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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Consider this story. In the fall of 2004, on the day a Dutch filmmaker is murdered in Amsterdam by a Dutch-Moroccan fanatic (who explains later, at his trial, that it wasn't "personal," it was simply that Islamic law compels him "to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the Prophet"), an artist in Rotterdam paints an angel on his studio window, along with the date and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill." There is a mosque on the artist's street, and apparently some men from the mosque, walking by the studio the next day, see the painting and get mad; they consider the Sixth Commandment to be a racist statement, directed at them, and they complain to the imam. Somebody calls the police. Rotterdam, at the time, is run by an anti-immigrant party founded by another murdered (though not by a Muslim) Dutchman, Pim Fortuyn, but never mind. The police, ordered by the mayor to be vigilant against provocation, do not want trouble in a city with one of the greatest concentrations of Muslims in Holland, so they proceed to the scene and call for trucks with power hoses to destroy the painting. Meanwhile, a local television reporter sets out with a cameraman, expecting to talk to the artist about his window, discovers the mosque chairman, the police, and the trucks, and tries to protect it. He is arrested, and some of his footage is erased, but the rest makes its way onto the Internet. There is a minor scandal, after which the mayor apologizes to the artist and the reporter. He allows that, in the interest of harmony, the city has made a small mistake. Everyone wins this multicultural round but the angel.
It is an ur-Dutch story. Even the murdered filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, bore an almost mythically Dutch name. (He was Vincent van Gogh's great-great-grandnephew.) But it is not so different, in terms of the questions it raises about free speech and crosscultural coercion, from a lot of recent European stories. The most recent, of course, began in Copenhagen last fall, when the newspaper Jyllands-Posten took up the cause of a children's-book writer who couldn't find an illustrator willing to sign his name to a book about Islam, and invited a group of cartoonists to "test the limits of self-censorship" with drawings about the Prophet. It is seventeen years since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his famous fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a citizen of Britain, for the "crime" of writing "The Satanic Verses." The West is still under attack for being itself--secular, democratic, and libertarian--but the fatwas no longer arrive from the mosques of Qum or Cairo. As often as not, they come from a young man with a laptop in a city like Amsterdam or Copenhagen--from immigrants or the children of immigrants, born in Europe. For the Dutch, it remains van Gogh's murder--their murder--and its aftermath that opened the floodgates of intimidation that have now sent twelve Danish cartoonists into hiding.
There are said to be fifteen million Muslims in Western Europe--the result of postwar and post-colonial migrations, labor recruitment, and the demographics of a rapidly expanding immigrant population drawn from cultures that do not concede much in the way of rights to women, and often judge them by the number of male children they produce. If you count illegal immigration, there are certainly more. Every country in Western Europe has had to concoct elaborate strategies not only for absorbing its Muslim immigrants but for dealing with Islamic identity at its most insistent. But the truth is that the subject of identity is as charged for Europeans as it has become for the immigrants themselves. When labor recruitment began in Western Europe, in the nineteen-sixties, most Europeans had never thought of themselves as living in immigration countries--despite the historical evidence that they almost always had. In the event, they could not anticipate the trouble they would have, decades later, when Europe's young Muslims, frustrated in their prospects, unnerved by discrimination, courted by fundamentalist mullahs and imams from North Africa and the Middle East, and stirred by the rhetoric of the new Internet jihad, were persuaded that the redress they sought was not to be found in jobs or classrooms but in symbols of "respect"--that they could fight exclusion with self-exemption, and due process with Sharia.
A great deal has been written about van Gogh's death in the past year and a half. But I came upon the Rotterdam story only a few months ago, in Amsterdam, where I was poking through the arcana, real, virtual, and rhetorical, of Holland's ongoing immigrant crisis and was sent to see a sociologist named Albert Benschop, who teaches media studies at the University of Amsterdam. Benschop, by way of tracking Islamist recruitment on the Internet with his students, had become something of a one-man archive of what he calls "jihad in the Netherlands" lore. After van Gogh's murder, he produced a casebook of the crime, "Chronicle of a Political Murder Foretold." It was a narrative of the missed clues, outmoded technology, civic placidity, inept intelligence, uneasy discrimination, lax laws, and official "tolerance" that had led to the murder, or, at any rate, left the murderer free to kill. By the time I met Benschop, he had revised the casebook, bringing it up to date with incidents like the Rotterdam story--incidents that added up to a portrait of a country unravelling under the shock of an act of terror that was, if not personal, chillingly specific in its challenge to the much vaunted tranquillity of Holland's official face.
The Dutch are not confrontational. They admit to being better at talking about what they should have done than what they could be doing now. So perhaps it isn't surprising that they still discuss their immigrant problem in terms of Theo van Gogh's murder. Or that many of them seem convinced that they can solve...
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