…of the new anti-semites on the left:
The deployment of “decoy Jews”…is being criticized by leftist parties such as the Dutch Greens. Evelien van Roemburg, an Amsterdam counselor of the Green Left Party, says that using a decoy by the police amounts to provoking a crime, which is itself a criminal offence under Dutch law.
Got that? If you go out looking like a Jew, and a Muslim physically assaults you, it’s your fault — kind of like it’s your fault if you’re a girl and your skirt is too short. To be on the safe side: Don’t look Jewish. And if you do look Jewish, you had better be Jewish, or the Dutch Greens won’t like it. Or something.
The new anti-Semitism is sometimes hard to keep up with.
Or, if you’re a Muslim, and you assault a Jew who is actually a Jew, that’s kind of bad, but if you assault a Jew who turns out to be a decoy — even though you thought he was a Jew — that’s not so bad, because you were tricked . . . or something.
The new anti-Semitism can give you a headache.
Maybe it would be simpler if they’d just return to the old days, and make the real Jews wear yellow magen Davids.
Their whine is music. I’d like to hear more of it played the world over.
I have little sympathy for GL (they are a bunch of holier-than-thou lefties), and there are many things you can say about them, but not that they’re anti-semites. The same cannot be said for all their voters however.
In this case, what they are saying is that they oppose entrapment, not that they are opposed to people wearing whatever they like or being responsible for any resulting violence. They have no problem at all with people wearing clothing that indicates their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or political leanings. If anything, they actually like that sort of thing, they’re a bunch of multi-culti’s. They want one happy family of cheeseheads, muslims, jews, gays and lesbians etc. A couple of years ago they had a campaign slogan “hands of our gays and muslims”. However, most rhetoric and even violence against Jews and gays comes from muslims.
Note that the (Jewish) acting mayor of Amsterdam and the Center for Information and Documentation Israel support the decoy plan.
Acting Jewish, or acting mayor? 😉
As Jay points out, it is no more “entrapping” a Jew hater to dress as a Jew, than a woman dressed in a short skirt is “entrapping” a rapist. This is nonsensical.
No, dressing as a Jew is not entrapment, but dressing as a Jew in order to catch anti-semites might be. I don’t necessarily agree with that argument, but I can see how one might sincerely feel that way. Even if it were entrapment, on balance I’m in favour of it. At least as an experiment to see if it works.
If we take away the emotionally very sensitive (and rightly so) issue of racism and compare it to something less serious, things become clearer. Let’s compare it to bike theft. My bike has been stolen many, many times and occasionally I’ve taken the trouble of reporting it to the police. (Mocking response: “wow, now there’s a really serious crime!” Serve and protect you dumbass!) When I asked them if they couldn’t use decoy bikes they said that would be entrapment and couldn’t be used to convict. On balance, I don’t think this reasoning should apply to the use of decoy-Jews to combat anti-semitism, but I can see why it might be entrapment.
Hey, they got the idea from NBC and their decoy Muslims at NASCAR. Copycats.
I don’t know about overseas but many US police departments have vice squads that use decoy cops dressed as hookers. They then arrest the johns who attempt to procure their services. Likewise, they also use cops posing as johns to catch hookers. Is that entrapment? I don’t think so and it would seem the courts agree because the police are still using those tactics.
If a cop dressed as a Jew and was attacked while simply walking down the street, that can’t be entrapment unless “Walking While Jewish” is a crime. On the other hand, if the cop went out of his way to provoke someone, that would be a different matter.
“…said that would be entrapment and couldn’t be used to convict…”
I’d say no problem. Give me a name and I’ll take it from here.
so what does dutch law say about this tactic.
Martijn, thank you for the reference.
This link — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Cohen — makes for interesting reading.
I might add that many here would benefit from following the example of Job Cohen.
Job Cohen is the former mayor of Amsterdam, now the leader of the parliamentary Labour party and a potential prime minister. Lodewijk Asscher is the acting mayor I mentioned earlier.
Ah. Thank you again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodewijk_Asscher is not as interesting reading, so I’m glad I was mistaken!
A major European city with two Jewish mayors — I wonder if this is a post-WWII record? For this and many other reasons, hooray for the Netherlands!
At least three actually, Ed van Thijn was another one. Amsterdam is the city with the largest Jewish community in the Netherlands.
Asscher looks like Nick Clegg. And he looks like David Cameron. Youngsters are running things over there!
Two more: Ivo Samkalden, Wim Polak.
Entrapment requires that the police officer be breaking the law in his own behavior in order to entice others to break the law.
Its not illegal to be a Jew.
It turns out that the Dutch High Court has recently decided decoy-bikes are not in fact entrapment. Pretending to be a junkie and selling a supposedly stolen bike would be. I feel so much more confident my bike will not be stolen again now… And since decoy-gays have been used before without legal complications, the decoy-Jews plan will probably go ahead.
Wow! I am surprised.
Entrapment requires that the police officer be breaking the law in his own behavior…
That’s how I’ve always understood it. I would think it would be a key pivotal issue; However, that point doesn’t seem to have made it’s way into Wikipedia: entrapment is when a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit an offense which the person would otherwise have been unlikely to commit.
No wonder Job Cohen is so racially sensitive — growing up in Haarlem, and all…
Based on either definition, decoy Jews are not entrapment since weather decoy or not you couldn’t say attacks were something they wouldn’t have committed.
So, when does the former holder of the office formerly known as Grand Inquisitor (that’d be the current pope, by the way) finally call for the final crusade?
When Purgatory freezes over. You’ll recognize it — it’s where the trolls go when they die.
To better understand why some people might have felt this was entrapment, it is helpful to know that the Dutch word that was used (lokjood) might be more literally translated as “bait jew” and that the element lok (from the verb lokken, to bait) also occurs in “uitlokking”, the Dutch legal term for entrapment.
So, when does the former holder of the office formerly known as Grand Inquisitor (that’d be the current pope, by the way) finally call for the final crusade?
What do you mean?
I’ve been reading with interest various facts about Amsterdam, in an attempt to figure out why, as one writer put it, Amersterdam has had more post-war Jewish mayors than New Amsterdam (New York). I read about the source of Amsterdam’s motto “”Valiant, Steadfast, Compassionate”, which commemorates the citizens of Amsterdam who participated in the communist-led February Strike, the first protest by non-Jews subjected to the Nazi regime against the Nazis’s treatment of the Jews. It is quite a history of tolerance, and and quite a modern day record of tolerance, and the Left is well represented.
Rand, when you talk about the anti-semitic Left as if the Left was a simple monolithic edifice, remember Amsterdam!
Its not illegal to be a Jew.
If Mark Stern is right, you need to add the word “yet” to your sentence.
“Its not yet illegal to be a Jew.”
or
“Its not illegal to be a Jew – yet.”