Netherlands: More on respect

Klein Verzet reports on interview given by Mohammed Faizel Ali Enait, a Muslim who was turned down for a job at the Rotterdam Municipality for refusing to shake hands with women and his insistence on Muslim dress.

So here's his philosophy on life. Remember, the guy wants to be a Customer Relations Officer:

- He does not shake hands with either men or women. Instead he puts his hand to his heart in greetings. He therefore does not discriminate.

- He thinks civil servants have a constitutional right to wear whatever they wish.

"It looks like a good job to me. The current boss of the social services also began this way. Now he earns two to three hundred thousand euros a month. I want that too."

On the CGB decision: "The mono-cultural society got a silent funeral that day. A point of no return. It is important that Muslims occupy key positions and not wander about the dark outskirts of society."

He wrote his plea on his own, against the municipality's lawyers. "I studied this issues for six months. You need to fight foxes with foxes and crooks with crooks. What do I mean? You need to be smarter than the smartest."

The municipality is supposed to announce whether he got the job tomorrow, and he has it all planned. If he doesn't get the job, he'll sue. If he gets the job but gets no compensation (for the salary he supposedly lost) then he'll sue. He calculates his lost income, counting from February in the tens of thousands of euros.

But he think he'll succeed. "I think that I'll be a Customer Relations Officer and that the aborigines, because that's what I call the ethnic population, will stand on their hind feet. Especially Leefbaar Rotterdam will make trouble. Than I'll wake up, yawn, turn over and sleep on. I'm used to running into brick walls."


Sources: Trouw (Dutch), AD.nl (Dutch), h/t Klein Verzet

See also: Netherlands: Find another way to show respect

Update:

The meaning and usage of "aborigine". The noun usually refers to the native peoples of Australia, but can be used also in a more general sense.

Wikipedia:

Indigenous peoples, peoples with a prior or historical association with a land, and who maintain (at least in part) their distinct traditions and association with the land, and are differentiated in some way from the surrounding populations and dominant nation-state culture and governance

Merriam Webster:

An aboriginal inhabitant especially as contrasted with an invading or colonizing people

American Heritage Dictionary:

When used in reference to a member of an indigenous people, the noun native, like its synonym aborigine, can evoke unwelcome stereotypes of primitiveness or cultural backwardness that many people now seek to avoid. As is often the case with words that categorize people, the use of the noun is more problematic than the use of the corresponding adjective.


I am not sure why the municipality of Rotterdam even got into all this trouble. Enait should not be working as a customer representative, regardless of who he shakes hands with or what he wears.