My parents were betrayed 12 times, and each time they managed to escape, sometimes with just half-an-hour to spare before the police arrived, rescued by a resistance group of conservative priests and nuns (my parents spoke lovingly of the Catholic Church — yes, nothing is as it seems). The danger came from Dutch informers, while the rest of the Dutch population looked away with a mixture of indifference and fear.

Evil exists, my mother raised me to believe, and Evil can also be spelled "indifference". 

But she also taught me that good exists. She met people who risked their lives to save Jews they had never met — in this case, conservative Catholics who believed that the Jews had caused the death of their Saviour yet were unable to live with the agonising thought that something would go fundamentally wrong with the cosmos if the Jews were left to their fate.

I cannot say it more precisely. Until I left my mother's house, that white villa which became increasingly oppressive as I grew up, my parents' experiences could be reduced to these two propositions. 

Evil exists. Good exists.

I'm no opponent of multiculturalism. Today, I live in one of the most varied multicultural cities in the world, Los Angeles. All kinds of languages are spoken here. Every ethnic group has its own segregated neighbourhood. And that's fine as long as cultural relativism remains at bay. In the Netherlands, cultural relativism threatens to take on suicidal proportions. Cultural relativism and appeasement go hand in hand. Cultural relativism is the erosion of moral and ethical values until they are crushed by fanatics who are waiting to slice off the heads of the appeasers under the umbrella of cultural relativism. 

Cultural relativism emerged from the vulgar neo-Marxist ideology that has polluted the media and academic world since the 1960s. Cultural characteristics were designated a consequence of material history. Man should be understood within his socio-economic environment, and his cultural characteristics are decorative elements on a par with any other ornament. These are grotesque fallacies, yet the reports and analyses of the manifestations of evil in the world are full of this kind of thinking. 

One example: Hamas is an oppressive ideological organisation based on a death cult. 

In the Western leftist-liberal media, Hamas is a response to poverty and hunger, imposed by Israel on innocent civilians who, if they were not starving and poor, would be just as liberal and tolerant as the media elites in London and Amsterdam. Thus the insanity of Islamist ideology is dismissed and blame is placed outside the radicals' own circle. The suicide terrorist is then no more than a pawn that merely reacts and never acts. In other words, the inhuman Evil that lies at the heart of Hamas's barbarous ideology is simply denied. The Western media is unable to recognise that Evil, or rather, refuses to recognise that Evil since that would undermine the socio-economic model that explains poverty and injustice in the world (and so the core social-democratic ideology of today's media elites).

Did I leave the Netherlands because the Dutch media whitewashes Hamas? No. What about the rain in Holland? And the dark, grey skies. It is wonderful, for a couple of years, to be able to leave the house without an umbrella. And it is liberating to live in a country where the houses and the streets and the landscape have, at least for me, no history.