At issue, he claimed, were competing “moral compasses” derived from competing historical wounds. The dominant moral compass of the Netherlands centered on the trauma of the Holocaust. However, multi-cultural sociability in Amsterdam demands that “we” familiarize ourselves with the “other’s” moral compasses, without allowing that discussion to de-rail into intolerance.
Barely two weeks later, the mayor defended his decision to close a neighborhood center for Muslim women. Dutch Internal Security Services had declared the institution a security risk on the basis of reports that some of the women operating the center refused to shake hands with men. “As mayor I cannot tolerate the handing out of subsidies to groups with anti-integrationist agendas,“ he explained.
This paper will explore these two events, and the discourses embedded in them, as a lens into the place of the Holocaust in debates about the limits of liberal tolerance, multiculturalism, civic integration, and the place of Muslims in the Netherlands and in Western Europe more broadly. I will argue that tolerance is increasingly culturalized to dismantle multiculturalism as a failed paradigm, and that a redemptive Holocaust narrative, which stages the Shoah as moral benchmark for the rebirth of liberal Europe, is key to that dismantling.
