Posters of a Muslim woman making out with a Jewish man in a yarmulke are pasted all over a city in the Netherlands, causing feminists and Muslims in the local community to freak out.
On a message board for Moroccans living in the Netherlands, one person compared the campaign to “hanging up posters on one of [the Jewish] holy days of Hitler kissing Anne Frank to criticize the Torah because it says that Jewish women may not marry non-Jews.”
The city council of Rotterdam produced the posters to raise awareness about the right of women to choose their romantic partners. In some strict Muslim communities, women who start a romantic relationship with a person from a different background can face violence or even murder, forced marriage, or being taken to their family’s land of origin and left there. At the top of each poster are the words “In the Netherlands, you choose your own partner” and at the bottom it says, “Do you feel free to choose?”
Leefbaar (Livable) Rotterdam, a populist-right party co-founded by assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, proposed the poster campaign. They are the largest party in the Rotterdam city council and frequently use their majority to address problems with the integration of the city’s large Muslim community.
Poster (The Daily Caller)
The posters have drawn criticism from an unlikely group — Dutch feminists. They have been particularly harsh on Shirin Musa, founder of women’s rights group Femmes for Freedom (FFF), because she helped develop the posters. Musa is a Muslim who wears a headscarf. Dutch feminists say she is a tool of the far-right.
Anja Meulenbelt, a prominent Dutch feminist and politician, wrote on her public Facebook page: “Shirin Musa, with FFF, likes to pretend she is the only one concerned about the rights of women in general and honor-related violence in particular…we should not be surprised that no one, except right-wing Islamophobes, is interested in working with her.” In a subsequent comment she accuses Musa of being out for financial gain.
Musa responds that Dutch feminists have grown up with basic freedoms and do not understand the problems faced by some Muslim women. She points to a recent feminist campaign against perceived gender stereotyping in children’s toy catalogues. “I don’t want to disappoint my sisters who are going after the ‘luxury rights,'” she said, “These are important issues, but it’s not a question of life and death.”
Dutch Muslim politicians claim they support the rights being promoted in the posters, but say the image of a Muslim kissing a Jew does more harm than good. Nourdin el Ouali is the head of NIDA, which describes itself as “an Islam-inspired emancipation campaign that developed into a political party in Rotterdam.” He told Dutch media, “I think this is stereotyping, ethnocentric and provocative.” He also said, “This campaign sends out the message that ‘our culture is the best culture.'” Tunahan Kuzu, an MP with Denk, a national political party for Muslims, called the posters “polarizing and paternalistic.”
Other posters in the campaign feature a Muslim woman kissing a Dutch man, two white women kissing each other, and a woman of South Asian ethnicity kissing a black man.