Torog
11-13-2004, 11:50 AM
Holland's Deadly Tolerance (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1278952/posts)
The Weekly Standard ^ (http://www.freerepublic.com/%5Ehttp://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/918ojqzh.asp) | November 22, 2004 issue | Christopher Caldwee
THE AFTERNOON of Election Day in Washington, one of the Dutch journalists in town to cover the vote mentioned to me that there had been a spectacular killing in Amsterdam that morning, which would be international news as soon as the dust cleared from the Bush-Kerry contest. True enough. Most of the world now knows that a Muslim assailant intercepted the controversialist filmmaker Theo van Gogh as he rode his bike through Amsterdam, and shot him several times. As van Gogh pled for his life, the murderer slit his throat. He then used the corpse as a sort of human bulletin board, pinning a letter to the torso with a dagger.
What was curious was the journalist's explanation of why the ordinarily open and liberal Dutch government had not released the contents of that letter. He speculated that it contained radical Islamic pronouncements and further threats against politicians, and that the reaction of the public to it would be violent. The letter, published early this week, did indeed contain death threats against two members of parliament: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born immigrant who has repudiated Islam and blames it for violence against women; and Geert Wilders, a longtime liberal politician who has turned to anti-Muslim demagoguery and heads an embryonic populist movement. Both are now in hiding.
Both rose to prominence in the wake of the killing in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic gay politician who won a massive overnight following by warning that high Muslim immigration was overburdening the country's institutions and threatening its ethos of easy come, easy go. It took him only weeks to turn his new party into the country's second largest, but he was soon shot dead by a deranged environmentalist. It was the first political killing in Holland since the sixteenth century.
Van Gogh, on the other hand, had been a loud--one could even say obnoxious--critic of Islam. He had referred to Muslims as "goatf--ers" and, with Hirsi Ali, had made a 10-minute agitprop film that mixed pornography, violence, and Muslim prayer. But even if the van Gogh killing was different in its particulars, it looked to certain Dutch observers like a second salvo in a revolution. The past 10 days have seen almost continuous protest. At least a dozen mosques and Muslim schools were set on fire. The subsequent firebombing of several churches fanned the fury. There were raids across the country on Moroccan, Kurdish, and Pakistani terrorist cells. At one pre-dawn arrest of two suspects in the Hague, police were met with a grenade attack, and a siege that lasted 15 hours, while the cornered suspects hollered, "We will behead you!" There were dozens of arrests. Most of the suspects were Arab immigrants. But, quite disturbingly, some, like Mohammed Bouyeri, van Gogh's alleged killer, were Dutch-born Dutch citizens. Two of those arrested--known only as Jason W. and Jermaine W.--were Dutch-American converts to Islam.
After decades of trying to fight social problems with ever more tolerance, the Dutch are at a loss before terrorism. Queen Beatrix limited her involvement to visiting immigrant kids at a Moroccan "youth center." This was hardly what public opinion was clamoring for. At this point, the Dutch seem more inclined to move from Live and Let Live to its opposite, and are calling for laws that make the Patriot Act look like Kumbayah. Strict laws against government surveillance over religious establishments, a centuries-old inheritance from the United Provinces' battle against Spanish occupation, appear set to go by the boards. On Friday, the Dutch parliament requested a new law that would forbid mosques to employ imams who had been educated elsewhere. One member of parliament was quoted in a wire report as saying: "It's better to have 10 possibly innocent people temporarily in jail than one with a bomb on the street."
Complicating matters further is the big story from neighboring Belgium, where authorities last week banned the Vlaams Blok, the most popular party in the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) part of the country. In recent years, the party has argued with increasing stridency for dissolving Belgium and building links with the Netherlands. There are not that many Dutch-speakers in the world. The unhappy result is that stories about Holland's immigrant menace and the Belgian government's banning of one of Europe's most popular right-wing parties have been mixed together in the same media pressure cooker.
There was naturally a lot of solipsistic hand-wringing in the Dutch press, warning the country against reacting like the United States or Israel, since "violence only begets violence." But for a change, that was not the only response.
Alternatives to rightism and pacifism are not lacking. The most hopeful sign of the week may have been the U.S. visit of the pro-American NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who as Dutch foreign minister was one of the architects of the Netherlands' pragmatic engagement in the Iraq coalition. De Hoop Scheffer met President Bush on Wednesday; the following day, in an interview in New York, he warned that there is a gap between the United States and Europe in their perceptions of the terrorist threat. "If the gap is to be bridged," he added, "it has to be done from the European side." Events, alas, are seeing to that.
The Weekly Standard ^ (http://www.freerepublic.com/%5Ehttp://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/918ojqzh.asp) | November 22, 2004 issue | Christopher Caldwee
THE AFTERNOON of Election Day in Washington, one of the Dutch journalists in town to cover the vote mentioned to me that there had been a spectacular killing in Amsterdam that morning, which would be international news as soon as the dust cleared from the Bush-Kerry contest. True enough. Most of the world now knows that a Muslim assailant intercepted the controversialist filmmaker Theo van Gogh as he rode his bike through Amsterdam, and shot him several times. As van Gogh pled for his life, the murderer slit his throat. He then used the corpse as a sort of human bulletin board, pinning a letter to the torso with a dagger.
What was curious was the journalist's explanation of why the ordinarily open and liberal Dutch government had not released the contents of that letter. He speculated that it contained radical Islamic pronouncements and further threats against politicians, and that the reaction of the public to it would be violent. The letter, published early this week, did indeed contain death threats against two members of parliament: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born immigrant who has repudiated Islam and blames it for violence against women; and Geert Wilders, a longtime liberal politician who has turned to anti-Muslim demagoguery and heads an embryonic populist movement. Both are now in hiding.
Both rose to prominence in the wake of the killing in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic gay politician who won a massive overnight following by warning that high Muslim immigration was overburdening the country's institutions and threatening its ethos of easy come, easy go. It took him only weeks to turn his new party into the country's second largest, but he was soon shot dead by a deranged environmentalist. It was the first political killing in Holland since the sixteenth century.
Van Gogh, on the other hand, had been a loud--one could even say obnoxious--critic of Islam. He had referred to Muslims as "goatf--ers" and, with Hirsi Ali, had made a 10-minute agitprop film that mixed pornography, violence, and Muslim prayer. But even if the van Gogh killing was different in its particulars, it looked to certain Dutch observers like a second salvo in a revolution. The past 10 days have seen almost continuous protest. At least a dozen mosques and Muslim schools were set on fire. The subsequent firebombing of several churches fanned the fury. There were raids across the country on Moroccan, Kurdish, and Pakistani terrorist cells. At one pre-dawn arrest of two suspects in the Hague, police were met with a grenade attack, and a siege that lasted 15 hours, while the cornered suspects hollered, "We will behead you!" There were dozens of arrests. Most of the suspects were Arab immigrants. But, quite disturbingly, some, like Mohammed Bouyeri, van Gogh's alleged killer, were Dutch-born Dutch citizens. Two of those arrested--known only as Jason W. and Jermaine W.--were Dutch-American converts to Islam.
After decades of trying to fight social problems with ever more tolerance, the Dutch are at a loss before terrorism. Queen Beatrix limited her involvement to visiting immigrant kids at a Moroccan "youth center." This was hardly what public opinion was clamoring for. At this point, the Dutch seem more inclined to move from Live and Let Live to its opposite, and are calling for laws that make the Patriot Act look like Kumbayah. Strict laws against government surveillance over religious establishments, a centuries-old inheritance from the United Provinces' battle against Spanish occupation, appear set to go by the boards. On Friday, the Dutch parliament requested a new law that would forbid mosques to employ imams who had been educated elsewhere. One member of parliament was quoted in a wire report as saying: "It's better to have 10 possibly innocent people temporarily in jail than one with a bomb on the street."
Complicating matters further is the big story from neighboring Belgium, where authorities last week banned the Vlaams Blok, the most popular party in the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) part of the country. In recent years, the party has argued with increasing stridency for dissolving Belgium and building links with the Netherlands. There are not that many Dutch-speakers in the world. The unhappy result is that stories about Holland's immigrant menace and the Belgian government's banning of one of Europe's most popular right-wing parties have been mixed together in the same media pressure cooker.
There was naturally a lot of solipsistic hand-wringing in the Dutch press, warning the country against reacting like the United States or Israel, since "violence only begets violence." But for a change, that was not the only response.
Alternatives to rightism and pacifism are not lacking. The most hopeful sign of the week may have been the U.S. visit of the pro-American NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who as Dutch foreign minister was one of the architects of the Netherlands' pragmatic engagement in the Iraq coalition. De Hoop Scheffer met President Bush on Wednesday; the following day, in an interview in New York, he warned that there is a gap between the United States and Europe in their perceptions of the terrorist threat. "If the gap is to be bridged," he added, "it has to be done from the European side." Events, alas, are seeing to that.