On February 6, just after nine o’clock, a Mercedes Benz van stopped at the corner of Bloemgracht and Prinsengracht, in the heart of the Jordaan. Back doors swung open. A cube-shaped device fired a beam of blue beams at the facade of the Anne Frank House across the canal: “Ann Frank invented the ballpoint pen.” The light show lasted four minutes and delivered two months in prison for the Polish-Canadian perpetrator.
It is still too early for a look back, but one of the trends of 2023 is the use of light as a weapon. It started already at New Year’s Eve, with lyrics such as “white lives matter” projected onto the Erasmus Bridge. Subsequently, racist and anti-Semitic images also appeared in Eindhoven and Capelle aan den IJssel.
This week, thirteen days after the Pole’s conviction, someone again stood with a projector in front of a famous facade, that of the Mauritshuis in The Hague. This time it was the text a slogan that a parliamentary majority had recently judged as an anti-Semitic call for violence: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
It was signed: BIJ1, which immediately acknowledged the action, or rather, proudly claimed it. Wonderful. Wasn’t the tactic of these guerrilla actions correct that you cowardly committed them on the sly? The fact that a democratically elected House of Representatives party is now openly resorting to the use of light graffiti is not only surprising, but also rather unfortunate.
What is evil is first of all its apparent innocence. Secretly glands with mirrors and sunlight. The exam-bumbling swagger of teenagers who give a middle finger to all smart boards To agree. A projector does not set a flag or a holy book on fire. No property is destroyed. The Greek laser pointers on the heads of Ajax players were not lighters. No, the flash graffiti skims laser sharply along the legal boundaries.
Likewise, the lyrics are never literal hatred. Not something about Hamas and gas but coded language like “14 words” , “white lives matter” or the Anne Frank ballpoint theory. I don’t feel like explaining it, but insiders understand dog whistles loud and clear.
Just like the demonstrators who do not wave a Hamas or IS flag, but one that slightly deviates from it, as lookalikebrands that cowardly circumvent intellectual property law. Does that explain the spelling mistake at the Secret Annex? Anne without E.
Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes you have to expressly stand exactly on the legal boundary. When newspapers after the attack on Charlie Hebdo published Mohammed cartoons, they sharply marked the boundary line of freedom of expression, which had been violently violated.
BIJ1 will defend itself in the same way in the event of a possible lawsuit (a report has been filed). And the Court of Appeal ruled Not in August that that slogan was not grounds for prosecution at a demonstration in 2021?
Certainly, but there is a difference between the river slogan before and after October 7. After the terror of Hamas, after the explosion of anti-Semitic incidents, you have to go to great lengths not to read it as a call to wipe Israel off the map and turn it into the Palestine of the map that the Denk party also distributes. .
This is no less than the less-less for which Wilders was rightly convicted. So fine if this leads to a ruling. But let’s not forget that BIJ1’s intention was more than enforcing a principled process. Virtually no one saw the projection at the Hofvijver live. I think it happened at night. The light show was staged primarily for social media pictures, which spread according to the thermodynamics of the commotion.
Even if people were already walking past, no one would have thought after reading that slogan: damn, now I’m convinced, Israel must disappear! Of course not. Flash defacement is always a signal to one’s own tribe. It is placing a tag. Emitting a scent trail. It marks the reach of one’s own clan, for whom there is nothing ambiguous about this message.
The action will also be motivated by frustration with the House of Representatives, which rejected this slogan as a call for violence. The projector is an extension of the middle finger that Sylvana Simons raised during that debate. From there it is a small step to unadulterated incitement.
Christiaan Weijts is a publicist.