Foreign Minister Bot plans fight against ‘caricaturing of Holland’

Fox News triggers official response

THE HAGUE - Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister Ben Bot plans to counter what he describes as ‘foreign press caricatures of the Netherlands.’ Mr. Bot made the announcement at the annual meeting with all Dutch ambassadors. He will try diplomacy to rectify images recently opined by a Belgian politician and by a commentary on U.S. news broadcaster Fox.

The Belgian comment qualified the Netherlands as a ‘cesspit of vice,’ but Mr. Bot was more dismayed at the commentary heard in a December broadcast on Fox News. Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas - under the title ‘Does History Repeat Itself?’ – gave a description of the Dutch as whore-mongering, coke-snorting child murderers’. The commentator had railed that ‘... something terrible is happening in the land of wooden shoes, windmills, Rembrandt and wonderful breakfasts’ and had gone on about ‘euthanizing - killing - newborn babies who don't measure up to an arbitrary standard set by the hospital’. It was also stated that ‘Holland is a perfect example of what happens when there is no governing moral standard.’

Fox News also said that ‘... the Dutch.... have admitted thousands of radical Islamists who have not assimilated... all of this in a country where the Nazis murdered Ann (sic) Frank just because she was Jewish and therefore less than human’.

The Fox News commentary caused thousands of comments and discussions on internet websites and forums.