The policeman who shot Driss Arbib, a Morroccan, on August 6 2003 will not be persecuted. The shooting took place in an eatery, Warung Swieti, on the Mercatorplein in Amsterdam-West. The case was decided by a judge of the Amsterdam magistrate court.
Arbib's family and his laywer, Gerard Hamer, are considering to take the case to the European Court of Justice. Earlier they had taken the case to the Amsterdam Court of Justice. This was after the public persecutor decided not to investigate the action of the policeman. The Court of Justice ordered an investigation and reconstructed the shooting in the eatery. The investigation supported the decision of the public persecution. The family of Arbib instructed their laywer to contest the decision and last weeks judge's decision is the latest and also final appeal to Dutch courts as the court decided that a court of higher appeal would come to the same conclusion on the basis of the evidence gathered by Amsterdam Polices Department Internal Affairs and the investigation by the Magistrate's Court. The judge also gave a declaration of "freedom of persecution" to the policeman.
The affair of the shooting of Driss Arbib is remarkable because of the insistence of the family of Driss Arbib to view the shooting of their son, who ran shouting and cursing, armed with two (!) knives, towards a policeman in a tiny restaurant as an unwarranted killing, inspired by hatred. The family and the Morroccan Community at large continue to view police action or any action by outsiders against Morroccans as hostile acts. Between Morroccans and others there is no such thing as an accident. There are only acts of war.
The pattern shows itself each time Morroccans and other communities clash. In Amsterdam-East a young Morroccan, Al el Bejjatti, was killed by a woman whose purse he tried to snatch. El Bejjatti returned from a morning in court who convicted him to four months in jail for several armed robberies. After coming home the boy met a Turkish friend and they used the motorcycle of the friend to attack cars and to get away. These attacks where strongly on the rise in the neighbourhood. On a short distance (50 meters) from the spot where Theo van Gogh was killed el Bejatti smashed the window of a car and took the purse that was laying next to the woman driver. The lads then got away on the motorcycle. The woman put her car in reverse gear and pursued the thieves in the narrow one way street. The motot cycle got caught between a tree and the car and the thieve was killed. The Turkish boy got away lightly wounded.
Immediately the Morroccan community reacted with fury. The family wanted to organize a march from the Central station in the city centre to the place of the killing. Morroccan boys declared that "everybody steals and we should not be killed for stealing" on national television. Clearly the assumption was that the woman had wanted to kill the boy and not that she was in a state of panic or that she just wanted to get her purse back. Pamphlets appeared in the neighbourhood calling all Muslims to march. Family members declared that El Bejjatti was a good boy with a great future. The denied that he was a criminal even though he was a convicted armed robber and even though he got killed in the act of purse snatching and vandalising a car with the owner in it.
The mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, for once did not cave in and forbade the march from the city centre, insisting that the lad was a criminal. The march was to be held from the place of the killing to the mosque on the Amstel river nearby. The march went through my street and by accident I left my house at the time of the march. The sisters of the lad were in the centre of the street carrying a banner with a slogan. They wore headscarves. On the pavements left and righ where a bunch of young Morroccan males, aged between 15 and 22. One of them I recognised as a petty criminal who had tried to intimidate me with a pistol. I recognised several of the other lads as petty criminals.
Later I met them in a local snack bar. Because I had stood up to the lad with the pistol they all think I am a hero and they spoke with me in ingratiating tones, like dogs that lick the hand of an owner who beats them. They did not like it when I called El Bejatti a criminal but they were afraid to voice an opinion. The Egyptian owner of the snackbar, a Muslim, also called the lad a thief. After the boys dissapeared a middle class woman appeared and strangely enough critisised the lady who ran over the criminal. She presented the case as if the lady killed the lad for purse snatching. This kind of misrepresentation of the truth is typical for members of the pc-brigade. She obviously did not want to deal with unwelcome facts that would disturb her worldview and sought to distort the picture.
For a sizable portion of the Dutch public however the problems with the Morroccans are a very big concern and the idea that the Morroccans are a minority that cannot be delt with in a traditional pacifying way is spreading through incidents like this. Morroccans are very heavily overrepresented in the crime experience of the Dutch public. They are viewed as a menace. Refused entry in bars and nightclubs. Refused for jobs. Increasingly the Dutch are, unconciously, imitating the particularistic behavior of the Morroccans.
As soon as this behavior becomes concious behavior the ideological underpinnings of the Multicultural project will dissapear.
Not altogether a bad thing and a very interesting phenomenon!
One last thing. The laywer of Driss Arbib critisised the Internal Affairs protocol of the Amsterdam Police Department. The Internal Affairs investigation was made on an ad hoc basis, by a team consisting of brother policemen of the policeman who shot Arbib. This is standard police procedure. The Magistrate court agreed with this critisism and ordered the reconstruction of the shooting in "Warung Swieti" to bring new facts and insights to the investigation.
It is in my opinion not correct to have such delicate investigations done by direct collegues and friends (and perhaps enemies) of policemen. This is a example of unprofessionalism in the Dutch police force and steps should be taken to ensure impartiality of such investigations. There should be a permanent professional bureau of Internal Affairs in the Dutch police to keep a tab on the professionalism and integrity of our police.
2 comments:
What is it with Morocco that it produces such a disproportionately high percentage of criminals? And when it comes to young Moroccan delinquents I cannot help but wonder about the role of the parents; surely when you see that your son goes astray then it is your responsibility as a loving parent to DO something about it instead of sitting still, waiting for the time when the police calls you to inform you that your son is in jail?
Unfortunately, all too often the use of violence towards criminals from ethnic groups immediately is distorted by labelling it as an act of discrimination. How can any sane man or woman blame a policeman for shooting at a thug coming at him with knives? Is the policeman required to wait until he gets stabbed?
A criminal is a criminal, regardless of the skin-colour or belief or ethnic origin. I'm still waiting for the day when that dreaded anti-discrimination article is scrapped from Dutch constitution. It only functions as a whip in the hands of the PC-brigade and is completely redundant.
I think most Moroccan parents do what they can to bring up their Children. Only their culture and religion give them the wrong instructions to prepaere their sons to deal with a Western and strongly secularized culture.
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