Following last week’s massacre at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo over the magazine’s publication of Mohammed cartoons, the mayor of the second-largest city in the Netherlands told Muslims who object to the right to publish such images to “f*** off” and look for a home elsewhere.
“It’s incomprehensible that you turn against freedom like that, but if you don’t like this freedom, for heaven’s sake, get your suitcase, and leave,” Rotterdam’s Ahmed Aboutaleb, who is Muslim, said on Dutch television on Monday, according to the Independent. ”There might be a place where you belong, and be honest with yourself about that. Don’t kill innocent journalists.”
“And if you don’t like it here because you don’t like the humorists who make a little newspaper — if I may dare say so — just f*** off,” he said.
Aboutaleb said the Netherlands welcomes “well-intentioned Muslims” who are willing to respect and be a part of the country’s vision for its people, which he called the “We Society.”
Rotterdam is approximately 13 percent Muslim, according to one study, and nearly half the city’s population is of non-Dutch origin. Aboutaleb, who was born in Morocco and whose father is an imam, took office in 2009 for the country’s left-leaning Labour Party and is Netherlands’ first Muslim mayor of a large city.