Can Job Cohen, a Jew who reaches out to Muslims, be the next Dutch PM— and a model for Europe?

[no_hypocrisy]

While slouching against a wall in a former cigarette factory in the industrial outskirts of The Hague one day last month, I was visited with the sudden realization that over the formative centuries of European history the two words that most succinctly signaled “other,” “foreign” or “enemy” were these: “Jew” and “Turk.” Crudely unpacking them, “Turk” meant Muslim, Arab, infidel, the threat from without; a Jew was the enemy within, someone who, even if born and raised in your hometown, was part of another political as well as religious entity; the Jews of a city were referred to not as a community but as “the Jewish nation.” “Jew” and “Turk” were in fact constructs Europeans used to help define their own identity: that which we are not.

-snip-

Some see in Cohen’s rise the possibility of a new Dutch society, and with it perhaps a hint of how new national identities could form in Europe. In what would be confirmation of the worst fears of a Wilders, the new identity prototype has an inclusiveness that inverts the centuries-old formula. As the Jew and the Turk stood side by side with their fellow candidates — which included a good mix of other ethnicities as well as native Dutch — Cohen proclaimed, “This is the Netherlands!”


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/magazine/30Mayor-t.html?ref=magazine

[WinkyDink]

1. Let me know when the Muslims "reach out to" the democracies they move into--- as a "model".

Call me when I can visit Saudi Arabia.

[Traveling_Home]

2. HO!

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Interesting. He sounds like a canny man

I hope he does well.