Gibburt

Four days a week it is open, more or less all through the year, the central marketplace in The Hague called the Haagse Markt. Claiming to be the biggest marketplace in Europe, it offers the visitor around 500 different stalls with products ranging from fruit and vegetables to clothing and shoes. It is a noisy and crowded place filled with a large variety of nationalities and/or cultures, such as, besides the present Europeans, people from Morocco, Suriname, Turkey and Ghana. Here, oblivious to their differences, the buying crowds shuffle side by side from one stall to another to find whatever they have set their minds to while the selling crowds try to present their products in every language that seems to attract some customers.

In February of this year Moroccan Dutch stand up comedian Salaheddine performed in Theater Zuidplein in Rotterdam. Upon his request the theater made 50 seats available for Muslim women who preferred not to sit next to an unknown man during his performance. The response generated by this initiative was overwhelmingly negative. Accusations of discrimination, oppression of women and, my personal favorite, ever increasing Islamisation of the Netherlands, filled discussion forums for days. The theater itself however was practical about its initiative: if there are women who want to sit separately, why wouldn’t we cater to those?

That the multicultural society is a myth and will never work has been said before. As such we would all be better off living among our own kind. This may be but those only for women seats were never used that night and every time I visit the market in The Hague I experience a glimpse of what such a society could be like. And that suits me just fine because although I like the Dutch gehaktbal and stamppot, I would not want to sacrifice my baklava, curry or olives to it.

Filed under: Politics, WtF by Robert Nijssen | Social tagging: multiculturalism > Salaheddinne