By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent
WAGENINGEN, NETHERLANDS (Worthy News) – Five pro-Palestine activists have filed charges against a Dutch royal decorated army officer who ended their protest by dragging one of the demonstrators away.
Major Marco Kroon “assaulted” and “violently disrupted” a legal demonstration, the activists say
Kroon has denied wrongdoing, saying the incident happened during Dutch Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans’ speech at a Liberation Day event in the central city of Wageningen on May 5.
Two of the five protesters unfurled a banner reading, among other things: “Liberation for everyone: trans rights, free healthcare, free education, animal liberation, free Palestine.”
Kroon then intervened. Video footage showed him leaving the stage during the speech, walking onto the square, grabbing one of the protesters, and dragging him away.
Lawyer Willem Jebbink, who represents the protesters, said Kroon “dragged the demonstrator for several meters (feet), injuring him.”
Jebbink noted that his clients were demonstrating “peacefully and quietly,” and Kroon did not have the right or authorization to end that protest. “It raises the question of who was actually responsible for the disturbance here,” Jebbink told Dutch media.
MILITARY ORDER
Kroon received the Military Order of Willem, the highest military award in the Netherlands, for heroic actions in Afghanistan.
Since then, he has made several negative headlines, including in 2019 when he was sentenced to community service for headbutting a cop.
Besides Kroon, security personnel also intervened when during the same World War Two anniversary event in Wageningen a speech by Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof was interrupted by a smoke bomb.
One protester threw the smoke bomb onto the stage, where visiting Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was also present, footage showed.
In his speech, Tusk referenced the war in Ukraine, saying that Europe’s post-war era “of comfort and freedom was over.”
He said the lesson of 80 years ago was that nations “had to be united to overcome the challenges they face.”
Several World War II veterans also attended the event. They included Mervyn Kersh, aged 100, from Britain, and Nick Janicki, 101, from Canada, who lit the National Liberation Fire just after midnight on May 5.
HUNDREDS PROTEST
The public greeted them with a loud cry of “thank you.”
Yet 250 to 300 protesters, according to estimates, voiced opposition to the Israel-Gaza war and demanded the Dutch government speak out against it.
They held signs reading “Not then, not now, never again” and “Don’t give hate power.”
They also held an 80-meter (262 feet) long red banner, with accompanying text describing it as a symbol of “the red line the government refuses to draw,” referring to the Dutch government.
Yet the pro-Palestine rallies come at a time of concern among Jews about growing antisemitism in the Netherlands.
Copyright 1999-2025 Worthy News. This article was originally published on Worthy News and was reproduced with permission.
More Worthy News
The U.S. State Department officially designated four foreign Antifa groups as foreign terrorist organizations, nearly two months after President Donald Trump designated Antifa a domestic terror organization.
The Temple Institute in Jerusalem issued an extensive clarification on Monday following widespread misinformation concerning recent reports about a red heifer and the production of ritual ashes—an act central to biblical purity laws and, for many religious observers, deeply symbolic in the context of prophetic events.
The United States is moving aggressively to secure UN Security Council authorization for the new International Stabilization Force (ISF) in Gaza, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying Wednesday that Washington is “optimistic” that the draft resolution will advance within days — paving the way for deployment at the start of 2026.
With the 41-day government shutdown now set to end, President Donald Trump is preparing to launch an aggressive new healthcare reform push that the White House says will finally replace the “broken” Obamacare system Democrats created.
President Donald Trump has formally asked Israeli President Isaac Herzog to grant a full pardon to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, marking the strongest U.S. intervention yet in the long-running corruption trial that has deeply polarized Israeli society.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that American forces, working alongside local Syrian partners, conducted more than 22 counterterrorism operations against ISIS between October 1 and November 6, significantly degrading the terror group’s operational capabilities across the region.
Archaeologists in the Czech capital have begun exhuming mass graves containing political prisoners executed under Czechoslovakia’s communist regime, in a major effort to identify victims whose resting places have remained unknown for more than seven decades.