ISLAMOPHOBIA REPORT

ISLAMOPHOBIA IN Netherlands
together hold 37 seats in the European Parliament. They succeed in founding another
two parties (the Polish Congress New Right and the British UKIP) and are
thus able to found a party in June 2015 under the name Europe of Nations and
Freedom Group. This means more financial support, more speaking time and thus
more influence.
December The PVV looks for new candidates in parliament using the criterion
´with an aversion to Islam.´
17 December
PvdA MP Khadija Arib informed parliament that she wanted to be a candidate
for the presidency of the parliament. PVV MP de Graaf reacted with a tweet: ‘Someone
who is a subject of the king of Morocco should not become president of the
Dutch Parliament, No way!’
Democratic political parties gradually but increasingly take a stance against
(the racism of) the PVV, against racism in general and Islamophobia in particular. 21
Wilders and the PVV are becoming more and more isolated at the political level and
anti-discrimination has become an issue on the political agenda. Political leadership,
mainstream political parties and civil society actors have not only distanced themselves
from and protested against the discourse on Moroccans by Wilders and his
party as such, but have also gradually taken concrete action against discrimination
and racism. However, various opinion polls taken in 2013, 2014 and 2015, have
pointed to the PVV as the largest party in the Netherlands, if elections should take
place at that point in time.
Justice system, laws, and regulations
On 4 April
G. Bouwman, head of the national police force writes on an internal blog that Muslim
police officers are verbally abused by colleagues. “A poison sneaks into our organisation,
the poison of exclusion,” he wrote. He condemned the arbitrariness that reigns
on the streets where Muslims are disproportionally stopped and searched and treated
as terrorists. Research shows that debureaucratisation and an emphasis on individual
autonomy have made the police force more vulnerable to different forms of discrimination
that cannot be countered by the usual psychological awareness training. 22 The
police service of the city of Tilburg has started a pilot project. Registration forms will
be used where police officers must write down the ethnicity of the person they stop and
the reason why this is done. In Amsterdam, political parties insist on a national policy
of diversity to counter police discrimination. The mayor of the city of The Hague, Van
Aartsen, in a debate in the local council (9 July) confirmed that ethnic profiling does
21. Examples and details are elaborated in the report, written in Dutch, I. van der Valk Monitor Moslim Discriminatie.
22. P. Mutsaers. “Ethnic profiling as a Societal Institution in the Netherlands” in: Anthropoliteia, April 2015.
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