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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The Dutch filmmaker believed that insulting people was his right as a free citizen. The Muslim fanatic who slaughtered him didn't agree.
Nov 24, 2004 | On the morning of Nov. 2 in a busy street in east Amsterdam, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was riding a bike to his office. Van Gogh hit the ground and stumbled across the street to a nearby building. He didn't make it. As the Moroccan strode toward him, van Gogh shouted, "We can still talk about it! Don't do it! Don't do it." But the Moroccan didn't stop. He shot him again, slit van Gogh's throat and stuck a letter to his chest with a knife. He was slaughtered like an animal, witnesses said. "Cut like a tire," said one. Van Gogh, the Dutch master's great-grand-nephew, was 47 years old.
After shooting van Gogh, Bouyeri fled to a nearby park, where he was arrested after a gunfight with the police. One police officer was wounded and Bouyeri himself was shot in the leg and taken to a police hospital.
The letter pinned to van Gogh's chest contained accusations aimed not at him but at Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and liberal parliamentarian, who for years has been fighting for women's rights in the Netherlands' widespread Islamic community. Earlier this year, Hirsi Ali and van Gogh had made "Submission," a short fiction film that was shown on Dutch public television. In the film, a Muslim woman is forced into an arranged marriage, abused by her husband, raped by her uncle and then brutally punished for adultery. Her body, visible through transparent garments, shows painted verses from the Koran. The film, van Gogh said in a TV interview, was "intended to provoke discussion on the position of enslaved Muslim women. It's directed at the fanatics, the fundamentalists.
Written in Dutch, the bloody letter called Hirsi Ali an "infidel fundamentalist" who "terrorizes Islam" and "marches with the soldiers of evil." With her "hostilities," she "unleashed a boomerang and it's just a matter of time before this boomerang will seal your destiny." In capital letters it said: "AYAAN HIRSI ALI, YOU WILL SMASH YOURSELF ON ISLAM!" The letter ended with a kind of chant: "I know for sure that you, O America, are going to meet with disaster. I know for sure that you, O Europe, are going to meet with disaster. I know for sure that you, O Holland, are going to meet with disaster."
Hirsi Ali fled into hiding the day of van Gogh's murder and the next day published a reaction in the Rotterdam daily, NRC Handelsblad. "I am sad because Holland has lost its innocence," she wrote. "Theo's naiveté wasn't that it [murder] couldn't happen here, but that it couldn't happen to him. He said: 'I am the village idiot, they won't hurt me.'"
But they did. As part of his fearless bravado, van Gogh underestimated the wrath of his enemies -- and perhaps the cultural storm at the core of Dutch society. The rage directed at van Gogh stems from the uneasy coexistence between the liberal Netherlands and Islamic fundamentalism. For decades, the country has had an open-door policy; it is now home to more than 1 million immigrants, mainly from Islamic countries. In the process of ensuring that Muslim immigrants are treated as equal citizens, the Dutch government has allowed mosques to flourish, some of which preach a radical brand of Islam that runs counter to the Netherlands' liberal values. It's this climate of "politically correct" tolerance that incited van Gogh and spurred him to strike back in his writings and films.
In fact, the big-bellied, chain-smoking director had just completed another bomb-throwing film, "06-05." It concerns the murder of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, a writer, professor and outspoken opinion leader who opposed the Dutch government's investment in a new fighter jet, the Joint Strike Fighter. Like van Gogh, who called Fortuyn "the divine bald one," Fortuyn detested the politically correct atmosphere that he said pervaded the country. In the spring of 2002, the flamboyant gay libertarian won Rotterdam local elections by an overwhelming majority, and it looked like he'd do the same in national parliament a few months later. But just before election day, Fortuyn was murdered.
On his Web site, the Healthy Smoker, van Gogh had predicted the assassination: "I suspect Fortuyn will be the first in a line of politically incorrect heretics to be eliminated," he wrote. "This is what our multicultural society has brought us: a climate of intimidation in which all sorts of goatfuckers can issue their threats freely." Fortuyn, however, was not shot by a Muslim extremist but by an animal-rights activist for "using Muslims as scapegoats," as the murderer, a quiet, earnest-looking man, later explained in court.
Notably, van Gogh was murdered exactly 911 days after Fortuyn. Anger toward him had certainly been rising to a boiling point all year. In May, he was slated to act as chairman of a public debate called "Happy Chaos" at the Amsterdam City Theatre. Dyab Abou Jahjah, the leader of a relatively small but provocative Belgian Islamic organization, refused to sit at the table with van Gogh. One of the organizers claimed Jahjah said, "We're not taking any more of that pig." When Jahjah left the stage, van Gogh took the microphone and said: "So this is what some Muslims think of democracy!" After Jahjah left, he said to the crowd: "Why would he be afraid to talk to me? After all, he's the prophet's pimp and he has bodyguards." The debate was canceled.
Needless to say, this didn't enhance van Gogh's standing with Dutch Muslims. Nor is the filmmaker's posthumous reputation likely to improve with the Dutch government and military when "06-05" is released next month. As van Gogh said when he was making the film, "I'll do my best to seriously insult quite a few people."
