Why? Because police and prosecutors wanted to protect Muslim asylum seekers.
By Bruce Bawer
In July 2020, when a 14-year-old Dutch girl named Tamar was struck to death by a car on a road called Zeedijk between the cities of Marken and Monnickendam, her parents were told by police that the car’s driver, who had fled the scene, was a German man. It later emerged that he was not German at all, but a 27-year-old Iraqi, now identified in the media as Jamal T., who had sought asylum in Germany. His car, a gray Mazda 3, had been carrying three passengers, all of them also Iraqi men who had applied for asylum in Germany, and all of them supposedly in the Netherlands on a camping trip. (You know how much those Iraqis love camping trips.) When Tamar’s mother learned the truth about the driver, she confronted the police with their deceit; in response, they told her that they had lied about the driver’s identity “because we didn’t want to create a Wilders effect.”
A “Wilders effect”: the reference, of course, is to Geert Wilders, the brave and charismatic politician who’s known around the world primarily for his eloquent opposition to mass Muslim immigration. In the 2023 general election, the Freedom Party, which he founded and which he still leads, became the nation’s largest. Yet although he should by rights be his country’s prime minister, the refusal of other parties to form governing coalitions with him has kept him from being named head of government. Indeed, for all his popularity, his views on Islam and immigration, which he shares with a growing percentage of the Dutch population, are still considered offensive by the country’s political, media, and academic establishment – and even, apparently, by the police, who in the case of Tamar were willing to go so far as to dissemble outrageously about the perpetrator in order to avoid letting the nation find out about yet another incident that supports the arguments of Geert Wilders. Prosecutors, who were heartless co-conspirators in the inexcusable misrepresentation to Tamar’s parents of the identity of her killer, even chose not to try a case against Jamal T., who instead of being taken into custody and put on trial, was, according to Remix News, charged a €1,500 fine “for looking at his phone while driving.” And he didn’t even pay the fine.
Frustrated by their inability to attain justice, Tamar’s parents took advantage of their rights under the law to challenge the prosecutors’ decision. Six years after the crime, the matter has finally been decided in their favor, and Jamal T. is finally scheduled to go to trial on June 30. Also, new information is going public. For example, experts hired by Tamar’s parents maintained that they found evidence that the exact location at which her body was found – namely, by the side of the road, not on the road itself – was not the actual site of her death, suggesting either that it was moved after the accident, presumably by the perpetrator and his passengers, or that Tamar herself was able to crawl to the roadside before dying. On this question, two forensic pathologists offered different theories about how the body might have been moved; the Public Prosecution Service, weighing in a year after Tamar’s death, ruled that her body had not been moved after all; now, however, an expert in traffic accidents has concluded that “Tamar’s body was indeed dragged.” Also puzzling is the fact that the men in the car, who claimed not to realize that they had struck a human being and who had purportedly just come to the Netherlands to go camping, hurried back to Germany only hours after killing Tamar. “The car was washed there,” reports the NL Times, “and put up for sale two months later.”
Happily, the determination of police and prosecutors to keep this case out of the public eye has backfired tremendously: on June 9, when Elon Musk reposted an item about it on X, his post soon gathered over 13 million views. (Unsurprisingly, however, while alternative Dutch news sites have been covering the latest developments in this story, I couldn’t find any mention of it – except for old reports from 2020 and 2021, predating the public identification of the perpetrator as an Iraqi – at the websites of such mainstream Dutch newspapers as De Volkskrant, NRC, and Trouw; the only exceptions to this rule were a couple of items in De Telegraaf.) Musk, as it happens, drew attention to the case by reposting a Dutchman’s post noting that in the case of Tamar, just like that of Henry Nowak, an eighteen-year-old student who was knifed to death by a Sikh in Southampton last December, “an innocent young person dies” and “authorities seem more focused on protecting a narrative and avoiding ‘political incorrectness’ than on delivering swift justice.”
Indeed. In the case of Henry Nowak, which I discussed here on June 8, the police who turned up at the scene were quick to treat the murderer as a victim – specifically, of racism, a charge later shown to be an outright falsehood – and to arrest the real victim, who was quickly bleeding to death on the ground in front of them, but whom they had were certain was a racist who was lying about having been stabbed. Henry’s father, as I noted in my article on that terrible incident, “had been so effectively inculcated in the left’s approved attitude about such matters that he expressed concern that his son’s death not “be used to create further division, hatred or tension.” In the same way, Tamar’s family, according to the NL Times, “has partially distanced itself from political discussions and comparisons with cases abroad.”
It’s not for me to tell grieving parents how to react to the loss of their children. It’s a terrible situation and everyone deals with grief in a different way. But it seems to me that if I were in their shoes, I’d get in touch at once with Geert Wilders and arrange a massive Tommy Robinson-style rally on Dam Square in the heart of Amsterdam. To draw attention to such cases in the hope of shifting public attitudes about the enemies in our midst is not exploitation of the dead or of their survivors; it is, on the contrary, one of the strongest weapons that we have in our struggle to save the free West and to protect future Henrys and Tamars from meaningless slaughter.
First published in Front Page Magazine
