If you put Rick Nieman’s questions one after the other, the result reads as a crash course. I wanted to start the ZAP week with another sentence-in fact: with a different program. But again looking at ‘WNL on Sunday’, I realized quite quickly that my intentions would not stand.
The subject that Nieman wanted to start the broadcast was horrible and tragic; Everyone could agree. The day before, a girl of eleven was stabbed to death in Nieuwegein. The same afternoon a suspect was arrested. Stories went around immediately about his identity: it would be a confused man from Syria. On Sunday morning, the police announced that the suspect did not come from Syria, but had both Dutch and Moroccan nationality and was born in Nieuwegein. In the Netherlands, so.
That information was already available by the time that ‘WNL started on Sunday’, but Nieman did not let himself be hindered in his questions and positions. On the contrary. When you note those questions and statements and omit the reactions of his guests, you will come to the argument below:
“It’s about the suspect and the nationality of the suspect. A discussion about that immediately comes loose. “
“There are also a lot of confused people – regardless of their nationality – on the street. That is of course a huge problem in itself. “
“But still. Geert Wilders tweeted last night: ‘Syrian’, ‘I am fed up’, ‘asylum stop’ … It of course plays a political role, the fact that this gentleman is not a born Dutchman. “
“A while ago we also saw a stabbing at the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, also by a confused person, but also with a migration background. Maybe they will escape the eyes of assistance agencies. It is speculation, but in that case it appears to have been the case. “
“But that is not an excuse for the fact that a girl of eleven … I can imagine people think – well, look at Germany. Those stricter border controls, also for these kinds of reasons. That’s not incomprehensible, isn’t it? “
“Hard or not, you could say: if you don’t let them in, you don’t have that problem either.”
Brexit
That last sentence got stuck on me. In the evening, in the first episode of De Wit and the Brit (VPRO), illustrated Tim de Wit how similar rhetoric contributed to the Brexit. De Wit went to England for the program, to look back on the turbulent time that he worked there as a NOS correspondent. He then saw how anti-immigration sentiment, pushed up considerably by tabloids, played a major role in the Brexit campaign. Now he visited a notorious tabloid journalist: Paul McMullen. He now ran a messy hostel for backpackers, for whom he secretly turned old sheets instead of changing them. McMullen had a past of facts twisting to come to the desired story. He wrote about asylum migrants (responsible for a small part of the migration figures) that they came to Europe “for sex and money.” He still sometimes tried to sell photos of boat refugees to tabloids: “Photos of women with babies sell well.” He made them from a bunch of bushes. The dirty feeling did not go away.
On the WNL site there was now a quote from Member of Parliament Henk Vermeer (BBB), who was a guest at Nieman on Sunday: “Research shows that the influence of asylum migration is greater than the numerical influence. Those people have an extra backpack, which has consequences for how they act. ” The reader was allowed to pop up that research. And that the perpetrator was not an asylum migrant at all, it seemed completely forgotten. So I just repeat it: he came from Nieuwegein.