Insight on what is going on in Holland

[EmeraldLexuSC3]

I want to post an article that has appeared in today's Daily Telegraph. unfortunately, the liberal-left in the UK are so hysterical in their anti-Bush/Blair/Sharon rhetoric that they've completely lost sight of who the true enemy is.

Dutch find the strength to take on their 'new Nazis'
By Daniel Johnson
(Filed: 11/10/2004)

The assassination of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker whose funeral took place yesterday, is something new in Europe. There are, of course, antecedents. Fifteen years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie: the first shot in the culture war between fundamentalist Islam and the West. But there is no precedent for the ritual slaughter of a prominent artist in broad daylight on the streets of Amsterdam.

For the Dutch, this murder is not only sinister: it is symbolic. Van Gogh - distantly related to Holland's most celebrated artist - was shot on his bicycle, another national emblem. As he writhed on the ground, the murderer cut his throat without mercy and left him with two knives protruding from his body: a method that is apparently common in North Africa, but unheard of here. Just in case there was any doubt about the symbolism of this butchery, a note was found pinned to his chest, containing death threats against three other public figures.

The resonance of this hideous crime, not only in the Netherlands, but across the whole of continental Europe, is difficult for the British to comprehend. We have no conception of the status accorded to the artist in countries that have known totalitarian dictatorship within living memory. The Nazis and the Communists liquidated or exiled the intelligentsia wherever they could. Persecution cast a shadow across the Continent from which it has still not wholly recovered.

Hence the reverence in which the artist is held. Hence the cult of dissent at any price, however absurd, pretentious or childish. Hence the aversion to censorship of any kind, including self-censorship. For a post-traumatic culture, the artist is a high priest. The murder of an artist for the sake of his art shocks secular Europe rather as martyrdom once shocked Christendom. Theo van Gogh is a secular martyr.

What had he done to deserve such a fate? Submission, the film that occasioned the attack, is by no means an attack on Islam as a religion. It does not, as Rushdie did, ridicule the Prophet Mohammed. What it does is to denounce the barbaric treatment of women in many Islamic societies, focusing attention on forced marriage and the penalisation of rape victims under the guise of adultery. The imagery is deliberately provocative: verses from the Koran are inscribed on a naked woman, to drive home the message that Muslim women are human, too, beneath the veil.

It does not require much imagination to see how this tableau would strike strict Muslims, who regard the Koran as the literal, uncreated word of God, and whose customs forbid the public display of the female face, let alone her body. To them, the broadcast of such an image on television is both blasphemy and sacrilege. In their eyes, it adds to the gravity of the case that the Somali woman who wrote the script of Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is a former Muslim - in other words, an apostate. She has been condemned by fatwa and survives only under police protection.

Van Gogh, as a non-Muslim, was mistakenly assumed, both by the authorities and himself, to be less at risk. In his book Allah Knows Better, however, he added insult to injury by castigating the misogyny and puritanical attitudes of local imams. Defiant to the last, he refused to alter his bohemian lifestyle, as if the Netherlands were still the haven of toleration that it had been since the revolt against Spanish rule four centuries ago.

That habit of toleration is an integral part of Dutch identity. Van Gogh's death, like that of the politician Pim Fortuyn two years ago, echoed the assassination in 1584 of the Prince of Orange, William the Silent, who is still seen as a martyr not only to the Protestant cause, but also to that of freedom of conscience. The words of the historian Motley about William the Silent - "When he died, the little children cried in the streets" - could have been said yesterday of Theo van Gogh.

In the 17th century, Holland was the only country in Europe where a Jewish apostate, Spinoza, could publish philosophical works challenging the very basis of revealed religion. The Jewish community could expel and curse Spinoza, but neither Jew nor Christian dared to harm him.

Only under German occupation was this tradition of toleration interrupted and temporarily crushed. When the Dutch Catholic bishops made a protest, the Germans responded by deporting clergy of Jewish origin, including the nun, philosopher and saint Edith Stein to Auschwitz. Anne Frank and her family were protected for four years, only to be betrayed as liberation approached. The bitter experience of occupation and collaboration has made the Dutch hypersensitive to intolerance in any form.

Now, with the manifestation of a violent form of intolerance in their midst, the iron has entered their souls. After decades of welcoming immigration and preaching multiculturalism, they now propose to expel failed asylum-seekers and to assimilate those who settle, rather than permit de facto religious segregation. If neo-conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, the Dutch are fast becoming a nation of neo-conservatives.

While the Arab-European League accused the Dutch immigration minister of giving a "Hitler speech" at a rally in protest at van Gogh's murder, the Dutch know who the real Hitlers are. Even the most liberal society is illiberal when it is a question of survival. The Dutch see those who dream of Europe under a revived caliphate as a threat to their way of life. The prospect of Islamist imams imposing sharia law on Dutch cities amounts, they feel, to a new Nazi occupation.

Unlike his great, great, great uncle Vincent, Theo van Gogh was not a genius. Was he really an artist at all? But van Gogh's murder has proved him right about the hardline Islamists. Their ideology is inimical to all that the Dutch hold dear. Last night, as van Gogh's cremation was seen on television, the tension was palpable. Holland is now the crucible of Europe. Not even the most tolerant people on earth can tolerate the Islamists.

[Richie]

It's true guys, the $h!t has really hit the fan over here.
I don't think the end of the voilence is insight yet.

[mmarshall]

Yes...this was awful....it sickens me. Really. Maybe more Europeans now besides Tony Blair will finally get some sense now and see who the REAL enemy is.....not George Bush, like so many of them think..

[Richie]

Originally posted by mmarshall
Yes...this was awful....it sickens me. Really. Maybe more Europeans now besides Tony Blair will finally get some sense now and see who the REAL enemy is.....not George Bush, like so many of them think..

The problem is that the enemy is not clearly visable.

[GS430 GUY]

From yesterday's WSJ opinion section. I agree with this, wake up time for Europe!

The Van Gogh Murder
November 10, 2004; Page A16

Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was thinking of leaving his country, complaining that in today's Holland it was no longer possible to freely express one's opinion about religious matters. Sadly, he was proved right last week when a man with dual Moroccan-Dutch citizenship repeatedly shot and then almost decapitated Mr. van Gogh with a knife. Images of the beheadings of hostages by terrorists in Iraq come to mind -- only this was downtown Amsterdam, not Baghdad.

What probably triggered the murder was a short film Mr. van Gogh had recently made, depicting a fictional Muslim woman speaking about her forced marriage, rape by family members and beatings by her husband. The script was written by Ayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who escaped a forced marriage herself and is now a member of the Dutch parliament.

"Don't do it. Don't do it. Have mercy!" were Mr. van Gogh's last words, according to witnesses. But the note the killer pinned to Mr. van Gogh's body said, "There will be no mercy for the wicked," adding that America, Europe and the Netherlands "will go down."

This note seems to have instilled real fear in Dutch society. Many Europeans, and not only in the Netherlands, liked to think of Islamic terrorism as an exclusively American or Israeli problem. The gravity of the fact that many of the 9/11 terrorists lived and studied in Europe, where they planned and organized that attack, never really sunk in. Somehow, at least on an unconscious level, Europeans thought this unholy symbiosis could continue, where terrorists would use Europe as a safe haven for attacks only outside Europe. The train bombings in Spain were widely seen as a reprisal against Spain's participation in the "American" Iraq war.

Partly motivated by an understandable desire not to inadvertently fuel xenophobia, Europe's elites have for too long played down the problems posed by radical elements within Europe's large Muslim community. Even as Muslim demonstrators called for the death of Jews right in the streets of Amsterdam, Paris and elsewhere, the public hardly took notice.

One might argue that this is the price a liberal society has to pay for its freedom: tolerance of the intolerable. But in Europe, tolerance is selective. Most countries have tough laws against hate speech and neo-Nazis are arrested for similar offenses. The police detained about 20 people in The Hague for chanting nationalist and anti-Muslim slurs after Mr. van Gogh's murder.

Of course, Muslims in Europe actually turning to terrorism are a tiny minority. But as Ms. Hirsi Ali said, Islamic terror can thrive there because "it is embedded in a big family of equal-minded Muslims." Dutch security services estimate that "only" about 5% of the country's Muslim community is "radical." Given that one million Muslims live in the country, that's about 50,000 people.

Europe's Muslim leaders are guilty of silence. Muslim groups in France organized thousands to protest the law against wearing headscarves in schools. No such demonstrations on a comparable scale have taken place in France, or elsewhere in the world for that matter, to condemn Islamic terror. Muslims who oppose terror and embrace liberal values have to stand up and be counted.

At the same time, Europe needs to stop rationalizing the irrational hatred that possesses Islamic terrorists. Islamic terror is not the result of some "failed integration policy" or of some real or imagined Muslim grievance supposedly caused by U.S. Middle East policy. It is fueled by a totalitarian ideology that seeks world domination and the subjugation of infidels and the West. The sooner Europe comes to terms with this truth the sooner it will begin to combat the fanaticism that claimed the life of Mr. van Gogh.

[Richie]

Originally posted by GS430 GUY
From yesterday's WSJ opinion section. I agree with this, wake up time for Europe!

The Van Gogh Murder
November 10, 2004; Page A16

Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was thinking of leaving his country, complaining that in today's Holland it was no longer possible to freely express one's opinion about religious matters. Sadly, he was proved right last week when a man with dual Moroccan-Dutch citizenship repeatedly shot and then almost decapitated Mr. van Gogh with a knife. Images of the beheadings of hostages by terrorists in Iraq come to mind -- only this was downtown Amsterdam, not Baghdad.

What probably triggered the murder was a short film Mr. van Gogh had recently made, depicting a fictional Muslim woman speaking about her forced marriage, rape by family members and beatings by her husband. The script was written by Ayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who escaped a forced marriage herself and is now a member of the Dutch parliament.

"Don't do it. Don't do it. Have mercy!" were Mr. van Gogh's last words, according to witnesses. But the note the killer pinned to Mr. van Gogh's body said, "There will be no mercy for the wicked," adding that America, Europe and the Netherlands "will go down."

This note seems to have instilled real fear in Dutch society. Many Europeans, and not only in the Netherlands, liked to think of Islamic terrorism as an exclusively American or Israeli problem. The gravity of the fact that many of the 9/11 terrorists lived and studied in Europe, where they planned and organized that attack, never really sunk in. Somehow, at least on an unconscious level, Europeans thought this unholy symbiosis could continue, where terrorists would use Europe as a safe haven for attacks only outside Europe. The train bombings in Spain were widely seen as a reprisal against Spain's participation in the "American" Iraq war.

Partly motivated by an understandable desire not to inadvertently fuel xenophobia, Europe's elites have for too long played down the problems posed by radical elements within Europe's large Muslim community. Even as Muslim demonstrators called for the death of Jews right in the streets of Amsterdam, Paris and elsewhere, the public hardly took notice.

One might argue that this is the price a liberal society has to pay for its freedom: tolerance of the intolerable. But in Europe, tolerance is selective. Most countries have tough laws against hate speech and neo-Nazis are arrested for similar offenses. The police detained about 20 people in The Hague for chanting nationalist and anti-Muslim slurs after Mr. van Gogh's murder.

Of course, Muslims in Europe actually turning to terrorism are a tiny minority. But as Ms. Hirsi Ali said, Islamic terror can thrive there because "it is embedded in a big family of equal-minded Muslims." Dutch security services estimate that "only" about 5% of the country's Muslim community is "radical." Given that one million Muslims live in the country, that's about 50,000 people.

Europe's Muslim leaders are guilty of silence. Muslim groups in France organized thousands to protest the law against wearing headscarves in schools. No such demonstrations on a comparable scale have taken place in France, or elsewhere in the world for that matter, to condemn Islamic terror. Muslims who oppose terror and embrace liberal values have to stand up and be counted.

At the same time, Europe needs to stop rationalizing the irrational hatred that possesses Islamic terrorists. Islamic terror is not the result of some "failed integration policy" or of some real or imagined Muslim grievance supposedly caused by U.S. Middle East policy. It is fueled by a totalitarian ideology that seeks world domination and the subjugation of infidels and the West. The sooner Europe comes to terms with this truth the sooner it will begin to combat the fanaticism that claimed the life of Mr. van Gogh.

Great article man, I agree 100%.
The thing that scares me is the possibility of 50000 people here with similar thoughts.
I also live in The Hague, a bit of a hotbed if the last couple of days are anything to go by.

[1SICKLEX]

Man this is so sad. I was ignorant to this. Time to read up. RICHIE MAN be careful dude!

[Richie]

Originally posted by 1SICKLEX
Man this is so sad. I was ignorant to this. Time to read up. RICHIE MAN be careful dude!

Thanks for the concern Mike!!
I'll be carefull allthough I am a bit scarred that this situation is going to stay explosive for a long time. A lot of people from all sides are still very mad and it will only take a spark to ignite the situation again.

[ARB]

Originally posted by Richie
Thanks for the concern Mike!!
I'll be carefull allthough I am a bit scarred that this situation is going to stay explosive for a long time. A lot of people from all sides are still very mad and it will only take a spark to ignite the situation again.

Richard, be safe buddy

[Richie]

Originally posted by ARB
Richard, be safe buddy

Thanks man!!!
I will.