Trying To Explain Extremism

In the past year a spate of new books — Bruce Bawer’s “While Europe Slept,” Claire Berlinski’s “Menace in Europe,” and Melanie Phillips’s “Londonistan” among them — have argued that jihadi Muslims pose a grave threat to Europe’s future. These authors make the case that Europe’s tolerance of Muslim intolerance and violence should be brought to an end.An answer of sorts comes from Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma in “Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance” (Penguin Press, 278 pages, $24.95). Written at the depth and pace of an extended New Yorker magazine article, this book is a meandering account of how the Dutch have responded to the ritual slaying of the provocative filmmaker Theo van Gogh on November 2, 2004, by a young Muslim militant named Mohammed Bouyeri. This unfortunate young man, as Mr. Buruma sees it, had been offended by the short movie “Submission,” made by van Gogh and the Somali-born female Muslim apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in which verses from the Koran are projected over the bruised bodies of woman abused in the name of Islam. Bouyeri told the court it could send as many psychologists as it liked, but “you will never understand. You cannot understand.… If I had the chance … to repeat what I did on the second of November … I would do exactly the same.”Mr. Buruma’s book deserves to be taken seriously because it represents the view of most of Europe’s governing political class — that “you cannot understand” is entirely apt. Early on Mr. Buruma defines his project: “How could one not be on the side” of the critics of radical Islam? he asks. However, “a closer look,” he promises, will “reveal fissures that are less straightforward.” But Mr. Buruma’s interviews with Dutch figures lead not to revealing “fissures” but only to small and often strained ironies. There is something perverse in his search for rationality in explaining extremists, while criticizing the alleged extremism of rationalists.Ms. Hirsi Ali, who fled the Netherlands to America earlier this year after she was rejected asylum, was at the center of the storm that led to the filmmaker’s death. Her Somali father, who was both a political rebel and a devout Muslim, tried to force her into an arranged marriage with a Canadian cousin. Ms. Hirsi Ali, a tall, attractive woman, refused to become, in her words, “a factory for sons.” She fled and was given refuge in the famously tolerant Netherlands. Bright, she soon learned the language and became a rising political star due to her eloquent criticisms of Muslim sexual ethics — “derived from premodern tribal societies,” as she put it, and “sanctified by the Koran and further developed in stories about the life of the prophet” — and their left-wing Dutch defenders, who suggested they might be modified by life in Holland.When Ms. Hirsi Ali was denounced for Islamophobia, she replied by dissecting the “paradox of the multicultural left.” “On the one hand,” she explained in Mr. Bawer’s book, European leftists “support ideals of equality and emancipation,” but in the case of Muslim immigrants,”they do nothing about it; they even facilitate the oppression” by turning a blind eye.Mr. Buruma is profoundly unnerved by Ms. Hirsi Ali. And so while he never attacks her modern values directly, he finds her “zealous,” haughty, contemptuous, and as “impatient” as an ex-communist with those who haven’t seen the light. Rattled by the way the left has abandoned its commitment to the Enlightenment, Mr. Buruma mocks her as a sanctimonious member of “that self-appointed elite, the public defenders of the Enlightenment.”He takes a very different tack with van Gogh’s killer. On different pages, he attributes Bouyeri’s alienation to his being short and pudgy, his boredom with the studies for which he was given a scholarship, the coarseness of the Dutch culture that emerged out of the 1960s, and his mother’s death. Where Bouyeri talks of gaming Western liberalism by using its freedom to overthrow the regime that makes those freedoms possible, Mr. Buruma bizarrely responds that this is just an old Dutch conceit that makes Holland the world’s moral beacon, as if what killed van Gogh was confined to the Netherlands. Mr. Buruma never asks why non-Muslim immigrants who face many of the same difficulties of adjusting to a new society are far less violent. In short, in Mr. Buruma’s version of the lone gunman theory, anything but Islam is held to account for Bouyeri’s murderous rage.Near the end of the book, Mr. Buruma recounts a conversation with a high-school history teacher, Abdelhakim Chouaati. Mr. Chouaati dismisses Dutch history as “just a lot of self-congratulatory guff” and “a lot of whining about the Jews.” He denounces the “lies” of Darwinism, explains how the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a Jewish plot, and tells Mr. Buruma that he refuses to vote, because, “Holland means nothing to him, only Islam matters.”But Mr. Buruma detects a current of hope. “In some ways,” he insists, “Abdelhakim is more Dutch than he thinks.” In his desire to use the mosque to aid Muslim delinquents, Mr. Buruma argues he resembles what Dutch society was like before the 1960s produced such “coarseness.” He acknowledges that the “anti-Semitism is vile.” And he says, “I’m not sure he would be so tolerant of infidels if he lived in a society under Shariah law. But he did not strike me as a dangerous man.” What’s crucial, as Mr. Buruma sees it, is that this guy doesn’t become another Bouyeri who believes that (in the book’s closing words) “death is their only way home.”Mr. Buruma, like much of the Continent’s political class, is betting Holland’s (and by extension Europe’s) future on making people like Abdelhakim Chouaati feel at home. It’s little wonder that Holland is experiencing the largest emigration in over a half-century. What do these emigrants, most of them part of the tolerant, educated middle class, know that Mr. Buruma doesn’t?Mr. Siegel is the author, with Harry Siegel, of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life,” available from Encounter Books.He last wrote for these pages about race.

Trying To Explain Extremism

Trying To Explain Extremism

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