Might I also recommend Bruce Bawer's bestseller, "While Europe Slept: The
Rise of Radical Islam in the West". Bawer is a Gay, former Liberal, turned
libertarian opponent of Radical Islam.
Subject: print.php?StoryID=20060909-101216-7324r
The Washington Times
[1]www.washingtontimes.com
__________________________________________________________
[2]What a brutal killing says about Islam and Holland
Published September 10, 2006
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Advertisement
MURDER IN AMSTERDAM: THE DEATH OF THEO VAN GOGH AND THE LIMITS OF
TOLERANCE
By Ian Buruma
Penguin Press, $24.95, 220 pages
REVIEWED BY ROGER K. MILLER
More than three decades ago, French writer Jean Raspail published
a novel, "Camp of the Saints," about a one-million-strong wave of
refugees from the Indian subcontinent swarming into France, and the
French being unable to deal with the dire consequences presented by an
alien population and culture. Mr. Raspail was roundly, and wrongly,
castigated as a racist, yet here we are 30-some years later, the
immigration issue sharpened to the nth power, and the themes Mr.
Raspail brought up, and the dangers he foresaw, widely discussed in
all the media.
In "Murder in Amsterdam," Ian Buruma brings those themes and
dangers home -- his own home, the Netherlands, where he was born in
1951. Now a professor at Bard College, a journalist and author of
several previous books ("The Missionary and the Libertine"), Mr.
Buruma is likewise no racist in examining the manifold issues raised
by the cold-blooded, daylight murder of writer and filmmaker Theo van
Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Moroccan-Dutchman and Muslim
fanatic, on the streets of Amsterdam Nov. 2, 2004.
Bouyeri left a rambling, anti-West letter pinned with a knife to
van Gogh's dying chest. It was addressed, not to his victim, but to
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician with whom van Gogh had
made the short film, "Submission," dramatizing what they saw as
Islamic abuse of women sanctioned by the Koran. It was this film that
drove Bouyeri over the edge to commit his murderous act.
For Ms. Ali thinks that Islam, the religion she was born into, is
a grave threat to Europe, even to all humankind, in direct contrast to
Bouyeri, to whom Ms. Ali was not only an apostate but a Western whore.
Van Gogh's view was similar to hers, though, as an outrageous
provocateur, he approached it from a mocking, self-advertising
perspective.
"It was not so much what she said; it was the fact that people
wished to prevent her from saying it" that attracted van Gogh to her
hostile views of Islam, Mr. Buruma writes. The crowning irony was that
while van Gogh warned about violent Islamic passions, he behaved as if
they could never affect him.
Mr. Buruma learned all this on a trip back to his native land to
see what was going on: "There was something unhinged about the
Netherlands in the winter of 2004." He found a mood of peevish
disillusion, of verongelijktheid, that is, of being "wronged not by an
individual so much as by the world at large."
Nothing is simple; he discovers viewpoints from all over the map,
and, like roads on a map, they twist and turn and cross and run
parallel and merge. There is the Iran-born scholar, Afshin Ellian, who
criticizes political Islam and its anti-Enlightenment values; the
"inability of Europeans to appreciate what they had" angers him
mightily, as it does Ms. Ali.
Van Gogh in some ways was a kindred spirit to the populist
politician, Pim Fortuyn, murdered in May 2002, not by a Muslim
jihadist but by a Dutch animal rights activist. An openly gay man who
boasted of having sex with Moroccan boys, he did not think of himself
as right-wing, though he denounced Islam as a threat to Dutch
liberties.
Fortuyn was immensely popular with Dutch voters; Mr. Buruma says
he had a chance of becoming prime minister. He tapped into anxieties.
"He was a peddler of nostalgia," even while resenting the smug,
"virtuous elite of Our Kind of People" who thought it their right and
duty to rule.
The author's argumentation is so finely nuanced that it seems,
frankly, to be a noble if misguided effort to call down a plague on
both their houses -- the established Dutch society and the Muslim
immigrant community -- as if to say that objectivity (or political
correctness) requires the scales always to register zero regardless of
the weights put upon them. Yet the weight of the evidence he offers
for the disharmony in Dutch society falls mostly against Muslim
radicals particularly and unassimilated immigrants generally.
One brave soul dares to tell his coreligionists in a mosque that
tolerance is a two-way street, but his voice can scarcely be heard
above the demands for the adopted country to become more like the
immigrants rather than the other way round. The culture of the "old
country," in which women are routinely beaten and dissenters
efficiently silenced, isn't the problem, says a Moroccan-born imam;
rather, "the problem is right here, in Holland."
Mr. Buruma never specifically defines the "Limits of Tolerance"
mentioned in his subtitle, but some readers surely are going to
conclude they start right about there.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance
writer, reviewer and editor.
Libertarian Republicans
Fiscally Conservative, Socially Tolerant & Pro-Defense!
Dondero is a US Navy Veteran, former Libertarian Party National
Committeeman, fmr. Senior Aide to US Congressman Ron Paul R-TX, and Founder
of the Republican Liberty Caucus. www.mainstreamlibertarian.com
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