>>>>Of course it makes a difference who says the words.
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>>>I'm saying that it should not. The act of discrimination, at least if you want to convict someone for it, you should have a rational definition rather than an vague and emotional one. This because then much depends, on how the words were said, the context of the event, the group of minorities (Skin colour, ethnic group, religion, country, etc) which were 'generalised', etc.
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>>Walter, the context IS important! Always.
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>I won't deny the context is important to any rule and law, only if so far is reasonable.
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>>If you deny that, then you are much too rationalistic. A good judge will indeed always look in what context things were said or done.
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>If so, how can we judge someone saying "Black rat" beeing discrimination without knowing the context.
It goes both ways. There is no way of proving that the NS employee ment to discriminate with what he said, aside from my opinion that something like that addressed to one single person could never be discrimination at all.

Suppose you would have been that employee, would you have said it?
Suppose it had happened in the Amsterdam metro, would it then have been discrimination, even according to you?
Suppose it had happened in New York...
If your answers are No/Yes/Yes, then how come you are so sure it was not discrimination in the context of the train in North Holland?

>>Remember Janmaat? Yes, of course. Certain things he said, are also said these days by sensible people like Leon de Winter and Paul Scheffer. But there is a huge difference between Janmaat and those people. The difference has to do with context. Janmaat's background and purpose was clearly racism.
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>Janmaat's slogan was "Own people first". The thing that went against him that he was clearly a creep and IMO, he only made thing worse because the political parties refused to say anything about problems with monirities because they did not wanted to be associated with Janmaat. But even janmaat recognized that real fugutives deserved a place in Holland. And don't forget that much he said in the age of kabinet "Paars 1" and "Paars 2" is now said by other politicians. The issues janmaat addressed were forbidden at that time because afraid of beeing called a racist. Thereby some obvious problems were ignored rather than addressed. Only with the rise and fall of the characteristic Pim Fortuyn (which was a forestander of a lot of points of Janmaat) people started to realise that culture problems needed to be addressed and spoken about rather than frightfully ignored.

Janmaat said all thing in a racist context. People like Fortuyn, Bolkestein and Scheffer had to work very hard to find a way to say certain similar words in a context that was perceived by sensible people as non-racial and unassociated to Janmaat. Janmaat was not their forefather or inspirator. On the contrary, they had to find ways to prevent being compared with him. You suggest that Janmaat was too early and that people were not yet ready for those certain words. I disagree here. I think people have adequately concluded that he and his party were racist.

>>Don't make the mistake to think that racists never have a good argument.
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>Sure, and many dutch saw that Janmaat was not the person to address common problems. Pim Fortuyn was the man who could have done this. Don't take me wrong, I would not have voted for him, but he was the one trying to change the whole political arena in a lot of ways.

Agree. Although many others have also been of major influence.

>>Out-of-context an argument could still simply be the truth, like "we have here far too many fugitives already". It is the context that an argument is made part of, that makes it a racist's argument or not.
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>Here I simply disagree. This phrase is not discriminating. It simply states the opinion that we have far too many fugutives. It does not matter whether the Prime minister, Janmaat, Pim Fortuyn, you or I speak out the words. If you think it does, you're applying discrimination too. You can not convict someone of discrimination because of his membership of a certain political party. The same applies for the "Black rat" argument. If the statement was made by a black person it would not be discrimination and if it was made by a white it is. Isn't that discrimination too (even a worse form if you aks me)?

My argument is that the context is important. If Janmaat said it, it was racism, because of the context, that is, because of what else he said about fugitives.