BROKEN GATES 'It just doesn't feel like Holland any more'

[gilliam]

ROTTERDAM – To a visitor, the village of Nijkerk looks like a model of Dutch calm and order, its neat streets filled with cyclists and lined with tiny townhouses.

But to Bert van Ramshorst and his family, the town no longer feels like home. Its citizens now come in a variety of hues and hold a wide range of beliefs, some of them deeply at odds with the pacifism and expansive liberalism that has long characterized Dutch society.

“I’ve lived here, in this town, almost all of my life, and it just doesn’t feel like Holland any more,” the 42-year-old electrical contractor said, as he took a break from packing to sit with his wife and three young children in their narrow, cozy living room. “It doesn’t feel like the place where I want to raise my family.” So the van Ramshorst family, troubled by the changes brought about by immigration, have decided to become immigrants themselves.

With their move to Vancouver this summer, they are joining an unprecedented number of people from the Netherlands who have decided, in recent months, to make a new home in what they see as the more comforting and less divisive Canada.
Read the rest here

 

[Fitz]

So, is this happening in France, Germany and other European countries too? Just wondering if anyone knows. I know they all sfffer with a declining birth rate due to abortion and birth control. Do they all have people leaving for Canada?

 

[Walburga]

I don’t know about those other European countries. I do recall reading quite alot about the murder of that artist in the Netherlands and what an uproar it caused. I can understand why they are leaving and heading for someplace else. I’m not sure if there has been that same kind of precipitating event in the other countries.

 

[mpav]

From the article: “The last 10 years, our government’s policy was to tolerate almost everything, and that’s not good,” he said. “There’s law, and there’s respect of the law, and you can’t just let people do anything. Tolerance is very important, but we’ve reached the point where we’re tolerating people who despise our way of life and want to damage it.”

The rest of the articles makes some good points about the Netherlands needing to learn from the Canadian experience as an assimilator of immigrant groups. In the past, however, immigrant groups usually have been open to assimilation, in Canada, the US, Australia e.g. When groups insist on moving to a new country and expecting that society to conform to them, allowing them to live in isolation, refusing to even learn the language skills necessary for success clash is inevitable. It’s too bad people must leave their country as it changes to accomodate immigarnts dedicated to destruction of the culture of the host country. I think we can all learn from the Dutch experience.

 

[puzzleannie]

mpav:

From the article: “The last 10 years, our government’s policy was to tolerate almost everything, and that’s not good,” he said. “There’s law, and there’s respect of the law, and you can’t just let people do anything. Tolerance is very important, but we’ve reached the point where we’re tolerating people who despise our way of life and want to damage it.”

The rest of e.

if immigration of Muslims into Europe continues at its present rate the liberal social laws will soon be overturned, and religious fundamentalism will begin to make its influence felt. But this time there will be no moderating Christian influence.