The ‘Dutch 9/11’ Sends Leaders to Safe Houses
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
AMSTERDAM – With the funeral of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh set for today, it is as if almost all of Holland is pushing against a great unseen force.
A week after van Gogh’s execution style murder, many residents of Amsterdam are still jumping at shadows. A roster of public officials has been moved into safe houses. And today, tens of thousands are expected to pour into the streets of the moated city to pay their last respects to a fallen provocateur and rally against Islamic extremism.
“We had hoped that radical Islam wouldn’t set foot in Holland, but we were naive,” a Social Democrat member of Parliament, Jeroen Dysselbloem, told The New York Sun in an interview. “The extremists are ready and able, and we have to shape up our intelligence and police and secret service to fight them. The murder of Theo proved to us it can happen here.”
Just a week ago, a man identified by police as Mohammed Bouyeri, 26, a Dutch Moroccan, coasted up beside van Gogh on a bicycle and emptied a magazine of bullets into his body. Some witnesses said as many as 20 shots were fired.
When the filmmaker staggered away, the killer gave chase, slashed his throat, and spiked a five-page letter to his chest, warning of a new jihad in Europe and a new hit list of future targets, including an Amsterdam alderman, Ahmed Aboutaleb; the city’s mayor, Job Cohen, who is Jewish, and a parliamentarian of Somali heritage who is a former Muslim, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Those on the hit list were to be killed for their criticism of radical Islam, the letter said.
While van Gogh’s murder has rocked this nation, he had long been living with death threats, though he had refused to accept police protection. Islamic extremists objected to his vulgar allusions to bestiality when referring to Muslims.
He further inflamed the situation in August when Dutch television aired his 10-minute film on abuses suffered by Muslim women. The most provocative part of the film, titled “Submission,” featured a shot of a naked actress’s body painted with Koranic verses.
The movie was found so offensive to radical Muslims that Ms. Ali, who wrote the screenplay, was included in their fatwah, too. She has not been seen in public since van Gogh’s murder.
The killing reminded residents here of an earlier political murder, that of a flamboyant anti-immigrant populist, Pim Fortuyn, in May 2002. Though he was killed by a Dutch animal-rights activist and van Gogh was allegedly murdered by a Muslim, some Dutch are finding sinister links to the killings. One newspaper calculated that van Gogh was killed exactly 911 days after Fortuyn.
Alderman Aboutaleb, who has been living in a safe house since his name appeared on last week’s hit list, said Holland is in shock.”A lot of people here see this is our 9/11,” he told the Sun. “But the attacks on New York were part of a big, well-organized plan. There were international money transfers. There was Osama bin Laden. No one has proved that Al Qaeda was involved here. We think this was just a crazy man. What worries us is he could inspire others.”
Indeed, while other officials also said they recognize that the van Gogh murder was not an act of the magnitude of the World Trade Center attacks, they worry that his death has opened Pandora’s box and Holland’s target list will continue to grow, moving from critics of Islam to Amsterdam’s gay community to the nation’s Jewish leaders.
According to authorities, that has already happened. Dutch police arrested two men in their 20s Saturday for allegedly distributing a video on the Internet that promised “paradise” to anyone who beheaded Geert Wilders, a popular right-wing Dutch politician who has long warned his countrymen of the dangers of radical Islam.
Yesterday, the third-largest newspaper in Holland, De Volkskrant, ran a cover story about a local Web site that proclaimed homosexuality was an illness and called on the faithful to follow the teaching of the Koran and throw homosexuals from the tops of buildings.
And Mayor Cohen has rarely been seen in public since his name appeared on the van Gogh death list. He left his safe house last night to attend a unity meeting at City Hall. Entering the banquet room under heavy guard, he received a standing ovation. He called on the Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the room to band together against radicalism and then, a short time later, left the room with guards in tow.
While there is no clear agreement on how to react to this new terrorist threat in Holland, there is consensus on why it has grown. Dutch schools are segregated, immigrants and their children often have a weak command of the language, and unemployment is higher among immigrants than among ethnic Dutch. That has led to a generation of young, disaffected Muslim men, who are now lashing out.
“We have to start asking why this guy who killed Theo decided to radicalize,” Mr. Dysselbloem, the Social Democrat, said. “We think there is isolation and lack of integration among Muslims in Holland. Combine that with a tough debate on Islam in this country, and you have a feeding ground for radicalism. We’re talking about unity, and while we talk these kids are logging onto a Hamas Web site to watch a video on decapitation. We have to find ways to connect to them or this will happen again.”
The head of Amsterdam’s Islam and Citizenship Council, Mohammed Sini, sounded pessimistic. “We’ve been thrown backwards in our efforts to integrate because of this murder,” he said. “Our society is under pressure, but we have to be careful to blame only the murderer, not a whole community. What this shows is that we don’t know each other, we’re strangers, and we need to change that.”
Calming words aside, in the past week there have been several apparent reprisals against Muslims. An explosion occurred early yesterday morning at an Islamic school outside of Amsterdam. There were no injuries and the damage was minimal, officials said. Three people were arrested as they allegedly tried to set fire Friday night to An Nasr mosque in the western town of Huizen. Unidentified suspects also tried to set fire to a mosque in Breda in the south, but the fire died out before it did much damage. In Rotterdam, a fire was started at the door of the Mevlana mosque, but the flames failed to spread. Vandals threw paint on the doors of an Islamic school in this city.
Those problems are isolated, officials said yesterday.
To head off any huge anti-Muslim demonstrations or outpourings of grief, van Gogh’s body was quietly transferred from the funeral home to the crematorium, but officials said they do not expect trouble at today’s funeral.
“We may have lost our innocence, but people here are rational,” Mr. Aboutaleb said. “They are upset and angry, but they also support the idea of social cohesion. Maybe this will make us work harder to achieve that.”