[Peace-discuss] on Theo van Gogh murder

[Lisa Chason]

a couple of weeks ago provocative Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was
killed in the streets of Amsterdam. Here is an article from the Guardian
that gives some context.
 
 
 
 'I feel terribly guilty and very much afraid' 
 
Jon Henley Guardian Weekly 
 
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has called the Prophet Muhammad a "lecherous tyrant",
Islam a "backward religion", and the Koran "in part a licence for
oppression". Theo van Gogh dubbed Muslims "goat-fuckers", a radical
Islamic leader "Allah's pimp", and Islam a "retrograde and aggressive"
faith. 
 
Van Gogh, the 47-year-old great-grandson of Vincent's brother and a
talented if wildly provocative film-maker, columnist and TV interviewer,
died on a street in eastern Amsterdam last week, slain by a suspect whom
police have described as an Islamic fundamentalist with terrorist ties. 
 
"I feel terribly guilty," a shocked Hirsi Ali told Dutch media, adding
that she was "very much afraid" that Submission, an 11-minute film about
Islamic violence against women that she wrote and the film-maker
produced, was the direct cause of his death. Unlike Van Gogh, Hirsi Ali
lives under 24-hour police protection. 
 
The elegant 34-year-old MP for the free-market VVD party, a Somalian
refugee who fled an arranged marriage 12 years ago and now calls herself
an "ex-Muslim", has every reason to be distressed: the manner of Van
Gogh's death was brutal - and, it emerged, depressingly familiar. 
 
The film-maker was shot several times as he rode on his bicycle down the
Linnaeusstraat to his office, but still managed to stagger some distance
- 30 or 40 metres, witnesses said - before being caught in a second hail
of gunfire by his attacker, a 26-year-old man with joint Dutch and
Moroccan nationality. On his knees, the eyewitnesses said, Van Gogh
twice begged for mercy. But the suspect, described as having a beard and
wearing a long jellaba, fired again and then drew two butcher's knives,
slitting his victim's throat before driving the blades into his chest.
Police found a letter on the body, but have yet to reveal its contents. 
 
The Dutch justice minister, Piet Hein Donner, said that the suspect,
captured after a shootout with police and currently in a prison hospital
with gunshot wounds, "acted out of radical Islamic fundamentalist
convictions" and had contacts with a fundamentalist group that was under
surveillance by the Dutch secret service. Dutch media also reported that
the suspect was a close friend of Samir Azzouz, an 18-year-old Muslim of
Moroccan origin who is awaiting trial on charges of planning terrorist
attacks on targets including a nuclear reactor and Amsterdam's Schiphol
airport. 
 
The assassination has sparked a heartfelt national outcry in the
traditionally tolerant Netherlands, sparking fears of a dangerous rise
in racial tension in a country whose population of 16 million includes
some one million Muslims, mainly of Turkish or North African origin.
Fanning fears further, a recent government estimated that, by 2010,
several large Dutch cities like Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Hague and
Utrecht would have Muslim majorities. 
 
Recent opinion polls show the Dutch to be increasingly hostile towards
immigrants and fearful of Muslim extremism. Islam, immigration and
integration have shot to the top of the political agenda since the rise
of Pim Fortuyn, the populist anti-immigrant politician who was himself
shot dead by an animal rights activist in May 2002, and whose party
finished second in general elections just days later. The centre-right
Dutch government has only succeeded in fanning the flames by calling for
greater integration of immigrants through language tests and citizenship
classes, and recently fuelled even more controversy with plans to
repatriate up to 26,000 failed asylum seekers. 
 
In the midst of this tinderbox, insisting on their right to speak freely
and with the support of many Dutch people, Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh
scattered their sparks - a blistering critique of Islam - with
magnificent disregard for the feelings they might be offending. 
 
The slender, couture-clad Hirsi Ali has had several fatwas issued
against her and spends her life in the company of a brace of six-foot
bodyguards; Van Gogh also received death threats but refused protection,
saying the bullets would surely never come for him. "No one can
seriously want to shoot the village idiot," he said recently. 
 
Their film was broadcast on Dutch national television in August. It
depicts, among other scenes, a beautiful young Muslim girl addressing
Allah in a mosque. She wears a veil that covers her face, but her naked
body is clearly visible through a transparent gown. 
 
"All praise to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds," says the text that
scrolls across the actress's throat and down her breasts: the fatiha, or
opening of the Koran. Other scenes portray a Muslim woman who is forced
into an arranged marriage, abused by her husband, raped by her uncle and
then brutally punished for adultery. 
 
In a third, a woman's bruised and beaten shoulders are covered with
lines from verse 34, chapter 4 of the Koran. "Men are the maintainers of
women because Allah has made them excel . . ." it reads. "The good women
are therefore obedient. Those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish
them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places, and beat them." 
 
The film was a potent, if undeniably provocative, interpretation of
Hirsi Ali's thesis. Brought up as a Muslim in Somalia, she suffered
female circumcision at the age of five and, sent to Germany to meet her
intended Somali partner in an arranged marriage, fled across the border
to the Netherlands in 1992. Penniless, speaking no Dutch, she worked as
a cleaner in a biscuit factory and as a translator before studying
political science at Leiden University. 
 
In 2001, after graduating, she wrote a report on "honour killings" of
Muslim women that also served as a savage indictment of a 30-year Dutch
experiment with multiculturalism, describing it as a "disastrous error"
born of "misplaced guilt". The report embarrassed the Dutch Labour
party, which comissioned it, but the VVD - which has a tough "boat is
full" stance on immigration - welcomed her with open arms, first as a
researcher, then as a candidate. She has sat in The Hague as an MP since
January 2003. 
 
Damning Islam as a "backward, 12th-century religion", a "medieval,
misogynist cult incapable of self-criticism and blind to modern
science", Hirsi Ali says orthodox Muslim men routinely indulge in
domestic violence against women, as well as incest and child abuse. To
make matters worse, she argues, their behaviour is invariably hushed up.

 
The solution, Hirsi Ali argues, is for fundamentalist Islamic books to
be banned, Mullahs to be banished and for western societies "not to bend
over backwards to accommodate a culture that advocates the degradation
of women . . . but to ensure that the Muslim men who perpetrate such
barbarity are brought to justice". 
 
The "lapsed Muslim" last year found an effect-ive and articulate
artistic partner in Van Gogh who, as well as having made a dozen feature
films in his 25-year career, was also a much-loved and often obscene
columnist and pamphleteer who published numerous indictments of an
over-radical Islam in an over-tolerant Netherlands. Fired over the years
by almost every Dutch newspaper and magazine for offending its readers,
he ran his own highly popular website, De Gezonde Roker (The Healthy
Smoker). 
 
But in the no-longer tolerant Netherlands, he paid the price. Fraught
Dutch commentators had no hesitation in saying that the Netherlands had
become a "front-line state" in a brutal collision between two
cultures."In France or Belgium you don't have this same kind of very
Dutch cabaret-like figure who rages about goat-fuckers," one
commentator, Rene Cuperus, told De Volkskrant. 
 
"They must know that they've landed up in the most liberal country in
the world, the land of abortions and gays and all that - but Muslims
don't see it. There's just no way to bridge that gulf in a politically
correct way."
 
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