A top Dutch jurist on Sunday criticized prosecutors for saying Deputy Prime Minister Mona Keijzer was guilty of hate speech when she noted publicly that many Muslim immigrants are antisemitic.
Afshin Ellian, a Tehran-born professor of law at Leiden University, in an op-ed in EW magazine on Sunday called the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service’s finding earlier this year, laid out in a legal document, “insulting and irrational.”
The prosecutors said that Keijzer, who is also the minister of housing and spatial planning, was guilty of “incitement to intolerance” that “contradicts the foundations of democracy.”
Despite their assertion that she had broken the law, the prosecutors decided not to indict Keijzer, a lawmaker from the right-wing Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB).
The allegation followed a complaint to police against Keijzer in July over her statement in a talk show that “what you see is that many asylum seekers come from countries with Muslim faith. We know that Jew-hatred there is a part, almost, of the culture.”
She said this in defense of her policy of making Holocaust studies an obligatory part of the naturalization process of new citizens.
Another panelist, Arnon Grunberg, a left-leaning Jewish writer, called this policy an attempt to “use the genocide of the Jews to punish newcomers,” prompting Keijzer to address Muslim antisemitism to justify her policy.
In his op-ed, Ellian urged Keijzer to appeal the finding against her. He noted the antisemitic teachings of Prophet Mohammed and a 2018 study by scholar Ruud Koopmans for the Dutch parliament, in which Koopmans noted that antisemitism is “remarkedly prevalent” among Muslims in direct proportion to their degree of religious observance.
“I hope that Mona Keijzer challenges this illogical, arrogant, and above all unprofessional assertion,” wrote Ellian.
In France, Georges Bensoussan, editor in chief of the Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, was acquitted of the charge of inciting hatred of Muslims in 2017, and again on appeal in 2018, for saying in an interview that “in Arab families in France and beyond, everybody knows but will not say that antisemitism is transmitted with mother’s milk.”
One of the complainants against him was the LICRA (International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism) group, which was founded in 1927 as a Jewish group fighting mostly antisemitism.
Geert Wilders, the leader of the Netherlands’ largest political party, was charged with incitement to intolerance or discrimination for saying in 2014 that he would make sure the Netherlands has fewer Moroccans. He was acquitted of that charge but convicted of insulting a racial group.
