ISCA - The Islamic Supreme Council of America

Dutch Call for Probe of Muslims Amid a Report on Radical Imams

Dan Bilefsky
Wall Street Journal Monday, July 08, 2002

Dutch parliamentarians called for a wide-ranging investigation of Islam in the Netherlands after Muslim clerics were secretly tape-recorded praising suicide bombers and calling for the "destruction of the enemies of Islam."

The lower house of parliament voted last week in favor of a resolution that asked the government to take a broad survey of the Muslim population in the Netherlands, asking for an examination of how mosques are funded, how imams, or prayer leaders, are trained and how many Dutch Muslims could be categorized as fundamentalists.

Dutch prosecutors are analyzing tape recordings of sermons by four Muslim preachers to determine whether they had broken Dutch law by inciting violence. Nova, a popular Dutch current-affairs television program, tape-recorded the Muslim preachers at their mosques in the Netherlands. On the tapes, aired last month, a cleric in the Hague asks Allah to "take care of" President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and an imam in Amsterdam extols the virtues of martyrdom, saying that "female Palestinian Muslims who offer their lives to Allah should be praised.

"Yassin Hartog, a spokesman for Islam and Citizenship in The Hague, a group that represents Muslims in the Netherlands, called the four men "radical imams." He said they are "a minority and do not speak for the Muslim community, which is against hatred and violence."

Concern is growing in the Netherlands about the recent influx of Muslim immigrants, who number about one million in a population of about 16 million. The party of slain anti-immigrant leader Pim Fortuyn, who branded Islam as a "backward religion" that threatened Dutch acceptance of homosexuality and women's rights, was the second-biggest vote-getter in a general election in May and will be part of a new coalition government.

The Dutch internal security agency said in a recent report that Islamic militants in the Netherlands were recruiting young Muslim immigrants at mosques across the country with the aim of signing them up for anti-Western missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims were fanned last year when an openly gay Dutch schoolteacher was attacked by Moroccan-born youths. That was followed by a television interview with Khalil el-Moumni, the leader of the A Nasr mosque in Rotterdam, who called homosexuality a "sickness." After the interview, two members of the Dutch parliament demanded that the imam be deported to Morocco; the government didn't take any action.

Miryam Sterk, a Christian Democrat in the parliament, said the new coalition government led by the Christian Democrats hopes to encourage the training of "home grown" imams who would be more attuned to Dutch values and tolerance than imams who have immigrated from predominantly Islamic countries. The government also plans to create an integration course for imams, teaching them about Dutch attitudes toward homosexuals and women.

"We need to have freedom of religion, but it is unacceptable that clerics should incite hatred. Imams guilty of encouraging people to commit acts of violence should be expelled from the country," she said.