Sheep, part II
My earlier post about the knifing atrocity in Japan, which seemed to happen without any citizen attempts to block the attack, garnered a lot of interesting comments. Danny Lemieux now sent me the perfect follow-up link to Bruce Bawer’s blog. (I can’t find any permalinks there, but just land on the June 9, 2008 post, which is currently the top post, of course.)
In this post, Bawer discusses a story which I’d heard through my email network, but that, rather significantly, never made the media — any media. Gay Patriot (who is the sole media outlet for this story) describes what happened:
At a fashion show to promote tolerance of gay people on April 30, a national holiday in Holland, celebrating the birthday of the late Queen Juliana, a group of ten Muslim youths dragged gay model Mike Du Pree down from the catwalk, beating him up and breaking his nose. A second model who tried to help out was also attacked.
Typically, given that its Bruce Bawer doing the writing, Bawer’s post goes beyond the obvious, which is that Islam is a profoundly intolerant religion, and that it is exporting that intolerance in violent fashion to the West. Instead, Bawer is horrified by the metaphorical sheep involved in this instance:
Another appalling fact here is this: according to one of the stories, Mike du Pree was defended by “another model.” There is no mention of anyone else rushing to defend him. I don’t get it. On no day of the year is Amsterdam more crowded with people than it is on Queen’s Day. This is especially true of Rembrandtplein and the streets leading into it. I suspect the side street on which this event took place was Halvemaansteeg, a little alley that is lined with gay bars and that connects Rembrandtplein to the river Amstel. For one thing, I can’t imagine why the cops couldn’t get there in time — on days like Queen’s Day there’s always cops staked out on Rembrandtplein to deal with rowdies and such.
But forget the cops. How come the story only mentions du Pree being defended by “another model”? How many gay guys were at that fashion show? How many dozens or hundreds of men, on this most crowded of all days in Amsterdam, were within shouting distance of this atrocity? Did any of them do anything? Dan links to du Pree’s web page, on which he describes himself as being between 170 and 175 cm (5’7″-5’9″) tall and as weighing between 50 and 55 kg (110-120 pounds). In a country where the average guy is over six feet tall, that’s a little guy. There were almost certainly gay guys at that show who were a foot or more taller than Du Pree. Did they actually stand there and watch him get his ass kicked without trying to do anything? Certainly they must have outnumbered the Muslim gangsters. Where’s the solidarity? Where’s the initiative? This is just plain chilling.
I hope it turns out there was some resistance. But there’s no indication in the Dutch articles that there was. And that’s the scariest part of all this, the sheer passivity. It’s like when Anna Lindh was murdered in Stockholm. People just stood there, waiting for somebody else to do something. Somebody whose job it was. Hayek was right: the capacity for resistance — the capacity of even conceiving of resistance — is bred out of people in social democracies. And it’s not as if gays in Amsterdam can say they were taken by surprise. In the last decade, conditions for gay people in that city have been heading steadily south. It was just about time for something like this to happen. Amsterdam gays should have been prepared.
A society that can’t defend itself should be prepared to die or be enslaved. It’s that simple, with the Jews of Europe serving as a depressing example.
