There is this brouhaha about what retired Marine General John Sheehan said in congressional testimony on March 19: He accused the Dutch Army of having allowed the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War, because of too much acceptance of homosexuality.
The Dutch are mad. Some swear to never visit this country again, assuming that General Sheehan speaks for all of us, stateside.
But here is the problem: True, General Sheehan’s accusation was laughable. The Dutch allowed the Srebrenica massacre of nearly 10,000 Bosnian civilians not out of excessive homosexuality, but out of cowardice. (I didn’t say it. A famous Dutch author and good friend of mine did).
However, what makes me climb the wall, is the knee-jerk European tendency to pick and select absurd statements or behavior by a few Americans, and to generalize them to all of us. Forgetting already that we elected the first black head of state of any Western nation, that today twice as many people support the President as oppose him, that the Health Care debacle victimizes nobody more than the American people, that the Tea Party folks only represent a minority of Americans, many Europeans are already returning to what feels instinctively most comfortable to them: ridiculing America.
So, seeing that Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders wants to get rid of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands, that former gay political leader Pim Fortuyn was assassinated, as was Van Gogh’s great- grandson Theo, should I decide to never set foot again in that horribly intolerant country?
To criticize an entire group on the basis of the features of one or some of its members is called: stereotyping. All Jews are misers, right? It is called bigotry and prejudice. It is wrong. Look it up in the dictionary.
So here is my question: are ALL Americans idiots, or only some of them? According to many Europeans, it’s the former. According to me, the latter.
And another thing: Not all Europeans are idiots, either. leave comment here
