"Tolerance" for the angry, violent and unassimilated sub-sector of Moroccans in The Netherlands has plummeted, both before, and now especially after the assassination of Dutch filmmaker and political provacateur Theo van Gogh. He had been at risk because of his outspoken criticism of anti-social Muslims, particularly through an 11-minute film of his about abuse of Muslim women in The Netherlands. It was titled "Submission, and a collaborator on the project was Somali-born Dutch parliament member Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself a female genital mutilation victim, and outspoken critic of modern Muslim extremists.
In the wake of van Gogh's murder by a young Muslim man apparently gone mad (Mohammed Bouyeri), the whole ethic of "diversity" in Holland is being radically recalculated, even by liberals. This fine piece of on-site reportage by Dutch-born author and journalist Ian Buruma in The New Yorker drills down deep. Read the whole thing, but here's a taste, from the conclusion.
...Although Theo van Gogh was Dutch and was killed by a Dutch citizen, in the end this is not just a Dutch story but a Middle Eastern one imported to the heart of Europe. Mohammed Bouyeri and hundreds like him, have plugged into a wider world of violent Web-based rhetoric and terrorist cells. The integration of Muslims in the Netherlands has not been a greater failure than anywhere else. But the country may have been less prepared for the holy war....especially since the nineteen-sixties, the Dutch prided themselves on having built an oasis of tolerance, a kind of Berkeley writ large, where people were free to do their own thing. Liberated, at last, from the strictures of religion and social conformity, the Dutch, especially in Amsterdam, frolicked in the expectation that the wider world would not disturb their perfect democracy in the polders. Now the turbulent world has come to Holland at last, crashing into an idyll that astonished the citizens of less favored nations. It’s a shame that this had to happen, but naïveté is the wrong state of mind for defending one of the oldest and most liberal democracies against those who wish to destroy it.
It was raining when I said goodbye to Paul Scheerder (ed.- Scheerder is a convert to Islam and ex-journalist who's married to a Moroccan and runs a home for abused women and children in a heavily Moroccan neighborhood of Amsterdam). The streets of Amsterdam-North, though bleak, looked peaceful enough. I said as much to Scheerder, who smiled thinly. “There is a lot of grief behind closed doors in this neighborhood,” he said. Then he mentioned a news segment about Theo van Gogh on Moroccan TV, and an interview it had featured with a Moroccan immigrant in Amsterdam. I asked Scheerder what the man had said. He thought for a moment and spoke softly: “He said that his death was just, and that he was punished by God.”
Hirsi Ali had been marked for death as an apostate even before van Gogh was slain. According to this report today in the Borneo Bulletin, she actually left The Netherlands in November, and will return for the reconvening of parliament on Jan. 18. Let us pray for her safety, while remembering that her crime is exercising the right of free speech, which to Muslim extremists is blasphemy. (Anything wrong with this picture?)
Like the Madrid train bombing, the van Gogh murder reminds Europe that it too has a stake in fighting Muslim extermism. So notes the Boston Globe, fleetingly, in this piece today on declining international troop support for the U.S.-British-Iraqi campaign against Islamic terrorists in Iraq.
While remaining opposed to the Iraq intervention, France and Germany, The Globe reminds us, ARE providing support for the NATO stabilization effort in Afghanistan.
''This isn't a trade-off; it's a transition to a whole different issue," said a veteran US congressional aide. ''The Europeans have woken up to the terrorism challenges we face."
Make that, "are slowly waking up."
Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 5, 2005 10:04 AM
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