This video shows a mass meeting in Amsterdam in the Netherlands against the extreme right refugee-hating Pegida organisation, on Saturday 6 February 2016.
Max van den Berg is a Dutch Jewish survivor of Adolf Hitler‘s mass murder camp Auschwitz. After the second world war, he helped to found the Dutch Auschwitz committee for commemoration.
Here is a translation from the speech by Max van den Berg on that Saturday 6 February 2016, at the statue De Dokwerker, commemorating the general strike in February 1941 against the German nazi occupiers’ anti-Jewish violence in the Netherlands. Max van den Berg was then fourteen years old. He participated in the general strike at his school: school students struck along with the workers.
This video shows Max van Den Berg’s 6 February speech.
Mr Van den Berg addressed the 6 February 2016 mass meeting against the extreme right refugee-hating Pegida organisation:
Max van den Berg spoke on the demonstration on February 6: Refugees are welcome, racism is not!
Here, along the wall of the Portuguese synagogue was then a row of German trucks. That was on Sunday, February 23, 1941. One hundred meters further on the Waterlooplein square Jews were herded with clubs and rifle butts. When there were more than 400 they were driven into the trucks and taken away. All were murdered in the concentration camp Mauthausen.
On Monday 24 February, the communist party gathered at the Noordermarkt [Northern Market] to spread the watchword: Strike! Strike! Strike!
75 years ago the February strike broke out. The city was in solidarity with their persecuted Jewish fellow citizens and revolted against racist violence. The commemoration of this strike is more relevant than ever.
Again in the city there is solidarity with those who flee war and violence. Again, the city resists, now against racist hate mongers of Pegida. In Amsterdam there is no place for these people.
How did this war and refugee misery arise? Then we must go back in history. On February 4, 2003 at 16.30 Colin Powell, an American government minister, appeared at the UN, and displayed photos that supposedly proved conclusively that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There had to be intervention quickly. A war based on a lie started. Later complemented by a Syrian civil war and the whole Middle East becoming ablaze.
Men, women and children fleeing the war which has lasted for 13 years. A fight with front fighting, guerrillas, attacks, terrorist attacks, hunger, phosphorus grenades and poison gas bombs. A fight that ended in a civil war. Nothing is more traumatic than a civil war. Village and neighborhood communities are torn apart and family ties torn asunder. Millions leave the battlefield hoping for a safe place in Europa. They fled by sea, more than 3,000 men, women and children drowned. They fled across the muddy paths of the Balkans during heat and during icy cold. They went to the Arctic Circle hoping to reach Sweden and Norway. Along the way there are now 10,000 children without parents who became lost and are wandering in groups across our continent. Easy prey for pickpocket gangs and prostitution.
Meanwhile, forty thousand refugees have found housing in our country. They were traumatized, and housed in large centers. …
Citizens wonder whether those refugees do not exceed the carrying capacity of society. [European Union authorities in] Brussels also question whether European society can support this financially. But that is a travesty, hypocritical. The same Brussels people refuse to tackle the tax dodging by big corporations, so that society is missing out on an amount of 80 billion euros.
Citizens have questions about unemployment, now there are refugees. But at the same time, the government’s statistics office states that the economy is picking up and may result in a shortage of workers in white-collar jobs and construction early next year. We may start to ask ourselves then whether too little refugees have come.
And then came Cologne and sexual violence and the so-called “testosterone bombs“. But then I think of the [murdered] girl Vaatstra, the Putten murder, about the Utrecht serial rapist [all crimes by non-refugee white Dutchmen], the massive child abuse within the Catholic Church and I think for just once: Our own people first [extreme right nationalist slogan, turned upside down here]. It is dirty to misguide worried citizens with hate speech.
Nothing is more dangerous than to mistake concerned citizens for racists. The hate mongers of Pegida would like that. We won’t be tricked by that.
And now the reception of refugees should be made a success. Refugees have to go from large centers to smaller more intimate and better shelters scattered across the cities and the country. Now there should be more government workers, making it possible to shorten the asylum procedure from seven months to a maximum of seven weeks.
Now there should be warm humanistic support in the areas of food, education and leisure. In this context we want to pay tribute to the thousands of workers, including many Dutch men and women with a Turkish or Moroccan background, who are doing that.
Some governments and politicians want to stop the flow of refugees. They want to close all borders. Europe should be made into a fortress with as its slogan: Me, me, me, and let all others die. Others want to take away the refugees’ money and jewelry (they can keep only their wedding rings! Aren’t those politicians ‘humane’, right?). Still others have developed illegal plans. Send them back to dictatorial Turkey, a country which itself bombs Kurds from the air. Creating a wave of Kurdish refugees.
No, there is no end to the flow of refugees as long as the war continues. 58,000 in January have braved the wintry chill and yet moved into Europe.
But there is a perspective. Through trial and error the first peace negotiations began and there is a chance to let the war end with joint forces. But just as these negotiations begin the Dutch parliament threatens to approve Dutch bombing in Syria (‘precision’ bombing – ridiculous). The English foundation Body Count and the BBC have calculated together that only because of the US bombing, apart from Russian and Syrian bombing, 1051 civilians have lost their lives. Collateral damage this is called and a little bag of dollars is ready, wrapped in a cloth of hypocritical ‘philanthropy’. But this breeds new hatred and terrorism. There are in the [ISIS] ‘caliphate’ no more military targets, say the experts. Dutch bombs may turn a desert into a Swiss cheese. That’s all.
We therefore call on parliament: no bombing in Syria! Stop arms exports to conflict areas! No drones dropping bombs but a blow against hate speech!
Dear people. Let us be aware of the serious political and moral crisis in which Europe finds itself. The contradictions are increasing, democratic freedoms are under pressure. Everyone has an interest in ending the protracted war with its destruction and waves of refugees.
Join the fight for the restoration of peace. Join the newly founded Amsterdam Peace Initiative.
Fight the racists of Pegida.
Long live solidarity with the war refugees.
Long live the people rescuing refugees!
Long live the struggle for peace!
This video shows another 6 February 2016 speaker, Anousha Nzume.
Refugee crisis: Angela Merkel appeals to Turkey for border controls to stop fresh wave of Syrian refugees: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Pegida’s haat duidelijk niet welkom in Amsterdam
http://www.doorbraak.eu/pegidas-haat-duidelijk-niet-welkom-in-amsterdam/
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On February 25, 1941 an event occurred in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam that would become known as the “February Strike.” Upon hearing of the deportation of some 425 Dutch Jews from the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam, hundreds of thousands of Dutch workers downed tools, walked off the job, and went on an unofficial strike.
Local tram drivers were the first to join the strike organized by the banned Dutch Communist Party, and shortly afterwards, as the strike spread throughout the city, dockworkers from the local Amsterdam-Noord shipyard joined the protest and walked out en masse. The strike spread to other nearby Dutch towns, including Utrecht and Zaanstad.
The workers’ protest against the persecution of the local Jewish population by the occupying German military forces was violently crushed by the occupying Nazi forces the following day. Three local Communists were shot to death immediately after the strike was suppressed and a further 12 were sent to German jails. The Dutch February Strike remained the only such protest of its kind organized by non-Jews during the course of the Second World War.
The days leading up to the strike had witnessed pitched street battles between the local Nazi goons in the WA (Weerbaarheidsafdeling) and Jewish self-defense groups, in which a WA member was fatally injured. On February 12, German commanders placed armed guards at the entrances to the Jewish Quarter and entry to non-Jews was forbidden. Further violent clashes ensued until a large-scale pogrom was organized by the German authorities on February 22, when 425 Jewish young men were first taken hostage and then later deported.
Before the outbreak of war in 1940 Amsterdam was home to approximately 80,000 Jews, most of whom lived in the city’s Jewish Quarter (Jodenbuurt). By early February 1941 however, the Nazi occupiers had surrounded the Jewish section of the city with barbed wire and transformed the district into a ghetto.
After one Dutch resistance group burned down the registry of births in Amsterdam to hinder the search by German troops, Jews were subsequently taken from their homes in alphabetical order, then collected and registered in the Hollandsche Schouwberg theater. Almost every adult who entered the theatre was later murdered in the Polish concentration camps.
Almost all of the Netherlands’ pre-war 140,000-strong Jewish community were transported to Nazi death camps, including the young Anne Frank, whose parents lived outside the Jewish Quarter. Only Poland lost a larger proportion of its Jewish citizens during the Holocaust than the Netherlands.
Today the February Strike is still remembered with an annual march past the De Dokwerker statue erected to commemorate the strike. The statue of the stevedore is located on the pavement outside the old Portuguese Synagogue from which the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was expelled by his orthodox Jewish co-religionists.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/02/22/twih-f22.html#100
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