The New Dark Age

Thursday, 10 April 2025 — BettBeat’s Newsletter

“Would we have protested if the resistance had blown up a school with German children?” – is the Dutch logic of supporting Israeli war crimes

In the pallid bureaucratic language that cloaks moral cowardice, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof has made his nation’s position clear: there is “no red line” that Israel can cross that would cause the Netherlands to alter its steadfast support. No war crime too heinous, no massacre too bloody, no humanitarian catastrophe too devastating will shake the Dutch government’s resolve to stand with the executioners rather than the executed.

We have seen this moral failure before in Dutch history. The echoes of collaboration during the Nazi occupation now find their modern expression in the corridors of power in The Hague, where officials meticulously avoid condemning what the International Court of Justice—housed on their own soil—has deemed a plausible genocide.

When Israeli forces gun down aid workers distributing food to starving populations, the Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp mutters platitudes about “quiet diplomacy.” The coward’s refuge. The Netherlands bizarrely shifts blame to Ireland for speaking out against atrocities, as if moral clarity somehow provokes more violence rather than demands its cessation.

The Dutch government presents token gestures—promises to “monitor” military exports to Israel—while F-35 components continue flowing uninterrupted. This is the illusion of action, designed to pacify domestic critics while changing nothing of substance. Meanwhile, Dutch authorities violently suppress citizens protesting against the slaughter in Gaza, criminalizing dissent with the tired, cynical charge of “antisemitism.”

Orwellian: Portraying Israel as the Anti-Nazi Resistance

We have entered a new phase in this complicity. No longer content with merely denying Israel’s war crimes through the tired fiction that every Palestinian casualty was a “human shield” or a “Hamas fighter,” Dutch media platforms now openly justify these atrocities. Columnist Theodor Holman, writing in the popular mainstream newspaper ‘Het Parool’, defends the killing of aid workers by comparing Israel to Dutch resistance fighters in World War II. That’s right, he compares Israel not to Anton Mussert and his Dutch Nazi collaborators of the NSB, but to the resistance against the Nazis—a perverse inversion that would make Orwell shudder.

My grandfathers, both of whom fought the Nazis—one Dutch and one Algerian who also fought against French colonizers—would turn in their graves.

“Would we have protested if the resistance had blown up a school with German children?” he asks, revealing the moral bankruptcy that has infected Dutch discourse. The answer is unequivocally yes—we condemn the bombing of Dresden as a war crime, and we condemn the indiscriminate killing of children regardless of who perpetrates it. The oppressed do not receive moral dispensation to become oppressors.

Let us be clear: this catastrophe did not begin on October 7th. It began with decades of occupation, of apartheid policies, of kidnappings of children into rape and torture dungeons, of strangulation and dehumanization. The attack on that day—itself most likely considered a war crime—has been used to justify a hundred thousand more extreme war crimes in response. The Netherlands stands on the wrong side of this moral equation, just as it has stood on the wrong side before.

The West Never Decolonized nor Denazified

As Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. History will remember those who spoke truth to power and those who enabled atrocities through their silence or active support. Almost every Western country now stands on the wrong side of history—not by accident, but by design. The West has never truly decolonized nor denazified itself.

The cultural rot of white supremacy and colonial thinking remains embedded in its institutions, its reflexes, its very DNA. This unexamined poison guarantees that Western nations will repeatedly choose the path of racism, apartheid, and genocide until the rest of the world musters the collective strength to say “enough.” What we witness today is not an aberration but the predictable outcome of unresolved historical crimes that continue to shape our present.

– Karim

This article was inspired by the Dutch blog Frontaal Naakt—a must read for those who can read Dutch.