© Google StreetviewA general view of Duindorp.
The Duindorp neighbourhood, a pre-war neighbourhood close to Scheveningen harbour, hit the headlines this week after locals appeared on television saying they saw nothing wrong in trying to drive out foreigners.
'My son has been waiting for a house in Duindorp for four years and then along comes a burqa with a man who has a dromedary and a camel. They get one within a week. Get lost. We don't want them here,' one man, Nico den Heijer, said on camera.
Pig's head
Immigrants have complained about having their windows smashed and swasticas painted on the walls of their home, local housing corporation Vestia said.
One family found a pig's head had been nailed to their door 'because they had the cheek to come and live here', the AD reports.
Housing corporation officials who show prospective new tenants around have also been threatened so seriously the police have been informed, the AD says on Friday.
Fire
A Turkish bakery close by was also set on fire last weekend and the owner suspects a racist motive.
Local Peter de Bruijn, described as a large, bald man in a jogging suit by the AD, told the paper Duindorp residents all know each other from school. 'It is a big group of friends, we leave our doors open and nothing ever happens between us,' he said. 'But if the foreigners move in, then the problems start.'
Repercussions
Not all locals are opposed to foreigners moving in, but those that have defended them in the past are reluctant to talk to the press because of local repercussions, the AD says.
The Hague's mayor, police and Vestia are now trying to work out how to deal with the situation. Van Aartsen says he will not tolerate the situation: 'not in Duindorp, not in Scheveningen, nowhere in the city.'
Local politicians have also expressed their concern at the situation. 'There is nothing the matter with sentiment but we cannot tolerate the use of violence against other population groups,' city councillor Richard de Mos, a former MP for Geert Wilders' PVV, told local broadcaster Omroep West.
Labour MP Ahmed Marcouch has asked justice minister Ivo Opstelten to make a statement on the issue and urged Wilders to condemn events in the village.
or maybe so called tolerance. Officially there is no discrimination or racism in The Netherlands. All cultures are supposed to live side by side peacefully. And everyone is supposed to exercise their personal faith freely. But then there are a lot of immigrants from rural areas in Morocco, not from the cities, mind you. They are severely traditional. Overall the muslims build their own mosques, have their own markets and shops in every city and village in The Netherlands, I shop there frequently. Our supermarket has a halal department. They go about their business and are part of Dutch society. But they remain culturally separate. At home every Moroccan family speaks Arabic. And most women don't speak Dutch.
But the buts are there too: a lot of young Moroccans are jobless and end up in the criminal circuit and in jail. Within the Dutch jails a majority is of foreign origin. And young Moroccan men are mostly not very cultured. They are generally a bit lost. And the young women are very repressed while they go to school with individually expressive Dutch women. This is a very big problem of clashing cultures.
And there are a lot of people from the former colonies, Indonesia, Surinam and the Antilles and of course the workers from Turkey that have come here since the eighties. Nowadays there are a lot of Poles, Rumenians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Slovenians, working for an honest (mostly very low) wages or skimming creditcards for that matter.
Every city has areas where the different ethnic groups live; of course they want to live close to each other, so historically there are areas in every city where the Maroccans live predominantly, or the Antillians or the Turkish people. Because there is no discrimination in this country, the government wants this to change: everybody has got to live happily with each other, so these neighborhoods have got to become mingled. This is happening in The Hague. Duindorp is a neighborhood where I fear to tread at night, especially when the locals lost a soccermatch. Or when there is a new year's party [Link] How to build a bigger fire than Scheveningen!
In the past, the original people in a neighborhood just left when a lot of Moroccans came to live there, so it has become a Moroccan neighborhood in the end ... and so it happened.
Now the government places newly arrived and innocent Moroccan families squarely within a traditionally white neighborhood on purpose, ignoring the sentiments of the ordinary working class people that live there. I don't live in such a neighborhood, would not want to because I don't share those sentiments but I understand the problem.
So I advise to read this article with the above in mind. These people are not neo nazi's, for the real thing you will have to look at Kiev, Ukraine.