Alleged context (feel free to correct if you have info in comments):
After Israeli Maccabi hooligans terrorized Amsterdam, the Dutch government demonized the pro-Palestine movement and banned protests. People came to protest anyways (peacefully)
The police arrested peaceful protesters and put them in a bus. They were driven to a parking lot. The police released them from the bus in a parking lot near a station.
While the protesters were walking to the station the police started hitting them. Allegedly for not moving fast enough.
@lalehamirali on instagram has reported this whole event in their story. But here’s a summary:
- There was a peaceful protest on Amsterdam dam square. Due to the events with maccabi hooligans the city decided that protests are not allowed in the city until Thursday (today). Trough court decision the protest of Wednesday evening was allowed after all, but not in certain locations like the dam square. So the police considered the protest illegal.
- After a while the police started surrounding the protesters and called on them to leave and go to the assigned protest location.
- When the protesters didn’t leave, there were told by the cops to get into a bus that would bring them to the assigned location.
- Protesters didn’t comply and were forcibly put into the bus that they thought would bring them to the assigned location.
- Instead they were brought to a parking lot in the outskirts of the city. This is a tactic the police uses often to end protests they deem illegal or ‘dangerous’, because it allows them to end the protest without arresting all protesters. It’s on the protesters to get home safely (which can be very tricky because sometimes this happens at night when there is no public transport and not everyone will have their phone/money on them).
- There was no police on the parking lot so the protesters thought they could just leave and try to get home.
- Laleh says in their story that apparently someone in the bus, when most people had already left, broke a window.
- This resulted in lots of police coming to the parking lot and basically hunting on protesters who are trying to run away to safety. You can see in Laleh’s story how panicked everyone is because they don’t know what’s going on and the police just keeps going after them and hitting them, resulting in people having to run into nettle bushes and ditches. This goes on for a while and according to Laleh about 3/4 of the people in the bus were arrested.
Mainstream news has reported on the violence (one of the rare occasions that they actually do that) and police is ‘investigating’ the incident.
Thank you for the context!
So they participated in an illegal protest and then are surprised police used violence to stop it after giving warnings?
Why would violence be the appropriate / expected result in your mind?
Using violence to enforce the law and government decree is literally the job of the police.
That’s a silly way to word it, that normalizes violent behavior. It’s a common tactic / tool they use, but more accurately:
“enforce the law and government decree is literally the job of the police.”
Violence, at the most cynical, is a common way they do it.
In this case, (not discussing the whole bussing thing), if an arrest was required, say, for the bus damage, it should have been completed with the absolute minimum violence.
It’s not silly. It is the most reasonable lens through which to examine the citizen’s relationship with police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
Normalizing via speech is entrenching this very problem. I’m not saying this thread is gonna tip the scales, I’m discussing that the above commenter replied as if it’s the right response. They are condoning and almost evangelizing the topic (evangelizing is way too active a word, I can’t think of a better one, but this one is too much).
I think there’s distinction between your raising the issue that police have a monopoly on violence, and their commenting that violence is their job. Given the context, it comes off as they are saying “it is correct and GOOD that the police met this group with violence.”
I contend it is not appropriate, but accept that is is common (even systemically so)
The job of the police is to enforce law and government decree without violence. Violence is just a tool they have access to, but it doesn’t mean it should be used for every kid and granny.
Good to see the Dutch upholding their colonial history
What are you talking about? Did the Dutch colonize Palestine?
The Dutch are one of the most evil, bloody and successful colonizers throughout world history. They didn’t colonize Palestine, only assisted, but they sure as hell colonized, raped and pillaged their way through many a country in their history. Now they play the good guy Dutch role so we won’t make them pay for their atrocities
Oh, you mean the ancestors of the current Dutch population. Gotcha. Okay, well if we are talking about ancestors, then I guess every ethnic group has had ancestors that colonized somewhere or other, since humans don’t live exclusively in the place we evolved. And I’m sure we also agree that people don’t have to answer for the crimes of their ancestors, only the crimes we do ourselves.
Well, Interesting framing. How many years until the Palestine genocide is fine? Or is that the good old colonialism that’s OK?
You see, that’s just twisting what I said. I didn’t say that genocide is okay. I said that people who do crimes are responsible for them, not their descendents. And, that eventually the migration of populations, with the possible displacement of the previous population, becomes permanent.
Look, practically all of history is a series of migrations, wars, resistance, conquest, counter-conquest, etc. Action and reaction. The Arab countries tried to eject Israel and Israel beat them back five times. Israel is spear-won territory. The Palestinians continue to fight, as is their right, but they’ve lost. Israel is not going to pack up its bag and give up their country, so the only way to get rid of Israel is to literally genocide them. If the Palestinians continue to fight the way they did on October 7, they should also expect to die, including civilians as collateral damage. That’s war. If they want to stop dying, they should make a compromise with Israel. The two-state solution has been close before, but certain death cults keep scuttling it. You know why? Reasonable people think it is all about land division and compensation. But that was all negotiated previously. At the end of the day, the final sticking point was Jerusalem. The crazy Jews want to rebuild the Temple, and the crazy Muslims want to stop the Jews from tearing down al-Aqsa mosque to do it. It is the nutters, not the average person, who is standing in the way of peace. Unfortunately, you can’t fix stupid, especially not religious stupid, which is why Israel wants to crush Hamas utterly. All of this hand-wringing about genocide is silly and counter-productive. It is based on some woke narrative, not on facts. If the Israelis wanted all of the Palestinians dead, there would be millions killed, not 43,000. They want Hamas dead and for the Palestinians to stop supporting that death cult. If you leave the narrative aside for a moment, 43,000 dead over the course of a year of pretty one-sided war sure does sound a lot more like collateral damage than genocide, doesn’t it?
