Dolf Jansen becomes quite testy live on television when Marcel van Roosmalen calls his Gaza tweet ‘pathetic’. “It’s what f*cking happens when you’re in your hotel at night!”
It is a somewhat uncomfortable phenomenon: when disaster breaks out somewhere in the world, celebrities and influencers immediately get up to post in their Instagramstoriesbetween the latte macchiato and outfit of the day by posting a message that they find it terrible. With white letters on a black background and preferably a broken heart.
Dolf is safe
Critics mainly consider it vanity. They think that those celebrities mainly do this to demonstrate that their hearts are in the right place. Dolf Jansen is now also being blamed for this. He posted what critics considered a somewhat melodramatic tweet about the victims in the Gaza Strip and was attacked quite harshly for it.
Dolf in that tweet: “I was home. I was safe. I was in a TV studio. I was safe. I went for a run. I was safe. I was in a theater. I was safe. I was on the A28. Safe. Hotel in Zwolle. Safe. 1 million children in Gaza are not safe. Unsafe. Nowhere safe. 1,000,000 children.”
Pathetic
Marcel van Roosmalen expresses his annoyance about it when Dolf sits next to him last night in the talk show Van Roosmalen & Groenteman. “They’re always jokes with a message, aren’t they? There is a layer of pathos over it. I always think of you: the world’s suffering rests on your shoulders, you will always choose the right side of the line.”
He continues: “They are always jokes with a message. That’s how I experience it and I have nothing against it, but sometimes it’s not quite my sense of humor. At the same time, I respect you as a colleague. I follow you on Twitter and I saw this last week. I find that a bit pathetic.”
Dolf explodes
Dolf doesn’t think it’s nice that Marcel calls that Gaza tweet pathetic. He explodes: “Definitely pathetic and there is no joke in it. It is what F*CKING happens when you are sitting in your hotel at night because you have to be in Zwolle the next day and you see images of a place where two million people live that is constantly being bombed, what is happening.”
He continues: “And then I try to convey some feeling. People think: where’s the joke? There’s no joke there, Marcel. This is what affects me at that moment because of what is happening there.”
Open door
Marcel thinks it’s very cliché. “I’m not even asking for the joke. No, but for me it’s about the expression. What matters to me is your own feeling that you want to share all the time and I have a little of that with you.”
Colleague Gijs Groenteman agrees: “No, it is not a joke, but it is very bad… It is also an open door that you are kicking in, Dolf. That we are doing well and that others are having a terrible time right now…”
Dolf: “You can see that as an open door…”
Gijs: “It is.”
Discharge
Marcel thinks it’s attention seeking. “It now seems as if you are the only man on earth who finds this very bad. Everyone feels bad for those children.”
Gijs: “I honestly find it very complicated to put forward opinions in a situation that is so complex and has so many sides, with only a fraction of the knowledge and a fraction of the insight, to say that it is bad, while everyone sees that it is horrible. Yes, but hey, it is a free medium.”
Dolf: “Sometimes you feel the need to say something about it because you find it horrible. You can see that as an open door or a kind of human behavior.”