Enemy: Jew and Turk

The anti-Islam Freedom Party of far-right politician Geert Wilders has made major gains in local elections. Yet, despite for long seeming unable to lead even his own party, Mark Rutte now looks set to lead the Netherlands through the current economic storm as its next prime minister. Rutte, who is 43 years old, brought his right-wing liberal VVD party a significant victory in Wednesday's parliamentary election. It is now up to him to take the lead in the, difficult, process of forming a coalition.

See his Freedom of Expression article at the Party Web Site

The 1579, Union of Utrecht‘s Article XIII indicated that everyone was free in his religion and that no one would be persecuted because of his religion. This bold and progressive statement of religious freedom was written over 200 years before the First Amendment of the American Bill of Rights

Mavi Boncuk |

While slouching against a wall in a former cigarette factory in the industrial outskirts of The Hague one day last month, I was visited with the sudden realization that over the formative centuries of European history the two words that most succinctly signaled “other,” “foreign” or “enemy” were these: “Jew” and “Turk.” Crudely unpacking them, “Turk” meant Muslim, Arab, infidel, the threat from without; a Jew was the enemy within, someone who, even if born and raised in your hometown, was part of another political as well as religious entity; the Jews of a city were referred to not as a community but as “the Jewish nation.” “Jew” and “Turk” were in fact constructs Europeans used to help define their own identity: that which we are not.
By RUSSELL SHORTO
N.Y.Times Published: May 28, 2010