Teeven will hate to give a human rights price against hinself
Dutch Christian University invited Fred Teeven on a human rigts event. Good! Let us see him sweat!
Astrid Essen and others wrote against the VU inviting Teeven on a human rights event.
I agree at first it sounds sickening to ask Fred Teeven to hand out a human rights price.
But it is also clever.
Teeven's (and Frontex) policies do everything to play down and keep anonym all news about tens of thousands of refugees, drowned on European shores.
Until recently, it were activist and relatively progressive organizations, protesting.
The last thing that Teeven wants, is that averige, churchgoing people also join the issue and start to see these deaths as individuels, drowned by European policies.
That is exactly what VU tries with enormous energy, and what this event is aimed about. Their material is really spine chilling and hugely convincing for millions of averige citicens.
If we want to do Teeven a big pleasure, we give him an excuse to not go there and portray the event as extremist.
If he is there, he will prefer to be shouted down by 'extremists'. So then he can ignore the issue, block the price ceremony for this fantiastic research, blame the extremists and say that he is spot in the middle between us and PVV.
People from different cultures demonstrate in different ways. That is one lesson from two years of activism with Wij Zijn Hier.
Let the Christians join our side on this issue, and let them do it in their own way. Lets have fun watching them learning this. And lets have fun, seeing Teeven to give status to research that he does NOT want to exist, because it goes full throttle against his policies of playing down border deaths.
Pieter Smit (activist with the Wij Zijn Hier refugee movement in Amsterdam).