From Haaretz, which slags the speaker as a pro-Palestinian "socialite."
"Holland’s powerful Jewish lobby is playing on the country’s sense of guilt over the Holocaust," a prominent Dutch activist said last week, triggering angry reactions and accusation of anti-Semitism from pro-Israel Dutch Jews.
Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of the first president of the European Central Bank and a friend of the Queen of the Netherlands, said in an interview for Islam Online that "the Jewish lobby in Holland, like in the United States, is very strong and powerful, and it is still playing on our guilt feelings although it is 63 years since the Holocaust."
It is important that this conversation is happening; people need to exchange these ideas without being smeared. Note that her argument is limned by Mike Desch’s important paper, The Myth of Abandonment, which described the way that Never-again-ism has distorted American foreign policy. And by Jeffrey Goldberg, who said he moved to Israel (soon after the period of the cultural discovery of the Holocaust in American life, which surely steeped his adolescence) because he didn’t trust the State Department to protect Jews. Note that Menachem Begin described Arafat as Hitler, that the late Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and lobby-pillar in Congress, described Saddam as Hitler, and that Israel’s information minister now seems to describe Goldstone as Hitler. Collective trauma.
