Quite a drama is shaping up in the Netherlands, where, our Dina Temple-Raston reports that racial and religious tension is running high following the murder by a “Dutch-Moroccan” Islamist of the radical gay filmmaker, Theo van Gogh. A collateral descendant of the great artist, Theo van Gogh had recently released a new movie – concerning the oppression of Muslim women – when he was gunned down. His heart was also pierced by a dagger that pinned to his chest a blood-curdling jihadist message, which among other things threatened a terrible fate for the film’s script-writer, a woman legislator of Somali Mohammedan origin.

“We’ve always considered ourselves so open-minded and inclusive that we didn’t think we’d ever be targets in a holy war,” one local told our correspondent in respect of the prevalent mentality of euro-isolationists on the Continent. “That happens to big powers, like America, and now, suddenly, it has happened to us.” Van Gogh’s killing vindicates what many Americans have been saying for years to friends in Old World: that Islamist violence is not stoked by the policies of the “fundamentalist moron” George W. Bush, or by the “evil” Ariel Sharon. The Dutch state, after all, has not been conducting “targeted assassinations,” nor has it building in Judea and Samaria. In the years since Rembrandt and, later, van Gogh, its contemporary cultural imperialism has been minimal, notwithstanding its admirable French fries with mayonnaise. The murder of van Gogh underscores yet again that it is not the West’s policy that offends the Islamo-fascists, but rather, it is its free way of life.

How much support, then, can the second Bush Administration expect from a sobered Europe? Permanent government officials with direct responsibility for security are privately rather realistic about the nature of the threat and cooperate extensively with American agencies to foil attacks. The Dutch AIVD – one the Continent’s most underrated intelligence organizations – has even been warning for years in its published reports about the noxious foreign influences on Holland’s Muslim youth. “It is alarming to have to conclude that such Muslim extremist ideas, in which martyrdom is the highest aim, have found a fertile breeding ground in at least several dozens of mainly second and third generation migrants,” noted the AIVD in its 2002 report, which drew particular attention to north African disaffection.

While the AIVD has worked hard to fight Wahhabist and Salafist influences, disenchanted youngsters fed on a diet of hate have nonetheless been sucked into jihadi operations as far a-field as Chechnya and Kashmir. And one of the key suspects in the bombing of Bali, a former Dutch colony, in 2002 carried a Netherlands passport.

The truth is that there is a limit to what security services can achieve on their own given the scale of the demographic, cultural, and ideological problems posed by Muslim immigration – even if, as now seems distinctly possible, Holland conjures up its own Johann van Ashcroft and belatedly introduces counter-terrorism legislation that at least bears a family resemblance to the Patriot Act. For there are already more than a million Muslims in Holland, a nation of 16 million, and around 14 million in Europe as a whole. The optimists, many on the liberal-left, hold that many are becoming “assimilated,” wearing western garments, disobeying their parents, and evincing little Koranic knowledge.

They are right, but there is a crucial catch to it. Take the example of many northern and southern Irish nationalists. The sway of the Roman Catholic Church has diminished dramatically on the Emerald Isle, but this has not resulted in a commensurate diminution in sectarianism. Indeed, anglophobia is more than ever the last, irreduceable core of their communal identity. Much the same goes for Protestant youths in Ulster. By the same token, the residually “Islamic” nature of Europe’s Muslim diaspora often takes the form of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, bolstered by fashionable sub-Fanon-esque narratives of “dispossession.” Holland has long been a haven for “the other,” but the burgeoning Muslim quarters are still far removed from the romantic, innocent world of the Amsterdam Jewish ghetto portrayed by Rembrandt van Rijn.

European politicians have repeatedly made anti-American noises as part of a strategy to make spurious common cause with these seething immigrant populations – and are now learning the hard way they have been riding a tiger. It says much about their values that the issue that seems to have attained most traction within Holland’s elite is the threat posed by Islamo-fascists to the sexually libertinism of contemporary Amsterdam and Rotterdam. What ironical bedfellows wars make.