Word: rotterdam
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...courage to speak out, and he was killed for his honesty," said Andrea van Es, who had placed her own bouquet on the pile in front of Fortuyn's house on a quiet square in Rotterdam. Many of the people shuffling through the streets of Rotterdam in a silent march last Tuesday, filing past his open casket in the city's cathedral on Thursday's Ascension holiday and lining the route of his cortege on Friday were moved not by his politics, but by the brutal violence that silenced him. "There was only a thin line between Pim Fortuyn...
...bearing the family crest, employed a butler named Herman, wore tailored Italian suits and oversized ties, and reveled in his homosexuality. "He was like a jester, the one who holds up a mirror to the politicians and says, 'Look, you're ugly,'" notes Arthur Ringeling, a political scientist at Rotterdam's Erasmus University. Raised in a middle-class Catholic family, Fortuyn was a nominal Marxist during his university studies but later joined the Labor Party. With a doctorate in sociology, he became a professor at Erasmus in 1990. Though he was popular with his students, a university committee judged...
...after he told an interviewer he considered Islam a "backward culture" and advocated the repeal of the first article of the Dutch constitution, which forbids discrimination on religious or racial grounds. He quickly formed his own party, which ran away with 35% of the March 6 vote for the Rotterdam city council...
...easy task to tease out how much of Fortuyn's appeal stemmed from his larger-than-life personality and how much from his right-wing program. "He made the other politicians look like robots," concedes Tip Ho Ong, who works for the Rotterdam Antidiscrimination Action Council. Fortuyn seemed to make his own rules: an earlier Dutch extreme-right politician, Hans Janmaat, known for his "Full is full" slogan, was fined in 1994 for using anti-immigration language. Fortuyn said the same thing with impunity...
...hasn't happened fast enough to counter the lure of a figure like Fortuyn. First- and second-generation foreign-born amount to about 17% of the Dutch population, roughly the same as in other West European countries and the U.S., says Erasmus migration expert Han Entzinger. In Rotterdam itself, the figure rises to 45%, and in some neighborhoods - and many schools - it is much higher. To promote integration, the Netherlands in 1998 began requiring new immigrants to take mandatory Dutch lessons. As asylum seekers choose other destinations, their annual rate of entry to the Netherlands has dropped from...