Category: Netherlands

WTF, ‘Eritrean Migrant Factions’?

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It is claimed that the president of Eritrea is a brutal dictator, but seeing how these people behave, who can blame him for being brutal?

Riots between rival factions of Eritrean migrants broke out in the Dutch city of The Hague on Saturday evening as police officers were left injured and cars were set on fire outside a conference centre.
The home of the war criminal trying International Criminal Court saw war zone-like scenes brought to its doorstep as supporters of the leftist government of Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki gathered in the Opera Hall Centre in The Hague’s city centre on Saturday evening.
A group of anti-government Eritreans gathered outside of the building in protest, however, it quickly devolved into open riots, with the anti-government faction smashing the windows of the hall and setting it on fire.
Riot police were dispatched to help protect the building from further damage and the pro-government Eritrean group within the conference centre were escorted from the building under police escort, Der Telegraaf reports.

The description of Afwerki as “leftist” might be misleading; like, you’re saying he’s the Justin Trudeau of East Africa or what? By describing him as “leftist,” you’re trying to get me to be against Afwerki, but seeing as how it’s the opponents of the dictator causing the riots, maybe I should be pro-Afwerki. Having searched my conscience for a reason to give a flying fuck about Eritrea, however, I must confess I found nothing. Instead, I’m leaning toward the conclusion that Eritreans are nothing but trouble and we should send them all back to Eritrea.

What are these people doing in Charlotte, North Carolina?

Charlotte police on Saturday made several arrests, deployed pepper spray and closed a major road for an “unlawful protest” that they said blocked a business hosting a cultural festival.
Police in a news release identified the festival on Monroe Road as an “Eritrean cultural event.” The Charlotte Observer’s news partner, WSOC-TV, reported the protest was over international politics, with two groups at the scene: one supporting the government of the east African country of Eritrea, and another saying the country’s president is a brutal dictator.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department posted photos from the scene of officers in riot gear and said its Civil Emergency Unit was met with violence and aggression and that the crowd of 200 set a tractor-trailer on fire.
By the time the scene cleared around 9:30 p.m. Saturday, police said they arrested eight people, including three male participants who face charges of impeding traffic and a female participant who faces charges of impeding traffic, inciting a riot and assault on a government official for hitting an officer. The other arrests were for charges that included impeding traffic and failure to disperse, a news release said.
Police said they seized a firearm from the female protester.

This is America, OK? Your disagreements over the government of Eritrea are of zero interest to us and, in consideration of your being here (and not there) we expect you to behave yourselves. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure a majority of Americans — especially the people in North Carolina whose roads you’re blocking — would be happy to deport all of you Eritreans.



 

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Geert Wilders Wins; Left Freaks Out

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Stunning news this week from the Netherlands:

Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) have swept to a stunning victory in Dutch elections, with exit polls predicting that his populist anti-mass migration party will become the largest force in the House of Representatives in the Netherlands. . . .
Performing in a way that many would have considered unthinkable just a week ago, the populist party is now projected to have more than doubled its representation over the previous election in 2021 when the PVV only managed to secure 17 seats in the House.
The PVV was followed by the leftist-green coalition GL-PvdA of Great Reset proponent Frans Timmermans at 26 seats, the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) at 23 seats, and the centrist New Social Contract (NSC) at 20.

Liberal media are trying to portray Wilders as a Trump imitator, when in fact Wilders long preceded the Trump phenomenon. When I heard the news of Wilders’ victory, the first person I thought of was Pamela Geller, who brought Wilders to CPAC in 2009. Wilders was also the keynote speaker at a Geller-organized 2015 event in Garland, Texas, that was attacked by two ISIS-inspired terrorists. These headlines give a taste of how Wilders’ victory inspired panic among liberals:

Dutch election winner Geert Wilders is
an anti-Islam firebrand known
as the Dutch Donald Trump
— Associated Press

Far-Right Populist Geert Wilders Scores
Major Victory in Dutch Election
— Wall Street Journal

Dutch Election Results Deliver
a Turn to the Far Right
— New York Times

Opposition to mass immigration is “far right,” the media declare flatly, even though polling shows that a majority of U.S. voters believe (and have believed for many years) that the border is out of control, that illegal immigration is a serious problem, and that the overall level of immigration is too high. Most Americans want less immigration, and especially want stricter enforcement to prevent illegal immigration — but such opinions are “far right,” according to the media. This is an interesting example of media manipulation, whereby a mainstream (majority) opinion is transmogrified into an “extremist” position, while the fringe beliefs of the Left are treated as if they were mainstream.

Geert Wilders was ahead of his time, calling attention to immigration-related problems that most politicians (and their media allies) don’t want people to notice. When the 2015 “refugee crisis” hit Europe, suddenly what had been seen as a “far right” fringe became the voice of a majority. The left-leaning “elite” in politics and media tried to prevent this majority from gaining power, but as the victory of Wilders shows, a determined people can overwhelm elite resistance. Congratulations!



 

Have The Dutch Torn Down All Their Statues and Renamed All Their Streets?

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Obviously it’s just a matter of time:

Dutch King Willem-Alexander has apologized for his country’s historic involvement in slavery and its ongoing repercussions, as the Netherlands on Saturday begins an official event to mark 150 years since the end of slavery in Dutch colonies.
The king issued his apology during a speech marking the event.
“Today I’m standing here in front of you as your king and as part of the government. Today I am apologising myself,” Willem-Alexander said. “And I feel the weight of the words in my heart and my soul.”
The king commissioned a study into the exact role the Dutch royal family, the House of Orange-Nassau, played in slavery in the Netherlands.
He asked for forgiveness “for the clear failure to act in the face of this crime against humanity.”
Thousands of descendants from the former Dutch colony of Suriname and the Dutch overseas territories of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao are attending celebrations in Amsterdam.
The event has been dubbed “Keti Koti,” meaning “breaking chains” in Sranan Togo, a Creole language spoken in Suriname.
Queen Maxina and Prime Minister Mark Rutte are also expected to attend Keti Koti commemorations. . . .
Last December, Rutte apologized for slavery on behalf of the Dutch government.
A number of Dutch cities, including Amsterdam, issued their own apologies before the prime minister did so.
Beginning in the 17th Century, the Netherlands grew into one of Europe’s major colonial powers and was responsible for about 5% of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Some 600,000 slaves were transported from Africa to colonies in the Americas, and many Javanese and Balinese people were enslaved and taken to South Africa under Dutch colonial rule.
The Netherlands officially abolished slavery on July 1, 1863. However, slaves continued working on plantations in the Dutch Caribbean for another decade before abolition was put into practice.

As I said quite recently:

If one studies slavery from a global and historical perspective, the idea of a transtemporal collective grievance — an idea Thomas Sowell addresses in The Quest for Cosmic Justice — is simply absurd. To carry around permanent grudges over the practices of antiquity is a foolish posture. 

Sowell addressed the issue of colonialism more specifically in Conquests and Cultures: An International History, the general point of which is that the endless anti-American guilt-tripping by “progressives” over our nation’s history is based on ignorance. Almost everybody everywhere in the world has, at one time or another, been either a “victim” or “oppressor,” as such things as judged by the Social Justice Warriors who insist that we should feel ashamed if we are one or two notches above anyone else on the socioeconomic hierarchy. Just yesterday, for example, I was re-reading Winston Churchill’s account of the English Civil War, when King Charles was beheaded and various of the aristocracy who supported his Royalist (“Cavalier”) cause had their property stolen by supporters of the victorious Republican (“Roundhead”) faction. After about a dozen years of Puritan dictatorship, when the English finally decided they’d be better off with a king, Charles II was welcomed to take the crown under an agreement that stipulated, among other things, that the properties seized during the Civil War would not be returned to their previous owners. So the heirs of various dukes and earls were never compensated for their lost property. No “social justice” for them.

Well, so much for the disinherited and expropriated English Royalists. What about the former Dutch colony of Suriname?

It has a population of approximately 612,985, dominated by descendants from the slaves and labourers brought in from Africa and Asia by the Dutch Empire and Republic. . . .
Europeans arrived in the 16th century, with the Dutch establishing control over much of the country’s current territory by the late 17th century. During the Dutch colonial period, Suriname was a lucrative source of sugar, its plantation economy driven by African slave labour, and after abolition of slavery in 1863, by indentured servants from Asia, predominantly from British India, as well as the Dutch East Indies. . . .
In 1667, during negotiations leading to the Treaty of Breda after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch decided to keep the nascent plantation colony of Surinam they had gained from the English. In return the English kept New Amsterdam, the main city of the former colony of New Netherland in North America on the mid-Atlantic coast. The British renamed it New York City, after the Duke of York who would later become King James II of England. . . .

(Excellent bargain you made there, Dutch colonialists!)

The Netherlands abolished slavery in Suriname in 1863, under a gradual process that required slaves to work on plantations for 10 transition years for minimal pay, which was considered as partial compensation for their masters. After that transition period expired in 1873, most freedmen largely abandoned the plantations where they had worked for several generations in favor of the capital city, Paramaribo. Some of them were able to purchase the plantations they worked on, especially in the district of Para and Coronie. Their descendants still live on those grounds today. . . .
As a plantation colony, Suriname had an economy dependent on labor-intensive commodity crops. To make up for a shortage of labor, the Dutch recruited and transported contract or indentured laborers from the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) and India (the latter through an arrangement with the British, who then ruled the area). In addition, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, small numbers of laborers, mostly men, were recruited from China and the Middle East. . . .
The largest ethnic group are Indians [i.e., descendants of laborers brought from India], who form over a quarter of the population (27.4%). . . . If counted as one ethnic group, the Afro-Surinamese are the largest community, at around 37.4%; however, they are usually divided into two cultural/ethnic groups: the Creoles and the Maroons. Surinamese Maroons, whose ancestors are mostly runaway slaves that fled to the interior, comprise 21.7% of the population. . . . Surinamese Creoles, mixed people descending from African slaves and Europeans (mostly Dutch), form 15.7% of the population. . . . Javanese make up 14% of the population, and like the East Indians, descend largely from workers contracted from the island of Java in the former Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). . . .
A small but influential number of Europeans remain in the country, comprising about 1% of the population.

Very interesting. Now, per capital gross domestic product:

Netherlands ….. $61,098
Suriname ………… $5,556

You can hear all the SJWs screaming: “RAAAAACISM!”

But instead of comparing Suriname’s per capital GDP to the Netherlands (the world’s 11th-richest country), let’s compare it to two countries where the ancestors of modern-day Surinamese came from:

Suriname ………… $5,556
Indonesia ……….. $5,016
India ……………….. $2,601

Now, compare to a few nations of the “Slave Coast” of Africa:

Suriname ………… $5,556
Angola …………….. $3,204
Ivory Coast ………. $2,646
Nigeria …………… $2,280
Senegal …………… $1,719
Cameroon ………. $1,699
Guinea …………… $1,549

It is not a defense of slavery, nor of 17th-century Dutch colonial policy, to point out that the modern descendants of slaves in Suriname are demonstrably better off than residents of many African nations. However, it is a useful antidote to the idiotic social-justice mentality that leads to the absurd spectacle of the King of the Netherlands confessing to his personal guilt in “this crime against humanity.” Right, and I’m still waiting for an apology from the King of England for the various “crimes against humanity” perpetrated against my Scottish ancestors.

Only from what Sowell calls the “cosmic justice” perspective does this kind of guilt-tripping make sense: “Let’s all point fingers about what happened 200 or 300 years ago, because that’s easier than finding practical ways to deal with the problems we have in the here and now!”

Meanwhile, some Dutch guy is reading my blog and saying, “Wait a minute — we traded New York to the English for freaking Suriname? What a rip-off! Let’s make the English apologize for that swindle!”

BWAHAHAHAHA! Sucks to be you, Dutch guy.



 

 

Dutch Stabbing Attack Update

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Having updated readers earlier on the London stabbing attack, we now have more information about the attack in the Netherlands:

Police in the Dutch city of The Hague have arrested a man aged 35 over a stabbing attack on a shopping street on Friday, in which three teenagers were injured.
The suspect, who has no fixed abode, will be transferred to a police station for questioning, local police said.
Those hurt, two girls aged 15 and a boy of 13, did not know each other, and no motive has been reported.
Al three were released from hospital following treatment.
Police said earlier that they were investigating “several scenarios” and that it was “too early to speculate” about a possible terror motive.
The attack in The Hague came hours after a stabbing in London in which two people were killed and three injured before police shot dead the suspect.
British police say the London attack was a terrorist incident.

Notice how Europe’s police procedures (and press policies) are so different from those in the United States. In the U.S., police are more or less required to name any suspect arrested, and to release the mug shot of the suspect. While political correctness sometimes shapes press coverage of crime in America, most news organizations will not hesitate to pursue off-the-record sources to gather background information about cases. “Sources close to the investigation” will be cited to provide information about the motive, etc., and reporters will seek out witnesses, neighbors and family members in order to get a complete story about any major crime. Even if it’s one of those crimes that is strictly “local news” (because it reflects unfavorably on Democrat Party constituents), you can almost always get good stuff from local newspaper and TV reporters. Quality coverage of local crime — well, that sells newspapers, and American publishers are greedy capitalists, thank God.




 

The Dutch Trump Is Awesome

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Nowadays, whenever you see the media label a politician “far-right,” you figure he must be awesome, and this rule appears to be valid in the case of Thierry Baudet, a Dutch politician who is being compared to Donald Trump after his Forum for Democracy (FvD) party won provincial elections. This makes Baudet’s party a potential threat to Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberal VVD party. Baudet is anti-EU, anti-immigration and a climate-change skeptic. He speaks brutal truth:

Thanks to a sophisticated social media operation and regular appearances on popular TV talks shows, Baudet and his party have managed to reach a large audience.
Two days before the election, the campaign shifted focus to migration after a Turkish-born man was arrested following a shooting in Utrecht in which three people were killed. Baudet was swift in his response, blaming the government’s migration policy for the attack just hours after the shooting. At the time of his remarks, all other parties had suspended campaigning in memory of those who lost their lives.
“We are being destroyed by the people who are supposed to be protecting us,” Baudet told supporters after his election win. “Successive Rutte governments have left our borders wide open, letting in hundreds of thousands of people with cultures completely different to ours.”

This is simply a fact, a truth that nobody is supposed to mention because it’s now “far-right” to speak the truth — including the truth about women:

In an interview in 2017, Baudet said “women generally excel less in a lot of occupations and have fewer ambitions,” adding that they are “often also more interested in just more family-like things.” Three years earlier, he wrote in an op-ed that women “do not want you to respect their no, to respect their resistance. The reality is that women want to be overwhelmed, dominated, yes; want to be overpowered.”

To employ a marketplace analogy, when it comes to sex, women are the supply and men are the demand and, in negotiating the transaction, the woman does not wish to seem too eager to close the deal. Her show of reluctance is an attempt to bid up the price, as it were, but courtesy requires men to pretend we don’t understand this. Nor are men allowed (at least publicly) to discuss strategy vis-a-vis female sexuality. Women are insulted by the suggestion that any man could be sufficiently shrewd to understand the psychology of sex well enough to win the game. Knowing this, of course, the shrewd player learns to act as if he’s not really playing, but rather just spontaneously doing what comes natural — a method actor, so to speak, cast in the role of the lovable brute.

Baudet bluntly analyzes the “nice guy” problem:

Aardige jongens halen het slechtste in jonge vrouwen naar boven. In weerwil van het dominante discours over het ‘zwakke’ geslacht is geen diersoort zo wreed als de jonge vrouw. Misschien is het evolutionair te verklaren – dat vrouwen een sterke spermadonor zoeken voor de voortplanting; dat het voortbestaan van de soort van een dergelijk afweermechanisme afhankelijk is.

Translation:

Nice guys bring out the worst in young women. In spite of the dominant discourse on the ‘weak’ sex, no animal species is as cruel as the young woman. Perhaps it can be explained evolutionally — that women seek a strong sperm donor for reproduction; that the survival of the species depends on such a defense mechanism.

Well, is he wrong about this? Women are generally unaware of their own cruelty. Having it within her power to make a boy spectacularly happy — ecstatic, euphoric, giddy with happiness — the teenage girl instead finds it more advantageous to deny him that pleasure and, to the adult who understands this as a matter of incentives, the romantic cat-and-mouse game is amusing to watch. Having both sons and daughters, I see both sides of the struggle. It’s rather too easy for a grown man to forget the misery a girl can inflict on a lovestruck boy, and it’s even possible to be deceived by feminist nonsense about women’s perpetual victimhood.

Life ultimately sorts people out as winners or losers, and while female losers have an entire political movement devoted to their grievances, the plight of the male loser is mocked to scorn. God forbid anyone should give a young man advice on how to win, which was the controversy Thierry Baudet was addressing in that 2014 column about the furor surrounding Swiss pickup artist Julien Blanc.

Anyway, this guy Baudet might soon become somebody important, and it’s nice to see that truth still counts for something in politics.
 

Dutch Police Seek Turkish Suspect in Utrecht Shooting That Killed Three

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The latest story:

Police have named the suspect in a shooting attack on a tram in the central Dutch city of Utrecht which has left three people dead and nine injured.
Officers identified Turkish-born Gokmen Tanis, 37, in connection with the incident. The public have been urged not to approach him.
Authorities immediately raised the terror alert for the area to the maximum level and said they are considering the possibility of a “terrorist motive” in the attack.
Utrecht mayor Jan van Zanen confirmed the number of people killed and injured in the incident, saying the authorities were likely to “assume a terror motive”.
The suspect reportedly opened fire at passengers on a tram in the area of 24 Oktoberplein.

It is not yet clear whether this actually is a terrorist attack, but let’s engage in unsubstantiated speculation anyway:

If Trump inspired the New Zealand shooter, as the media alleges, did the media inspire this guy? How about Ilhan Omar? Or is Trump the only person on earth with the charisma to inspire people?

Personally, I blame Beto O’Rourke because why not?

UPDATE: The suspect has reportedly been arrested after an eight-hour manhunt. He had a previous criminal record, and the tram shooting may have resulted from a personal quarrel, rather than terrorism. Still, I blame Beto O’Rourke.

 

First-Person Plural Pronouns: Steve King and the Problems of ‘Our Civilization’

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Rep. Steve King is the most influential conservative in Iowa and, because of its first-in-the-nation caucuses, Iowa is one of the most influential states in presidential politics. The road to the White House goes through Iowa and, if you’re a Republican, you want Steve King on your side.

It is therefore important to pay attention to the controversy that arose over the weekend when King expressed support for Geert Wilders, who may become the next prime minister of the Netherlands, riding a wave of backlash against immigration from Muslim countries. The Dutch election is Wednesday and, commenting on anti-Wilders protests by Dutch Muslims, King re-tweeted a pro-Wilders message.

 

 

Judging from the reaction to this sentence — “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” — you might have thought King had quoted the infamous neo-Nazi “Fourteen Words” slogan. Yet the Iowa congressman was simply summarizing, within the condensed 140-character confines of a Twitter message, what Mark Steyn has explained at length in his 2006 book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Europe’s demographic decline have enormous consequences for American policy. The flood of Muslim “refugees” into Europe and the wave of Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe are related phenomena, and these problems are in turn related to the very low birth rates among Europeans. How to address these issues as a matter of public policy is a very serious matter, but we cannot solve a problem if the terms of debate are inhibited by a political correctness that regards some facts as “racist.”

What does Steve King mean by “our civilization”? Among other things, this could include representative democracy, limited government, a free economy, the rule of law and the First Amendment. All of these American traditions are indeed imperiled by cultural and demographic trends and, while Mark Steyn did not go so far as to say, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” this is really the question raised by the open-borders stance of the Left. If you read the Constitution, you find that our Founding Fathers sought to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Americans today — including the descendants of slaves, and the children and grandchildren of immigrants — are the inheritors of that liberty, and we see today many threats to our liberty. On college campuses, the First Amendment is threatened by radical mobs who attack speakers they disagree with, and our economic freedom is imperiled by a national debt now approaching $20 trillion.

People in Iowa appreciate Steve King for his willingness to speak unpopular truths, and if any Republican thinks his pro-Wilders tweet was pushing a bit far against the politically correct limits of acceptable speech, let them make their case. However, the results of the last presidential election indicate that many Americans are waking up to the realities that King was attempting to describe, which are the same realities that Mark Stein was writing about in America Alone. If Wilders’ allegedly “far right” party wins Wednesday’s election, perhaps this will focus further attention on the seriousness of the larger problems that our decadent elite — in politics, in media, in academia — have tried for so long to conceal from the American people. Screeching accusations of “racism” will not solve these problems, and yet the Left really has nothing else to say, and how long can Americans be expected to play along with this charade?

America’s liberty was founded on behalf of “We the People,” and we must keep looking at that pronoun and asking, “Who are ‘we’?”

(Hat-tip: Taylor Millard at Hot Air.)



 

Some Creepy People Get Arrested, and Speaking of Brett Kimberlin …

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. . . John Hoge reports something interesting about how certain Web domains are hosted in the Netherlands:

Of course, using an off-shore ISP allows Team Kimberlin to avoid having the actual identity of the person or organization responsible for the domain being identified through a subpoena to the ISP.

The Netherlands, huh? That struck me as oddly interesting, because the Netherlands has kind of a reputation as an international pervert-magnet, and as for offshore Web hosting . . .

Deception and secrecy are essential to the kind of concealment necessary to criminal enterprises. Gosh, do we know anyone with a history of involvement in criminal enterprises?

“Brett C. Kimberlin schemed to elude justice with a series of bizarre plots designed to murder, maim and rob his enemies, create havoc . . . and discredit the chief government prosecutor.”
— Joe Gelarden, “Kimberlin case a maze of murder, deceit,” Indianapolis Star, Oct. 18, 1981

So now we find a number of Web sites that John Hoge says are associated with “Team Kimberlin,” operating in the secretive manner of a criminal enterprise with an ISP in the Netherlands. You might well ask, what other online activities are the Dutch infamous for?

When international police teams revealed [in March 2011] what they described as the biggest online pedophile network uncovered so far, the numbers were staggering: 670 suspects, 230 rescued children and 184 arrests across 30 countries. . . .
Details of the ring came out Wednesday when Amir Ish-Hurwitz, a 37-year-old Dutch resident whom investigators identified as the founder and owner of the boylover.net Internet forum, was jailed by a court in The Hague. . . .

Readers may recall that this was the network that included gay pedophiles Peter Truong and Mark Newton. It was an international network, but the founder and owner of the forum was based in the Netherlands, because Dutch law permits the kind of secret Web hosting on which such a criminal enterprise depended.

The Netherlands actually has a rather notorious history in this regard that predates the Internet, mainly because of the Dutch pedophile journal Paidika, whose editors and contributors included a number of Dutch academics. The second issue of Paidika included an article entitled, “The Dutch Paedophile Emancipation Movement,” which makes for quite creepy reading. This is relevant background:

Theo Sandfort, a Dutch academic and member of Paidika‘s editorial board . . . contributed an article entitled “Constructive Questions Regarding Paedophilia” to the third issue of the journal in 1988, contributed another article (“The World is Bursting with Adults, so I’m always Glad to See a Little Girl”) to the eighth issue in 1992, and published a two-part article (“The Sexual Experiences of Children”) in consecutive issues of Paidika in 1993 and ’94.
For several years, Professor Sandfort wrote about almost nothing else. He is author of the 2001 book Childhood Sexuality and co-edited the 1990 book Male Intergenerational Intimacy with fellow Paidika contributor Edward Brongersma, [a Dutch lawyer and politician] who was convicted for having sex with a 16-year-old boy. Readers will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Sandfort is now on the faculty of Columbia University.

 So . . . the Netherlands. Strange to say, despite their country’s status as an international pervert-magnet, the Dutch haven’t actually legalized sex with children, as the pedophile pornographer (and Paidika contributor) Lawrence Stanley discovered:

In 1998, a Dutch court convicted Stanley in absentia for sexual abuse of three children ages 7 to 10. . . . He faces a three-year prison sentence if he returns to the Netherlands.

This helped explain why in 2002 Stanley was arrested in Brazil, which does not have an extradition treaty with the Netherlands.

So . . . the Netherlands. That certainly struck me as an interesting place for “Team Kimberlin” to do its secret Web hosting.

“A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: ‘We’d see a girl, who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, “Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?” It made me very uncomfortable.’ Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as ‘my girlfriend,’ and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker . . . Sandi confided that Kimberlin was ‘grooming Jessica to be his wife.'”
— Mark Singer, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, Page 78

“Oh, give me a break,” one imagines Kimberlin’s defenders saying, “that was decades ago — the 1970s — certainly it is grossly unfair to resurrect such ancient history.” Yes, and after Brett Kimberlin was released from federal prison, in 1996 when he was 41 years old, what do we read about his first rock music album?

Not all the songs on his album … have political overtones … others, like “Waiting to Meet” and “Teen Dream” (both about having sex with teenage girls) are lacking in subtlety and tend to make one squirm. But this is exactly what Kimberlin wants.
“I say things a lot of people are afraid to say. Yeah, ‘Teen Dream’ is about f–king a teenage girl. Every guy who’s seen a good-looking teenage girl has thought about it. I’m talking about that lecherous quality that every man, though he won’t act on it, has.”

Songs “about having sex with teenage girls,” did you say? Songs “lacking in subtlety” that “tend to make one squirm,” you say? There’s nothing remotely suspicious — certainly no indication of a persistent tendency — when a 41-year-old paroled convict writes songs like that. It’s not as if Kimberlin then went out and married a girl 27 years younger than him, right? What’s that you say?

Tetyana Kimberlin, 32, sought a domestic protective order [July 9] saying her husband had “been going by my work and telling my employer I am going to be arrested,” and that Kimberlin, 59, “had me arrested before on false charges.” . . .
“He told me if I will try to take my kids with me he will hurt me and I will see what will happen to me,” Kimberlin’s Russian-born wife wrote in her petition for a protection order, a case that was heard Tuesday in Silver Spring, Maryland. “He tells my 14-year-old about his plans about me and what he is going to do with me.” . . .

So . . . the Netherlands. It’s probably just a coincidence that somebody on “Team Kimberlin” knows about the secrecy that Dutch law affords to Internet hosting in the Netherlands. But it’s surprising what you find if you Google for news about the Netherlands:

As part of its attempt to combat a growing trend of online sexual exploitation, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency announced on Monday that 255 suspected child predators had been arrested during a nearly five-week sting operation.
Operation iGuardian, as it was called, was run as a part of the agency’s larger Operation Predator and sought to identify and arrest those who allegedly “own, trade and produce” child pornography in the United States and its territories. So far in 2013, the agency has arrested 1,674 people for this type of crime, and more than 10,000 in the last decade.
Authorities also identified and rescued 61 alleged victims in the United States, Canada, Indonesia and the Netherlands . . .

Yeah, some creepy people get arrested, like the headline said. And you might be shocked what some people say about Brett Kimberlin.

Or maybe not.

 

UPDATE: You discover odd things while researching Dutch pedophiles. Edward Brongersma was a 39-year-old member of the Dutch parliament in 1950 when he caught having sex with a 16-year-old boy and subsequently became quite a notorious crusader for legalizing sex with boys. The search for biographical information about him led me to the case of a Canadian man, Robin Sharpe, who cited two books by Brongersma (Loving Boys and Male Intergenerational Intimacy) as evidence in his own trial for child pornography.

Sharpe’s legal problems began in 1995 when, at age 62, he was arrested for possession of more than 500 explicit photographs of boys, and was also charged with distributing pornographic writings of his own: “My erotic, often sadomasochisticly themed boy stories titled BOYABUSE: Flogging, Fun and Fortitude … were the principal material evidence against me.”

Believe it or not, Sharpe somehow managed a successful appeal of that conviction, but was subsequently arrested again, this time on sexual assault charges. It had been discovered that some of the photos in Sharp’s pornographic collection depicted a boy whom Sharpe had abused years earlier, from 1979 to 1982, when Sharpe was in his 40s and the boy was ages 11-14. You may wish to read Sharpe’s account of one of his hearings, which includes this:

[A constable who testified for the prosecution] was out to discredit Brongersma by any means.
This upset me, I became quite emotional and had to wipe away my tears. Edward Brongersma was a friend. He had died only a few months earlier. I encountered him first in print, quoted in some book I was reading, and later I bought his Loving Boys study, a major purchase for me at almost a hundred dollars. In 1991 I began corresponding with Dr. Brongersma through the Brongersma Foundation as I had heard they archived boylove material. Not many people liked my more bizarre stuff anyway . . . Brongersma liked my “atrocious” stories and we found we had certain interests in common including Filipino culture. . . . We wrote back and forth at least monthly for years. . . . I hope some day to publish his letters. I had kept him informed of my case.

Well, there you go, eh? Sharpe was utterly shameless about his peculiar interests, and seemed to view himself as horribly oppressed by anyone who thought there was anything wrong with it. And the conclusion of Sharpe’s account is weirdly amusing:

On the last [day of this court session] a friend of many years whom I had met in his teens was the only spectator there at the end. It was late, after 7:30, we went out for falafels on the Granville Mall and then walked down to a coffee house in “Little Amsterdam” by Victory Square to play backgammon and smoke a joint. I really needed it.

Canadians: Almost as Bad as the Dutch!