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In a key scene in Schindler’s List, an SS trooper plays the piano while his fellow Nazis are brutally liquidating the Krakow ghetto. The kicker is the music: Bach’s Prelude: English Suite #2 in A Minor. The point is obvious and brutal: how could a culture which produced such sublime genius degenerate into such horrifying brutality?
We might ask the same of the Dutch. How did the nation that produced the astonishing brilliance of a Vincent van Gogh simply roll over and submit when a fanatical mediaeval death-cult brutally murders one of his close descendants, also an artist? Because that’s exactly what happened, 21 years ago, with the murder of Theo van Gogh.
The grandson and namesake of Vincent’s beloved brother and lifelong ardent supporter, both spiritually and financially, Theo van Gogh was also an artist. A film-maker, who specialised in creating provocative pieces in the name of free speech. Van Gogh had long criticised religions such as Christianity and Judaism. Neither of them ever threatened his life.
Then he turned his blowtorch on Islam. Two months later, he was dead. Murdered with signature mediaeval brutality by yet another Islamic death-cultist.
On Nov 2, 2004, a Moroccan Dutchman named Mohammed Bouyeri shot van Gogh twice before slitting his throat in Amsterdam. Horrified witnesses later said that van Gogh’s throat was “cut like a tire.” The provocateur’s voice was symbolically and violently silenced with the flash of an assassin’s knife.
Before leaving the scene, the 26-year-old Bouyeri pinned a letter to van Gogh’s body with a knife. The letter said that Bouyeri’s gripes were actually with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee turned Dutch politician. Hirsi Ali had famously worked alongside van Gogh on a short television film called Submission, which criticized the treatment of women in Islam.
Since Hirsi Ali was under police protection at the time, Bouyeri couldn’t kill her. But sadly for van Gogh, he was still an open target.
Like many fanatics, Bouyeri was a coward at heart. He chose the easiest of targets. He was also yet another example of what so many Western Islamophiles refuse to admit: too many Muslim immigrants simply don’t assimilate in the way that generations of other immigrants have. In fact, the children of Muslim immigrants tend to be even more fanatical than their parents.
Unbeknownst to Theo van Gogh, his film had attracted the attention of Mohammed Bouyeri, a man who held both Dutch and Moroccan citizenship. Though Bouyeri had been born and raised in the Netherlands in a seemingly normal and “quiet” household, he started becoming involved in radical Islam after his mother died of cancer when he was 18 years old.
What was it about this film that inspired such murderous Islamic rage (which, to be fair, is like shooting fish in a barrel)?
The film, titled Submission, Part I, focused on women praying to Allah to free them from their horrible lives, which included physical and sexual abuse at the hands of men.
Controversially, the film also featured verses of the Quran written on the bodies of naked women, in protest of the abuse they had suffered […]
The film was also partly inspired by Hirsi Ali’s own life before she arrived in the Netherlands. She fled Somalia after realizing she wanted to escape an arranged marriage, and also left her Muslim faith behind […]
When asked why he made the film, van Gogh said that he “intended to provoke discussion on the position of enslaved Muslim women.” He also insisted, “It’s directed at the fanatics, the fundamentalists.”
Well, you can’t say that he didn’t succeed. The only problem was that “the fanatics, the fundamentalists” of the ‘religion of peace’ reacted exactly as they always do.
Surely such a horrible crime, perpetrated on one of the most famous Dutch names, woke the nation up to the existential threat of Islam?
As if.
Just as the ‘religion of peace’ can always be relied on to react to criticism with unhinged violence, the ‘great and good’ will just as reliably react with spineless cowardice.
Both van Gogh’s admirers and critics were stunned by the loss, and it wouldn’t be long before his death changed the Netherlands forever.
And not in a good way.
As the years went on, however, many prominent people in the country stopped talking about the assassination altogether, for fear of angering both right-wing and left-wing movements. Some were concerned about accidentally inciting more hatred against Muslims, while others worried that any criticism of van Gogh’s work would be seen as supporting his murderer.
Journalist Theodor Holman, who was one of van Gogh’s closest friends, has strongly criticized the silence around the murder and the fears of causing offense in the country: “Tolerance has been transformed into cowardice.”
“Submission”, indeed.
