The Arrahma and Attakwa mosques and the Moroccan Youth Foundation in Den Bosch are ‘astonished’ by statements made by Jack Mikkers. They said in a statement that the Den Bosch mayor ‘showed his true colors’ earlier this week and that he is ‘not our mayor’.
Mikkers came under fire after statements about Moroccans on Tuesday during an information evening about the choice of location for the reception of asylum seekers. A visitor then said that ‘Syrian people are the worst’, to which the mayor replied: “That’s not true, that’s Morocco.”
On Thursday, he apologized and said he should have outlined the context of his statement better. He wanted to indicate that ‘of the safe landers who come to our country and who are involved in nuisance, the COA indicates that these mainly concern asylum applicants from Morocco’.
Bewilderment
“The astonishment is great. The disbelief has been replaced by enormous anger. This mayor is not the mayor of all the residents of the city. The way in which he dismisses an entire community is so sad that the words to solve this are lacking. This mayor is not ours,” the statement from the Moroccan organizations said.
They believe that this is ‘the next step in the deterioration of the relationship between the municipal council and the Moroccan community’. And point out that the Arrahma mosque in Den Bosch has previously been wrongly portrayed as a source of radicalization by the municipal council.
The signatories of the statement say that ‘there are no words that give us confidence in a solution to a workable relationship’.