lesbians, and it is our fault that the Middle East islamofascists are killing people like us because they do not fit into their society.

    This is more bull than a Merrill Lynch commercial.

    Regards,
    Peter H.

    Comment by Peter Hughes — June 10, 2008 @ 10:21 am - June 10, 2008

  5. that doesn’t necessarily mean that an entire nation condones homosexuality.

    I’m not sure what to make of that statement. Is that a goal, that whole nations should unconditionally accept homosexuality? That is beyond Utopian. Nobody on this earth is free of prejudice or some form of discrimination, human nature is clannish and tribal.

    You can see that mentality reflected in this situation.

    That is not what I see at all, what I see is a society that has been good at giving lipservice to protecting it’s diverse members. In reality, the Dutch have decided that one group is more equal than others – Muslims – they are getting all the breaks from the law these days.
    This isn’t the first attack in Holland. When I go to a pro Israeli rally here in the US, I am thrilled to see all the cops out there protecting us. They know that such an event can lead to problems from Israel haters. Why can’t be Dutch police be out in force on a day like that, especially near a gay pride event.

    Comment by Leah — June 10, 2008 @ 3:37 pm - June 10, 2008

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