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The Netherlands
“It's strange that we're fighting for more democracy when there are youngsters fighting for less of it. They are here among us, and we can't say anything about them.”
-Theodor Holman,52
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In September 2004, a film called Submission screened on
Dutch television. In it, a Muslim woman is raped, beaten, then
shown with texts from the Koran written on her naked body. The
film, written by Dutch-Somali politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali–already
notorious for renouncing her Islamic faith on TV–aimed to
illustrate what she believed to be Islam's attitude toward women
and violence. It was directed by Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker known
for making good films and outspoken pronouncements. Death
threats followed, but Van Gogh wouldn't take them seriously. He
thought Dutch society was liberal enough to absorb hatred. Two
months later, a Dutch-born Muslim called Mohammed Bouyeri
pulled Van Gogh off his bicycle at 8.45am on Linneaus Street in
Amsterdam (right), shot and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest,
while Van Gogh begged him to stop. Then Bouyeri
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| “We've been brought up in a culture in Holland, .. where you can do anything and say anything against Christianity and authority, even the Queen herself. We underestimated the effect of this film.“ |
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slit Van Gogh's
throat, before pinning a letter to the corpse that threatened Hirsi
Ali. It was probably the worst peacetime display of intolerance in
the Netherlands since the Second World War. ”We've been brought
up in a culture in Holland,“ says Theodor Holman, a journalist and
colleague of Van Gogh, ”where you can do anything and say
anything against Christianity and authority, even the Queen
herself. We underestimated the effect of this film.“ Since Van
Gogh's death, Submission has been off the screens, and Hirsi Ali
has mostly been in hiding. Demonstrations against the murder
included many Muslims, but a poll since taken by regional
newspapers found that 40 percent of Dutch people hoped that
”Muslims do not feel at home in the Netherlands.“ All it took to
remove decades of tolerance was eight bullets and
a knife.
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