Ah the mayor of Rotterdam – what an admirable guy. A story from January 8, the day after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.
Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb appeared on television programme Nieuwsuur Wednesday night, and lashed out at Muslims living in this society despite their hatred of it. “It is incomprehensible that you can turn against freedom,” he said. “But if you do not like freedom, in Heaven’s name pack your bag and leave.”
“There may be a place in the world where you can be yourself,” he continued. “Be honest with yourself and do not go and kill innocent journalists,” Aboutaleb, a Muslim himself, said.
“And if you do not like it here because humorists you do not like make a newspaper, may I then say you can fuck off.”
Unimprovable.
I lived in Holland for a few years. He’s a true Dutchman.
Hooray for the Dutch.
May I second that?
I like this guy. You would never hear a US pol say something like that.
I agree with the sentiment, and it’s clearly aimed at violent-thinking radicals. But I have a problem with the principle of “fuck off if you don’t like X” where X = what we the numerical majority believe and you, the minority, do not. This is the same illogical principle which claims “this is a Christian country, and if you don’t like it then fuck off”.
Maybe it’s better to say if you don’t like the way things are around here, then use free speech to do something about it. If you don’t like the very existence of free speech, then take a logical look at yourself, and don’t say anything.
I have to say I was surprised to see this sentiment endorsed here as “unimprovable”.
“Fuck off” has the dual advantages of being both pithier and something angry Islamists are more likely actually to do, with luck to somewhere like Syria from where they’re unlikely to return.
[meta]
sonofrojblake:
Note that it was the inferred sentiment itself rather than its specific expression which was lauded.
(How about “If you dislike this place so much, why do you remain here?”)
I agree that this in itself is very very often problematic – but I think it’s significantly affected in this case by the context of who is saying it to whom. Ahmed Aboutaleb is a Muslim, so he’s not an Xtian or other non-Muslim lecturing Muslims from on high (well clearly he’s in a position of authority – but on one important level at least he’s part of the same group as those he’s addressing).
It’s also relevant that the “what we believe” bit in this case is secularism/civil rights and freedom of speech – by definition a non-partisan standpoint inasmuch as it explicitly demands the same freedoms for opposing parties.
But I have a problem with the principle of “fuck off if you don’t like X” where X = what we the numerical majority believe and you, the minority, do not.
No, in this case, X = the basic rights enjoyed by individuals under Dutch law. And what this mayor said to violent fanatics in his country, is the same thing I say, with no apology, to people who want to take away my rights under the US Constitution: fuck off if you don’t like the basic rights it describes.
Another important point here: this guy is a mayor, which means he’s more of a law-enforcer than a law-maker. So it’s part of his JOB to tell people to fuck off if they don’t like the laws.
I strongly disagree. (Unless my sarcasm detector is faulty this morning.)
RWNJ’s say stuff like that all the effing time, every time some “other” they don’t like suggests that the country could be better. I bet you wouldn’t have to search very far to find one telling Obama to go back to Kenya.
Um. He’s not speaking to people who think the country could be “better.” He’s speaking to murderers and their enablers; murderers who object to basic human rights.
Kudos, Mayor Aboutaleb.
But that’s the point Trebuchet is making. He IS speaking of people who think the country could be better, by their (nightmarish, theocratic, horrific) definition of “better”. We (people who agree with us) do not own the concept of “better”.
“Agree with my definition of how things should be or get out” is an inherently anti-democratic thing to say. I criticize the right wing whenever they utter something like it, and I will criticize people “on my side” for it as well, or else I’m a hypocrite. It’s tribalism when right wingers do it, and someone who believes in free speech doing it doesn’t make the tribalism go away magically.
I find this sentiment very much improvable.
suttkus
There are basic limits to how democratic one should be. If your idea of being democratic includes allowing people to vote my basic human rights away, then kindly stick your “democracy” where the sun doesn’t shine.
And in this in this instance the particular right Aboutaleb was talking about is pretty damn central to the whole enterprise. Without the right to a free press or free speech, there is no democracy.
What’s anti-democratic is killing people for exercising their democratic rights.
Exercising your democratic right to say, “if that’s what you want, you really don’t belong in a democratic society?” That’s well within bounds.
You can’t skip over the context like that and claim anti-democracy. It’s bullshit.
“If you don’t like it here, you can fuck off!” is the local mating cry of every bogan that ever existed in Australia. They use that phrase against gay people, women, people of colour, muslims, atheists and pretty much any left-leaning person. While I can see a small amount of validity in the usage discussed in this post, the phrase itself makes bile rise in my throat and I can’t condone it. The number of times I’ve been told to fuck off out of Australia (despite having been born here, with a heritage on one parental side that extends back to the First Fleet) is monumental. It’s an easy way to dismiss people who don’t agree with you, regardless of whether you’re right or wrong.
And, might I add, I very much think that Ophelia and the others who are backing the use of the phrase are in the right, I just detest the phrase with every fibre of my being.
Whereas I find it commendable that a highly visible person like the mayor of one of the biggest cities in the Netherlands, himself a muslim, speaks out against the scourge of radical interpretations of religion, I think the “fuck off” bit shows that he thinks the radicals can’t be rehabilitated anymore. It’s a bit like (usually conservative) politicians who advocate the death penalty for pedophiles: We don’t want these people around anymore, so remove them from our society – for good. To me, it caters too much to the “us vs. them” sentiment.
You also need to keep in mind that we have Geert Wilders’ PVV around, a political party that runs on a platform of strong “us vs. them”-sentiments (whether “them” are compatriots of Northern African descent or workers from European countries a bit further down the block). I would not put it beyond Aboutaleb to have one eye in that direction, as his party, the PvdA (“Labour”, to categorise it), stands to lose a lot of votes to the PVV in the upcoming elections for the provincial parliaments (which indirectly also determine the seats in the Eerste Kamer, our Senate, which is of vital importance for the current government, as that will be a lame duck if the current coalition of Liberals (right of center in the Dutch political spectrum) and Labour lose more of their rickety support there).
In the end, I find the “fuck off” idea not a very democratic notion. The dialogue with “them” has ended, all you want is for them to go the hell away and bother people in some far-away corner of the earth. The strange thing is that we prosecute people who actually take up that idea and try to leave for IS controlled territory. We want you to fuck off, but if you do, we’ll drag you back and put you in jail in our own country – is that logical?
So – no, I think there’s room for improvement in Aboutaleb’s statement. We can be better than that.
I think a lot of the time people really misunderstand the meaning of “democracy.” The definition only requires that a governing entity allow every citizen (with caveats) to decide who forms that governing entity. Case in point: the second-last election in Egypt, the one that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, was democracy in action. While the election may or may not have been conducted in a totally fair way (to do so is hard in countries with no tradition of democracy), there is no doubt that a massive section of the population of Egypt does support the Brotherhood, and that a properly monitored election with no shenanigans at all would have produced the same result. It is important to note that the Muslim Brotherhood is a socially regressive party/gang that immediately began to take steps to transform Egypt into a theocratic hellhole (though it was always a theocracy, it had been fairly moderate under the control of its past autocratic leader, who valued Western money and tourism more than being faithful to Allah).
So I think it is a fair comment (“fuck off”) in this context; fundamentalist, violent Islamists attacking institutions and individuals who have affronted their prophet Mohammed is certainly worse than fundamentalist, violent Islamists toning down the violence and forming a political party that intends to make The Netherlands into an Islamist theocracy, but both are pretty crappy outcomes if Islamists reach their goals (terrorism or theocracy). Until such people are able to throw off the shackles of their extremism (or at least willing to accept that they can assimilate enough into Western European culture, live according to all of the laws, and reap the benefits of living in such a wonderful country without wanting to impose their fascist viewpoint on anyone who does not already share it), there is really no place for them. They should have the same rights as anyone else (as should anti-semites and Holocaust deniers, though they do not); they can freely congregate and tell everyone how we’re all living in sin, or whatever, but using violence or the tools of democracy to undermine secular liberalism are both terrible offenses against The Netherlands and all people who, like them, benefit from the social services a secular liberal ethos provides.
So yes: fuck off. There are plenty of places in the world where you can live your faith to its richest extent, and enjoy the squalor and massive inequality that fascist theocratic states all seem to have (although some, like the UAE and Qatar are rather adept at distracting people from the squalor part). People who do not share and actively try to oppose basic Enlightenment principles will not fit well into Western societies (except the USA where 20% of the population seems to always be opposing basic Enlightenment principles…but wrong god, so it might not work out).
Telling people to “fuck off” means that we are not willing to look into the factors that made them the personae non gratae that we think they are. It absolves us of blame for anything, relieves us of the need to see whether we can make our societies better places to live in. The process of radicalisation probably is a very multi-layered thing: some of it can be directly attributed to discrimination, alienation and poverty. For others, like the three girls from Bethnal Green, it may be more a sense of outrage over what’s happening in the conflict in Syria, coupled with a desire to be more righteous than Mohammed.
But whatever the reasons for embracing this kind of radical experience of religion, by saying “fuck off” we indicate that we do not want to address the underlying causes. It’s something that we don’t want to understand, that has nothing to do with us. It’s the easy way out, and it might very well come back to haunt us.
M’thew
Well, part of what we need to make our societies better places to live in, is for people who believe that we should kill people for publishing things they don’t like to fuck off.
There are some things which are not acceptable, and the onus isn’t on us to change.
To put across and analogy on this:
I don’t care if a guy who shat on my sofa was raised in a poor neighbourhood, denied proper education and was radicalized into sofa shitting by the long mistreatment of his ancestors by sofa manufacturers, none of that is my problem.
My problem is that he shits on sofas, one of which happens to be mine. I am going to tell him to take his sob story and fuck off.
Now that doesn’t mean he can’t improve, he can’t one day undergo proper potty training, become a productive non-sofa shitter, or even an activist against sofa shitting – but until he does all of that frankly, I don’t have to put up with his shit.
And it is not for me to fix him.
Telling people to “fuck off” means that we are not willing to look into the factors that made them the personae non gratae that we think they are.
It might also mean we’re not even ABLE to address any of those factors — we all have our own problems, and that makes it literally impossible to accommodate certain other attitudes or behaviors, and impossible to address the causes of such behaviors without huge additional burdens to ourselves (and possibly no benefit to the others). A psychiatrist in a good hospital can address the problems that made someone a raving scary homeless loony who can’t hold down a job — but I’m not a psychiatrist, so I can’t give that loony a place to sleep, both because I can’t trust him, and because there’s ho guarantee it will even do him any good.
In the case of thin-skinned religious bigots who think they have a right to threaten or kill anyone who says anything they don’t like, I’m guessing the mayor of a city doesn’t have the legal or financial means to lock them up and re-educate them; and he still has the rights and safety of the other residents to consider. So it makes perfect sense for a mayor to tell violent jihadi wannabees to just fuck off. If the city’s lawmakers, or the national government, have a better response than the mayor is in a position to offer, that’s fine — the jihadis can be their problem.
Also, telling people to “fuck off” isn’t really an act of expulsion; it’s just a warning that their particular concerns or demands won’t get any accommodation from him, so they need to give them up if they want to live on his turf.