Nationality Dutch Name Ebru Umar | Ethnicity Kurdish Role Columnist | |
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Born 20 May 1970 (age 53)
The Hague, Netherlands ( 1970-05-20 ) Similar People Esmaa Alariachi, Fidan Ekiz, Geert Wilders Profiles | ||
Ebru Umar over haar column, bedreigingen en islam
Ebru Umar (born 20 May 1970) is a Dutch columnist of Kurdish descent. Under the influence of Theo van Gogh, she gave up a career in management and became a columnist, first for van Gogh's website and, after he was assassinated, as his successor as a regular columnist of Metro. A somewhat controversial columnist because of her criticism of Islam and her opinions on feminism, she writes for a number of Dutch magazines and has published four books.
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Biography
Umar is the child of Kurdish Yezidi parents who came to the Netherlands in 1970. Her father is a retired anatomic pathologist, her mother an ophthalmologist. She grew up in Rotterdam and attended the Gymnasium Erasmianum. After studying management and working for a while as a manager, she began writing, under the influence of Theo van Gogh, and wrote columns for his website (van Gogh was her "friend and mentor"), and soon began writing for a number of other Dutch newspapers. In 2005 she took over van Gogh's column in Metro. Umar is also the author of four books, and writes a weekly column for the Dutch women's weekly magazine Libelle (in addition to doing interviews and panel discussions for the magazine) and for the Dutch feminist magazine Opzij. Umar, an atheist, has a reputation for outspokenness, a characteristic her parents say she has had from an early age on, and has suffered a violent attack as a result, when she was beaten outside her apartment in Amsterdam.
Umar has been criticized as the stereotypical Muslim commentator who gets called up when a talk show needs a Muslim to "say something nasty" about other Muslims, and her attack on Fatima Elatik, the director of Amsterdam's Stadsdeel Zeeburg whom she called a "token muslim" was noted by the media as well. Others have criticized her for what they deem an all-too easy criticism of Dutch women, who Umar claimed were lazy and would rather rely on child support than get a job in a guest column in de Volkskrant, which was the third-most popular opinion piece in the Netherlands that year.
