AMSTERDAM – Hundreds of mourners braved the cold outside the gates of De Nieuwe Ooster cemetery yesterday to pay their final respects to the controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was gunned down by an Islamic fundamentalist last week in a murder many in Holland see as an assault on free speech and a forbidding sign of things to come.

A week ago, Mohammed Bouyeri, 26, a Dutch Morroccan, allegedly coasted up beside van Gogh on his bicycle and emptied a magazine of bullets into his body. The killer then slashed the Dutch filmmaker’s throat and spiked a five page letter to his chest quoting the Koran and threatening more attacks.

What has so rattled Dutch citizens about the murder of Van Gogh, whose forebears were related to the 19th-century Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, was its brutality. Many Amsterdam residents consider their nation to be Europe’s most tolerant and saw van Gogh’s murder as a terrorist act.

“This is not a Dutch way to murder,” said one member of the funeral crowd, Frank Goedhart. “We have jealous spouses, or the occasional drug-related shooting, or a mafia shot between the eyes. But to gun someone down while riding his bike on the street? That is unheard of. It tells me that we have allowed the wrong people into our country, and now we must fix it.”

The fix has to come from The Hague, where, many residents complain, the government is practicing “ostrich politics.” The nation’s center-right government has known about the tide of Islamic extremism rising up in Holland for some time, they said, but has put its head in the sand.

“Thanks to ostrich politics, the Netherlands is deathly ill,” one banner outside De Nieuwe Ooster last night read. “Stop de Haat,” or “Stop the Hate,” another said. The irony of the second sign is that Theo van Gogh was a man best known for spewing hate. In columns, films, and radio shows he was like a shock-jock on steroids, baiting not only Muslims, but also Jews, Christians, and immigrants generally.

He accused Muslims of bestiality with goats. He made derogatory and extraordinarily unsavory comments about Jews. He made disrespectful comments about the Vatican. No one was spared his wrath. One of Holland’s most disliked commentators, he had a succession of jobs at various newspapers, from which he was dismissed because of the ugliness of his comments.

“For years I have detested van Gogh,” a prominent Dutch Jewish writer, Leon de Winter, wrote in the Volkskrant newspaper at the weekend. He blasted van Gogh for his “vulgar language, his rudeness, and his insults.”

That reality aside, the Dutch people seem to have made a collective decision to gloss over the details of van Gogh’s commentary and focus instead on his right to say whatever he wished, no matter how abhorrent.

One woman at the funeral who would only give her first name, Ingrid, said that if van Gogh had accused her god of bestiality, then she, too, would have been angered. But she said: “We can’t settle differences of opinion with bullets. I may not like everything Theo said, but I respect his right to say it.”

The proprietor of the Grill House, Ahmed M., saw van Gogh a couple of times a week when the filmmaker stopped by the restaurant, just steps from where van Gogh was gunned down, to get a hamburger after work. He said van Gogh was a notoriously difficult man. “We are all treating him like a hero now because of the way he was killed,” Ahmed M. said in an interview. “But he was no hero, he was a victim. Pim Fortuyn, now he was a hero.”

The assassination in May 2002 of Fortuyn, a flamboyant anti-immigrant populist, rocked the Netherlands. He was one of the first politicians in the nation to draw attention to the growing differences between Holland’s immigrant communities and ethnic Dutch. His murder has provided an eerie subtext to the van Gogh killing.

While many who watched the van Gogh funeral from a giant television screen outside the cemetery and crematorium said they did not agree with what he said, they said his murder suggested that freedom of expression in Holland was in peril. To underscore that belief, a handful of Fortuyn supporters appeared outside the funeral holding signs with photographs of Fortuyn. “Let us watch over your freedom of speech,” the captions read.

Many Dutch said they now believe Fortuyn was prescient in questioning whether their nation had been too tolerant of immigrants and had not pushed enough to make them part of society. Dutch schools are essentially segregated. Many Turkish and Moroccan immigrants don’t speak Dutch, and an increasing number of their young men are becoming disaffected. One of them, authorities here allege, ended up killing Theo van Gogh.

Details are only just emerging about suspect Mohammed Bouyeri. Dutch papers reported that he was a “nice young man,” until about two years ago when his mother died of cancer. That was when he began to espouse extreme Muslim views and began to wear a djellaba, the traditional hooded cloak.

The Dutch justice minister said that the murder stemmed from Bouyeri’s “radical Islamic beliefs” and that the young man found a van Gogh film called “Submission” particularly offensive. The 10-minute movie, aired on Dutch television in August, featured a woman in a see-through burka – a Muslim garment – who had text from the Koran condoning family violence written on her naked form. Witnesses to the murder said Mr. Bouyeri was shouting about the film as he stood over van Gogh’s bullet-riddled body.

Those kinds of reports make residents here ask whether the gap between Islam and Dutch culture can ever be bridged. And now, with the specter of terrorism looming ever larger, the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. Consider a recent poll by RLT Nieuws here in Amsterdam. It found that 47% of those surveyed this week were less tolerant of Muslims than they were before the van Gogh murder.

A recent study by the government’s Social and Cultural Planning Office, released before the murder, warned that while there was a trend among this country’s 1 million Muslim immigrants toward secularization, there was “a small minority of Turks and Moroccans who perceive Dutch society as hostile and discriminating.”

“This could lead to a negative spiral of growing ethnic tensions,” the study warned. “Among a small minority of Muslim youths as well as native Dutch youths, this can even lead to illegal forms of protest and action.”

Theo van Gogh was cremated yesterday evening after an hour-long ceremony attended by friends and family. He lay at the front of the room in a plain light pine box with a bottle of fine white wine and a cell phone placed at its foot. A song by Lou Reed, “Perfect Day,” was played for the assembly.

“Theo had joked with us and planned his whole funeral,” a colleague at his production company, Gijs van de Westelaken, told reporters outside De Nieuwe Ooster. “He wanted us to drink wine, and play music. But he was only joking. He didn’t think his death would happen so soon. He didn’t expect anything like this.” Hours after the funeral, flames broke out at a mosque in Uden, the BCC reported. Authorities found graffiti there which read: Theo, Rest in Peace.