Thanks much for the awful truth here. Why is some of the press holding this back, these necessary details? Necessary for understanding this murderous scum, what his motives were. Your account is the first I've heard of the note being "pinned" to Van Gogh via a knife plunged into his chest.
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The initial stories of Van Gogh's death contained those tidbits. Don't have a link, but I'm sure I read it on FR, since I seldom bother to go elsewhere!
Dennis, here is the eyewitness account of Van Gogh's murder; I finally found it on Belmont Club blog:
The Dutch blog Zacht Ei is an interesting window into how people in the Netherlands are reacting to the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by Islamic fundamentalists. The UK Times described Gogh's death in the following way:
Theo van Gogh, the film maker who had often attacked radical Muslims, had been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of an abattoir worker. ... Now other people were being targeted, too, as evidence emerged of a "brigade" of Dutch jihadists preparing to murder "the enemies of Islam" in a terror campaign that would be easier to carry out than the bombing of trains or heavily guarded government buildings.
He was not the only one to be threatened. "There will be no mercy" said a document that the killer had held over van Gogh's chest before skewering it there with a final knife blow to his heart. By then van Gogh, 47, had been shot several times and was seen by one witness on his knees, pleading with his assailant, "Don’t do it . . . we can still talk about it." The response was a knife to the throat. The killer sawed through the neck and spinal column, almost to the point of decapitating him.
The murder caused widespread popular anger, yet political correctness forced much of the public reaction into unconventional channels. The Mayor of Rotterdam Ivo Opstelten had a mural with the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill" removed in the aftermath of the Gogh murder because it might inflame Muslims. Gogh's film "Submission", which offended his murderers in the first place, was pulled from the Stedelijk Museum of modern art because it might cause an "uproar"; the same film was yanked off Rotterdam TV West for fear it would endanger their employees. Instead the Dutch PBS ran a special program to discuss:
'how a multicultural society should deal with freedom of expression'. This implicitly suggests that Mr. Van Gogh may just have stepped over some sort of invisible line, and therefore may be partly to blame for his own death. Of course, this suggestion was never spoken out aloud.