“I love Annie MG Schmidt, but ‘Jip en Janneke’ is really no longer possible”, she said during a discussion about libraries that remove books with Zwarte Piet. “Old-fashioned and stereotypes confirm the role of men and women. I can therefore also imagine that ‘Jip en Janneke’ books disappear from the collection. Some literature must be placed in the context of the time in which it was created. That is a bit too much to ask for primary school children. ”
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A video in which these statements by d’Hondt can be heard has been widely shared on social media and led to a storm of criticism and verbal abuse. It now appears that the impetus for this was given by Bert Deckers, councilor for Vlaams Belang in Balen-Olmen. He saw a tweet from the Utrecht faction of Forum for Democracy by which it was claimed that “even Jip and Janneke should disappear from the left”.
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He then looked up the public video registration on the Utrecht provincial site and extracted the fragment. He shared the video on ReactNieuws’s Twitter account and also pointed the chairman of his party to that video, after which Tom Van Greeks also retweeted it. After that, the fragment crossed the Dutch border again, after which it exploded and the fence was lifted for Julie d’Hondt. She was subsequently threatened and verbally abused.
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Now the Dutch politician is trying to “correct the falsehoods”. “I really didn’t say these books should be taken off the shelves of the libraries. I’m a bit angry about that too ”, she told AD. I have intended it to give a personal example of children’s books that I find old-fashioned and rather stale myself. I said that I can imagine that these books will eventually disappear from the collection, because many people think they are old-fashioned and don’t read them, ”she concluded.
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