QUEEN'S DAY CONFESSIONS
I must confess that apart from my empathy for the innocent victims of the 2009 Queen's Day attack, I have also felt a sense of relief about one aspect of this drama. And I believe I was not the only one who felt strangely relieved. That feeling of relief came when the newsreader informed that the attacker was a native Dutchman, a white man.
I think everyone relieved to hear that was relieved for various reasons. In my case, I remember thinking how good it was that no matter how tragic the event, it would not grow into another wave of speculations about the immigrant invasion of Europe – speculations especially popular outside Europe (in my native Russia, for instance, where such speculations are utilized to justify nationalist tendencies within the Russian society). I was also happy, of course, that the incident would not come handy as yet another populist weapon in the hands of Geert Wilders and his (potential) supporters.
True, there was also another reason in the back of my mind why I felt relieved, and that reason I am somewhat ashamed of. I also remember thinking: The attacker is native Dutch, hence it was no terrorist attack. Literally this means that even for me, who makes the daily conscious effort to free my mind from traces of stereotypes and xenophobia, the dangerous link “Islamic immigrant” – “Terror” is vaguely present.
I then tried to imagine what the days after the attack would have been like, had the attacker been an immigrant, let's say a Moroccan, and the rest of the circumstances completely identical to the real story. How would the government, the society, the foreign observers have reacted, if it was a lonely, frustrated, jobless, despaired, possibly mentally distorted ethnic Moroccan who killed those innocent civilians and tried to hit the bus with the Royal family onboard?
We can't predict our exact reactions, and surely the rational thinkers among us would have summoned us back to our senses, but one thing is certain – we would all have felt more afraid than we did in the face of the “native Dutch attack”. Because, for some reason, we would have initially denied an Islamic immigrant attacker any “right” to commit a crime disconnected from his ethnic or religious origins. We would have immediately associated him with a vast group of other potentially dangerous attackers, whichever country they come from or reside in at the moment. The mildest and the most democratic among us would have linked the attack to the fallbacks in the integration process. And the foreign observers would have probably armed themselves with Queen's Day 2009 in Holland as an argument that such integration is either failing or impossible.
And hardly anyone would have suggested that a Muslim immigrant, too, may act, think, get frustrated, lonely, mentally unstable and commit grave and criminal mistakes for the same reasons as a native Dutchman can – that is, without any link to the Islamic terror or integration problems altogether.