Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Dutch-Muslim politician tweets Jewish yellow star to protest coronavirus surveillance plan

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Dutch-Muslim politician has tweeted a picture of a Jewish yellow star to protest plans to monitor coronavirus carriers.

Arnoud van Doorn, a member of the City Council of The Hague, posted the picture on Monday, the birthday of Adolf Hitler. Yom Hashoah, Israel’s day of mourning for Holocaust victims also observed by many Jews worldwide, starts in the evening and extends to Tuesday evening.

In 2018, van Doorn tweeted a prayer to Allah to “exterminate the Zionists” and said that fasting on Yom Kippur won’t help Jews atone for Israel’s sins. His Party of Unity says on its website that it strives to “promote the interests of the Islamist community.”

His tweet shows a yellow star of the kind that Nazis made Jews wear during the Holocaust bearing the words “corona app.” Its caption reads “No obligatory corona app,” a reference to a test being carried out by the Dutch government for a smartphone app that would help authorities monitor the whereabouts and interactions of people, including those they know or suspect are carriers, in order to curb the spread of the virus.

Tom de Nooijer, a member of the City Council of Oldebroek, a town situated some 40 miles east of Amsterdam, was among the many who criticized the tweet.

“Remove that star, Arnoud. You have no right to reference it,” wrote de Nooijer, who represents the pro-Israel Christian SGP party.

The post Dutch-Muslim politician tweets Jewish yellow star to protest coronavirus surveillance plan appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The Forward is free to read but not free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make your Passover gift today!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.