The Dutch radical right grumbles about
Holland being swarmed by immigrants, a tiny selection of Islamic
extremists threaten jihad and the Muslim and non-Muslim moderates are
squeezed in the middle. Van Gogh's murder is a window into the common
failures of immigrant integration in Europe and the violence that can
be related to free speech.
"My first visceral reaction on the murder was that I
knew Theo van Gogh," said Buruma in a telephone interview from
Amsterdam. "I had been on his talk shows several times. My reaction was
surprise. Nobody expected this."
Muslim-baiting messages
Van
Gogh was famous in Holland for his newspaper columns, where he
delighted in baiting Muslims by using offensive terms. His last movie,
created with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Sudanese-born politician and social
activist, became his death warrant. It was a film called "Submission,"
consisting of naked women with verses of the Koran inscribed on their
bodies.
Bouyeri, van Gogh's killer, was an aimless young man
filled with rage. He developed his fundamentalist Muslim ideology by
reading dubious translations of the Koran on the Internet. "Bouyeri was
a loser," said Buruma. "He was a pathetic figure but a dangerous one.
Adolescents and young men who don't know their place in the world fall
into a kind of despair and are attracted to deadly causes. They dream
of sacrificing themselves and others to a great cause. Bouyeri was an
example of that, a loser who hadn't found his place in the world."
For all its self-congratulatory liberalness, Holland has
fostered a Muslim immigrant underclass. In the 1950s and 1960s, single
men from Morocco, Turkey and other Muslim countries came to Holland to
take the hard, dirty and low-paying jobs the Dutch would not do. They
mined coal, worked in gas plants and heavy-industrial factories,
destroying their health in the process. The men's families followed and
their children were born in Holland. The immigrants wound up in
concrete ghettos, their children left with limited options.
Permanent outsider status
"The
original immigrants did not really have immigrant status," said Buruma.
"They had an in-between status that left them hanging. Their children
were often lost between two worlds."
The alienation of Dutch Muslim immigrants is similar to the alienation of other Muslim immigrants in Europe, noted Buruma.
"In
Western Europe, and Holland is an example, even though immigrants are
tolerated, it is very difficult for them to become Dutch or British or
German," said Buruma. "It is hard for them to know what to assimilate
to. They are not hated, but are treated as outsiders."
The bleak subtitle of Buruma's book, "The Limits of
Tolerance," permeates his story. "In a small, exclusive and relatively
free society, words didn't come at a price," said Buruma. "You could
insult each other without it leading to any violence. With extreme
religious believers, if you insult God, you insult them."
In the book, van Gogh comes across as an unappealing
character. He relentlessly mocked Islam, accusing a whole religion of
bestiality. If he had an opponent who was Jewish, he'd use anti-Semitic
slurs. "Theo had a polemical side on his Web site and in his magazine
columns where he showed himself at his most belligerent and hostile,"
said Buruma.
Buruma spends time with Hirsi Ali, in the aftermath of
van Gogh's killing. The charismatic Ali underwent horrific female
circumcision as a girl in Africa. She came to Holland as a political
refugee, lost her faith and became an atheist and crusader for battered
women in the Muslim community and was elected to the Dutch parliament.
She also became a strident critic of Islam. With numerous death
threats, Hirsi Ali had bodyguards 24 hours a day.
"The value of Hirsi Ali is that she's started the debate
on Islam in the first place," said Buruma. "She brought attention to
the social problem that there are immigrant women who are abused by
their husbands and that Islam is used for justification for this. She's
also been useful in making people less naive on the revolutionary
movements in Islam. She's misguided. She's a convert. She was a
believer and now she's an atheist. She attacks religion more fiercely
that someone who was never religious."
Hope for Dutch Muslims
In his
interviews for the new book, Buruma met with several people who hold
the hope of Holland's Dutch Muslim community in their hands, from a
prison chaplain to a devoutly religious law student. "One has to be
very careful not to be monolithic about Muslims," he said. "There is a
small revolutionary fringe that is dangerous, but you have more
thoughtful people who are trying to reconcile religious beliefs with
the secular life in Western democracies. They have to be encouraged."
Hirsi Ali left Holland for America, Buruma said. "Life
here became increasingly impossible for her. ... Hirsi Ali has joined
the American Enterprise Institute," he said of the conservative think
tank. "She's ambitious. She wants to play a role in a bigger world."
Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.