Animals, Bizarre, Politics, Religion, Society, Torts

Dutch Politician Proposes Ban On Dogs In Hague As “Unclean” Under Islam

We have previously seen stories of the banning or threatening dogs by Muslims who believe that all dogs are “unclean” and an afront to Islam. Now, Hasan Küçük, a Turkish-Dutch representative on The Hague city council for the Islam Democrats, has called for all dogs to be banned from The Hague, the third-largest city in the Netherlands.


It is the latest incident of an increasing number of confrontations between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities over dogs. In Catalonia, Spain, the large Muslim community is demanding the regulation of dogs to prevent them from “offending Muslims” in public areas. In England, Muslim taxi drivers have refused to take seeing eye dogs accompanying blind people. Blind citizens in England have been barred from restaurants and buses so their companion dogs would not offend Muslims. Even the use of a picture of a dog was opposed as offensive.

The Dutch confrontation was triggered by a measure by the Party for the Animals (Partij voor de Dieren) to make the city more dog friendly. Küçük responded by demanding that the keeping of a dog be made a crime.

Muslims make up more than 12% of the city’s population of 500,000.

The campaign against dogs pits principles of religious accommodation against principles of pluralism. In this case, the Islamic value would require the loss of freedom for non-Muslim citizens by restricting or banning their dogs in public. Bans should be an easy question in that there are many public displays that may offend religious sensibilities. Families may raise their children according to their faiths but must accept that they live within a pluralistic community. Just as many of us objected to be ban on Burqas in France (which were viewed as offensive to women), these bans are equally wrongheaded. The more difficult questions come in areas of contact. For example, in England, police have been told that bomb sniffing dogs can come into contact with luggage but not the persons of Muslim passengers.

I view these proposals as inimical to a pluralistic society and also contradict principles of separation of church (or Mosque) and state. It will be interesting, however, as the anti-dog views of some Muslims become more known, whether there is an increase in tort actions based on the negligence of businesses or agencies in allowing contact with dogs by Muslims.

Source: Stonegate as first seen on Reddit

47 thoughts on “Dutch Politician Proposes Ban On Dogs In Hague As “Unclean” Under Islam”

  1. BLOUISE,
    HOW VERY VERY TRUE.
    I worked a few months in Salt Lake. In the office was a young woman who invited me to visit her at her home. There she told me that her husband was upstairs, completely out of it on downer drugs. Their home was in the middle milliion dollar class in 1963. That’s my taste of LDS folks, and I mean by that, the others in the office.

    But then every cult has its peculiar sides. Like finding literal truth in documents written by humans thousands of years ago.

  2. Elaine M.
    Thanks, and I’ll add this bit more from the Seamus article:

    “President Obama partisans use it to paint Romney as a cruel character who, as Wasik puts it, will “sort of tie us all to the roof of the car.””

    In that case we would be along for the ride, although more uncomfortable as time goes.
    What I fear is that Romney would leash us to the back bumper, and we’d have to spring after him until our legs gave up, and thus to our demise.

    The obvious solution is not to go along with him, or instead call on all dogs to bite his tires to shreds

    Seamus was of course suffering from exhaustion, dehydration, hypothernia, and acute mental and hormonal stress. Unfortunately, their are too many others like Romney who regard the things they own, including their employess, as disposable goods.

  5. Isn’t there a currently uninhabited island or archipelago somewhere, like in the middle of the Pacific, that can be turned over to these people so that they can live the lives they want without having to compromise with other cultures or – worse yet – encroaching on the rights of people who don’t share their beliefs? I am all for people living in their own conclaves and following their own rules (like the Quakers), but I don’t want any part of my life dictated by their tenets.

  7. I wonder how long until some Dutch politician points out that his religion finds Muslims to be unclean, and proposes a law that forbid them in Hague. I’m sure they could find at least 12% of the populous that agreed with that idea as well.

  9. Re: Elaine’s post at 5:21 pm …

    Our dogs were always considered part of the family and rode in the car with us. I can no more imagine my parents sticking a dog in a cage and strapping it to the roof of the car than I can imagine them sticking one of my 3 brothers in a cage and strapping him to the roof of the car.

    That this is a family story to be reminisced about tells me one thing and one thing only … the Romneys are creepy people.

  10. The Amsterdam news reports that Den Haguers trips to the red light district in Amsterdam are being photo’ed and put on U Tube to “out” the customers back in their home town. Several politicians have been thus outted. Including some who deride canines as unclean.
    We are curious as to why a story needs to be bought. In the Netherlands people are quite open, accepting, non judgmental, and yet do not like narrow minded people taking advantage of the hospitable ways. English is spoken there quite widely yet it is a EuropeSpeak that is full of contractions and derogatory words. Jarhead, Tenthead, Meathead, DamYak. The owner of my favorite hotel calls himself a Paki. I am called a Limey. Yanks are from anywhere in the US not just Yankee country. A Yanker is something else but the rest of you might be curious.

  12. There seems to be a pattern here….. first “pakis” and now “tent heads”. I’m not buying Dog’s story.

  13. Frankly,

    Here’s a recent Boston Globe article about the Romney dog vacation story:

    What our fascination with Mitt Romney’s dog Seamus says about our culture
    GLOBE MAGAZINE
    January 08, 2012|By Neil Swidey
    http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-08/magazine/30596586_1_romney-family-mitt-romney-dog

    Excerpt:
    In the annals of presidential campaign coverage, I am an asterisk, and a tiny one at that – the journalist who unearthed the story of how Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with his dog Seamus in a carrier strapped to the roof of the family station wagon. In the nearly five years that have passed since I dug up that golden nugget, there’s been so much chatter about the anecdote that “Romney” and “dog” have become inseparable dance partners in Google searches entered around the world. (In just one sample week last month, that search snagged hundreds of fresh Web mentions.) Still, I have refrained from writing more about the Romneys’ Irish setter and his bout of highway-borne gastric distress. The reason? I dread the thought that Seamus might somehow make it into the lead paragraph of my eventual obituary.

    Yet, here we are at the start of another primary season, with Romney once again awaiting the verdict from New Hampshire that could sink or propel the presidential ambitions he’s harbored at least since his father’s were dashed in 1968. And here we are, once again, watching the media and blogosphere – even the sober Wall Street Journal – fixate on Romney’s treatment of his dog nearly three decades ago. I’m wading in again because I’ve come to believe that the endurance of the Seamus story sheds fascinating light on our media and political cultures. Just as interesting is the light it sheds on Romney himself.

    To recap: Sometime during a 12-hour drive from Boston to Canada in 1983, Mitt’s oldest son, Tagg, noticed a brown liquid running down the rear window of the family station wagon. Realizing the liquid was being discharged by their dog, Mitt pulled off the highway and into a gas station, borrowed a hose to wash down Seamus and the car, and then returned the dog to his rooftop carrier for the duration of the trip. Most media reports have accurately relayed those basics. However, exaggerations and faulty assumptions have been advanced, most notably by New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who has trotted out the ghost of poor Seamus in more than 30 of her pieces since 2007.

    The exaggerations tend to be patently absurd, like the implication that Romney strapped his dog to the roof of his car with nothing more than rope, rather than in a carrier with a specially fashioned windshield. The assumptions, however, are more subtle, and therefore more believable, but just as untrue. For the record, neither Tagg nor any other Romney was my original source for the anecdote. Collins and others have pushed this silly line to suggest how tone-deaf the Romney brood must be. In fact, I went to the then 37-year-old Tagg only after having heard the Seamus story at the very end of a long interview with a close friend of the Romney family. Seeking to penetrate the stock image of the air-brushed family, I had asked that friend what stories the Romneys reminisced about in the privacy of their own home. As soon as the Seamus road trip anecdote passed his lips, I knew it was a gem. But I was determined to avoid a situation where Romney’s handlers could call into question the anecdote – or the entire article – because I had gotten some small detail wrong. So I insisted that Tagg poll his mother and brothers and persisted until I had confirmed every last fact. Far from being tone-deaf, Tagg realized as I dug deeper that the story could cause his father grief. Yet Tagg’s participation actually helped his dad. After all, the first version of the story I’d heard from the family friend – who hadn’t been an eyewitness – improbably had Mitt driving the station wagon right through a carwash. Imagine the howls from PETA if Seamus had been introduced to the world with the image of high-pressure wraparound brushes pummeling a defenseless, diarrheal dog.

    Some commentators have complained that I failed to show sufficient animal-rights indignation when I ushered in the Seamus story. Although I wrote that the diarrhea was “payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours,” I had deliberately tried to play the anecdote straight so readers could draw their own conclusions. Still, it was no accident that I had chosen to open the lengthy front-page story – part of an exhaustive 2007 series on Romney – with Seamus. Although I think it would be nuts for voters to base their presidential selection solely on this incident, it’s always struck me as a valuable window into how Romney operates. In everything the guy does, he functions on logic, not emotion.

    To me, Romney’s critics have focused on the wrong part of the anecdote. It’s not that Romney put his dog on the roof. Remember how different standards were in 1983. Back then, I was a kid sloshing around in the cargo section of my family’s station wagon, competing with my equally unbuckled younger sister to see how many passing truck drivers we could get to pull their horns. I’ll take the Romneys at their word that Seamus loved his alfresco rides. Hell, my dog loves doing all kinds of things I don’t, chief among them luxuriating in the stink of other dogs’ duffs. What is beyond debate, though, is that this far into this particular trip, Seamus had ceased enjoying his ride. Faced with such irrefutable evidence, most people, I suspect, would have relented and let the ailing dog cram into the back of the wagon, even if logic dictated that cleaning up a repeat episode of his gastric distress would be a whole lot messier than if he were returned to the roof.

  15. By the way, an old southern house cure for shallow wounds was to let the dog lick it. Speeds healing, disinfects and reduces scarring….or so we believed and practiced. Ignorant white trash! No, really.

  18. TalkinDog…….”In Swedish it means My…….
    Snacker du svenska också?
    If I had a dog, he would keep me healthy with his walks, and that kind of love might be addictive.

  19. Incredible. I am not a right-winger but when I read things like this it does raise the question of if someone didn’t like their old country, why are they trying to impose old country rules on their new country? The door swings both ways.

    This does raise questions of serious conflict as more people come from nations that don’t have strong traditions of separation of religious and secular authority and enter nations which do.

    No one is making someone who despises dogs own one as far as I know.
    And what kind of person doesn’t like dogs, anyway?
    Dogs are cool.

  20. “Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” – Mark Twain

    Also, get a box of tissues and read Mark Twain’s short story, “A Dog’s Tale” (1903)

    @AnonYours: Good question…!

Comments are closed.