[Peace-discuss] on Theo van Gogh murder

[Matt Reichel]

I was actually in Amsterdam when this incident happened during the Fete de 
Toussaint (All Saint's Day Holiday).
The murder was carried out in the early morning hours November 2nd on 
American election day, as I was preparing to return to Paris.
Unfortunately, at the time I didn't know the reason for the beefed up 
security within the city center and at the train station because I was 
having one of those vacations without the outside world and paper reading 
and news watching (especially common for 20 somethings going to 
Amsterdam....). But I didn't think much of the security because its not all 
that uncommon in Europe, where countries must deal with minor acts of 
terrorism and threats thereof much more frequently than in the United 
States.
But, nonetheless, this sociopolitical development in the Netherlands is part 
of a growing political issue that I think is best symbolized by the question 
of Turkey's entrance into the EU. Can an overwhelmingly Muslim country (that 
descended from the Ottoman Empire) be considered part of Europe? Further, 
what would be the implications of this?
And how can the individual European countries work to preserve their 
national heritage and identity in the face of mass immigration?  For one, 
every Western European nation is in need of immigrants for the same reason 
the United States has always needed and thus welcomed immigrants: cheap 
labor. Europe's white population is aging and failing to re-produce at 
sufficient levels. Meanwhile, most of the white population goes on to 
professional jobs, and thus don't work industrial and service sector jobs. 
These "Lefty, Socialistic" countries need cheap labor to support their 
Socialism of the white middle-class. As such, these countries are becoming 
more and more Muslim, North African, and South Asian; Much like the United 
States went through phases of becoming more and more Irish, than Latino, and 
South and East Asian.
Eventually, conservative forces within Europe are going to have to embrace 
this movement, and, thus, will have to accept Turkey into the EU. But to 
watch the situation play out in real time is overwhelmingly intriguing.

cheers,
Matt

>From: "Lisa Chason" <chason at shout.net>
>To: <Peace-discuss at lists.cu.groogroo.com>
>Subject: [Peace-discuss] on Theo van Gogh murder
>Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:27:28 -0600
>
>
>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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