Better than cursing it is to praise the Protestant Church in the Netherlands
Right-religious orthodoxy is not parish, but it always makes me sadder when refugees are spoken harshly from that quarter than when it happens from the right-wing secular quarter. But why actually? I don’t think at all that religious people are better than others, nor that they should be. Why then do I use a different standard for one category than for another? You will find harshness everywhere, humanity too, the dividing line is not between the believer and the unbeliever.
Be that as it may, I did not like to hear Tom de Nooijer, leader of the Christian Association Oldebroek and active within the youth department of the SGP, fulminate against the ‘luxury’ reception of asylum seekers on cruise ships. Like Geert Wilders, from whom you cannot expect anything else, De Nooijer uses the needs of Dutch citizens as a trump card against free meals for asylum seekers. Ours go off the gas, they suffer from the cold, they have to go to the swimming pool to take a shower – ‘very bitter’ to see how foreigners are received here, he told BNR Nieuwsradio.
De Nooijer always sends an ‘open invitation’ to the world: come all, here is a ‘gigantic multi-faceted place’. And he really saw the world coming, this year met 215,000 men. To which state Van der Burg caused with a tweet that put the figure in perspective: “Of the 215,000, 86,000 are Ukrainians. We regularly receive around 120,000 people a year, the outspoken expats, students of people who have a relationship with a Dutch person and around 25-30,000 asylum seekers.”
Van der Burg could have added that it is not the fault of asylum seekers that we have let the reception shrink in recent years, just like social housing. And that the free meals – part of a stopgap in their cabins and can not cook. I looked around on De Nooijer’s Twitter account and came across a line from Psalm 73: “If my body and my heart fail, God is the rock of my heart.” It’s that the editor-in-chief doesn’t allow me to curse, the temptation was really there for a while.
But it is much better than cursing to praise, and praise the initiative of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands to arrange housing and counseling for no fewer than 8,000 to 10,000 status holders. It is not a direct solution for the situation in Ter Apel, it will take time to set everything up. But it certainly promotes the possibility for recognized refugees to – finally – leave the asylum seekers’ centers, which relieves the whole system.
It seems sensible to me that the churches want to extend this reception to six months, or to extend cohesion to a year. But also high game. It is good to keep pressure on the municipalities, it is the (local) government that must provide housing. But so far little has come of this, so what then? Will these people end up on the street? You don’t want refugees to have to camp in front of church doors in the cold rain.
Three times a week Stevo Akkerman writes a column in which he preaches the ‘hard nuance’ and the ‘relentless approach on the other hand’. Read them back here.