In a classic move by The New York Times, the leftist paper gave prime positioning on A3 of Saturday’s print edition to a piece boasting of the far-left Denk Party in the Netherlands that’s promised to create a museum about Dutch slavery and completely root out “xenophobia and racism” in the country to the point of banning anyone with racist rhetoric (in their eyes) from public office.
Dutch correspondent Nina Siegal made it clear from outset how she would spin the story by lamenting how “Europe has more than its share of angry anti-immigrant political parties these days” while “one party has turned the politics of immigration on its head, positioning itself as perhaps the first in Europe with a pro-immigrant stance, run by people from immigrant backgrounds.”
Revealing that this party goes by “Denk, or Think,” Siegal promoted it as “a multicultural group of candidates seeking to combat xenophobia and racism in the Netherlands” and particularly “the flamboyant far-right populist candidate Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party, which has been surging in the polls.”
As for their policies, they include stifling dissent and banning a Dutch word for integration that probably should outrage a news outlet that, like many, pride themselves on the importance of free speech and, in America, the First Amendment:
Denk was accused in the local Amsterdam centrist newspaper, Het Parool, of “fanning flames of immigrant discontent.” On social media, the party has been called “Netherlands haters.”
Among the Denk party’s stated policy goals are banning from legislative forums a pejorative term often used for Dutch nonwhites, “allochtoon,” and to replace the term “integration” with “acceptance.”
It wants to establish a “racism register” to track the use of hate speech by elected officials and to bar those who promote racism from holding public office.
It also promotes the building of a Dutch slavery museum and it hopes to abolish the black minstrel character called Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete, who appears in Dutch winter holiday celebrations with Sinterklaas, or a kind of Dutch Santa Claus.
Despite the hype, the article buries the criticism that it’s been accused of being “puppets” for the increasingly-authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and led by a former Miss Netherlands and prominent television host.
All told, the party doesn’t seem poised to take over the country anytime soon either as “some polls show that the party is likely to win two or three seats in the next elections, but others show it gaining only one seat at most.”
The Labor party in the Netherlands has been the natural casualty of Denk and, according to Siegal, it’s due to the “feel[ing] that Labor has done little to promote the interests of minority groups” but those in the establishment left-leaning party fear their ideological ally might exacerbate divisions. Once again, it should come as no surprise that this fear was buried at the bottom of the puff piece.
