Orange alert

Amsterdam

Be careful if you are planning to attack a Jew in Amsterdam. What you see is not always what you get. Throw a rock or spit at some bloke with long curly sidelocks and a yarmulke and before you know it you might end up handcuffed in the back of a police van. What you attacked, then, was not a Jew, but a Decoy Jew. Decoy Jews are policemen pretending be Jews, a cunning initiative dreamed up by the city authorities to prevent anti-Semitic behaviour. They’ve borrowed it from the Dutch town of Gouda, where the local coppers dressed up as grannies in order to cut down on muggings: I would have paid to see that. Elsewhere there have been policemen dressed as homosexuals and prostitutes, both groups that some people also enjoy attacking, and next it’s Joods.

Anti-Semitic attacks rose tenfold in Holland last year, so it is as well that there may soon be Decoy Jews to attack as there aren’t enough proper Jews to go around. The total population of Jews in Holland is less than 40,000, for reasons which you will probably understand unless you are one of the growing number of maniacs who believes the Holocaust was a figment of fetid and despicable Jewish imagination. This is a tense little country, this once excruciatingly tolerant and liberal patchwork of canals, tulip fields, bicycles and naughtiness. A country which willingly subsumed itself to the European ideal — to the extent that even its cute and lisping language is rapidly disappearing — has, this last decade or so, begun to kick back.

There is trouble between the Muslim population (some 25 per cent of Amsterdam’s population is Muslim) and the increasingly angry indigenous Dutch, who are rather less welcoming to Muslim immigrants than they once were. The conservative politician Geert Wilders, who has called for the Koran and the veil to be outlawed, is up in court next week accused of whipping up hatred against Muslims.