Triangulating Dutch Jewry’s Downfall

The Hague’s Van Ostade Housing Project—once part of a traditional Jewish neighborhood—now belongs to a transformed Schilderswijk which the Dutch increasingly know as the “Sharia Triangle.”

There aren’t enough Jews left to form a minyan. But Frabrice Shomberg, an artist born in England, stubbornly continues to make “kippah walks” and build a Sukkah as a marker of his Dutch neighborhood’s Jewish past. (Yet even Shomberg makes careful calculations about when—and when not—to wear a yarmulke in public.)

The reaction?

Urged by the police to shutdown Shomberg entirely, municipal officials tried instead to torpedo him by requiring him to tear down the Sukkah every day by 9:00 P.M. in order to rebuild it the next. He received anonymous Internet death threats, many probably from the same Muslim neighbors who parade with banners endorsing ISIS and reading: “Kill the Jews!” And the Hague’s Jewish community—both Reform and Orthodox—stigmatized and ostracized him as a cross between a contemporary bipolar crackpot and a reincarnation of excommunicated Spinoza, though Shomberg is guilty of nothing except putting into practice his belief that (as a lonely defender puts it) “banning sukkot is like banning Judaism.”

Perhaps the Hague should declare that its new Shariah Triangle is the European extension of Mecca so that Dutch Muslims can stay home terrorizing Jews without having to take time out for the haj.

Clearly, the organized Dutch Jewish community seems to be well along the road to preemptively accepting second-class citizen status as dhimmis in an Islamicized Holland.

See http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.619579