yes, lets fight terrorists with "rules"
My fantasy is that the Netherlands becomes the first nation to declare political correctness as a threat to national security.
They cut his throat, didn't quite decapitate him. They also pinned a letter on him with a knife. Perhaps the Dutch will wake up and sweep the Islamic terrorists from their homeland. I doubt it though.
"Muslims are afraid to speak out and feel separated from the society they live in,...People feel uncomfortable at work, because colleagues question them.''
If they felt like saying the right things I don't think they'd have need to fear, if they had the right answers I'm sure their co-workers would be happy to hear them.
This is why we fear the moderate Muslims too, they go into the "Don't blame me, I didn't kill the guy" mode, it's almost always that, never a full throated denunciation of the Islamofacist violence.
HEY MODERATE MUSLIMS - WE CAN'T HEAR YOU YET!
Brilliant! I'm sure Mr. Rantsrop wants to get back to the place where they were, where terrorists are not the focus of their lives but they're a nuisance. Good luck with that!
Those darned resources...they never seem to magically appear when a sensitive socialist country needs them most!
This movie was based on a screenplay by a former Muslim. However, the movie also made claims that Muslims have sex with animals. It also featured a woman in a see-through burka. This was probably viewed as obcene and a calumny by Muslims. Too bad the filmmaker couldn't have stuck to the facts a bit. The mistreatment of women is bad enough without trying to offend people just for the heck of it. He was being provocative. He wasn't trying to get Muslims to rethink their attitudes. He was not criticizing in a constructive way. He was trying to stir things up. He got more than he bargained for.
http://www.nysun.com/article/4403
Murder in Holland Brings Terror War Home to the Dutch
BY DINA TEMPLE-RASTON - Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 8, 2004
AMSTERDAM - For many in this Dutch city, the war on terror came calling just five days ago. That is when a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan national emptied a magazine of bullets into the body of a filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, outside the bucolic Ooster Parc, slit his throat, and spiked to his chest an ominous five-page letter promising a new holy war.
The letter warned of "screams that will cause chills to run down a person's back, and make the hairs on their heads stand straight up."
"People will be drunk with fear, while they are not drunken. Fear will fill the air on the Great Day," the letter read. "I know that you, Oh America, will go down. I know definitely that you, Oh Europe, will go down. I know definitely that you, Oh Netherlands, will go down."
The letter sent a frisson of horror through a nation that, until last week, liked to think of itself as the liberal and tolerant heart of Europe. In the wake of van Gogh's execution, many local politicians, from a Somali-born former Muslim member of Parliament to the Jewish mayor of Amsterdam, have either gone into hiding or taken to traveling with bodyguards.
Lawmakers are considering an emergency law that will allow authorities to revoke the Dutch nationality of dual citizens suspected of terrorist activity, so they can be deported. Suddenly, ethnic Dutch are looking at their Muslim neighbors through narrowed lids and are suspicious of the terror within.
"It was tense before, but the murder brought so many things out into the open," a woman, Caroline Houton, said as she washed beer glasses in a pub off one of this city's grand canals. "We've always considered ourselves so open-minded and inclusive that we didn't think we'd ever be targets in a holy war. That happens to big powers, like America, and now, suddenly, it has happened to us."
A man who had come to lay flowers at a makeshift memorial to van Gogh, Mark Bakker, made a similar point.
"Theo van Gogh was an agitator, he tried to stir things up, but we thought we could all handle it, that it would get a dialogue between Muslims and the Dutch here going," Mr. Bakker said. "Instead it was solved with bullets, and it has shaken everyone up."
The authorities have arrested a man they call Mohammed B. for the crime, and six other Islamic militants were charged Friday with "conspiracy with a terrorist intent." The indictment marks the first time the Dutch have used a new law that expands their power to prosecute people suspected of terrorism.
"The increase in radicalization is worse than we had thought," the deputy prime minister, Gerrit Zalm, told reporters. "We are not going to tolerate this. We are going to ratchet up this fight against this sort of terrorism."
While the execution of van Gogh, 47, was a shock, it couldn't have come as a complete surprise. He had been on the receiving end of a roster of death threats for months after Dutch television aired his film "Submission" in August.
The 10-minute film, based on a screenplay by a parliamentarian and former Muslim, Aayan Hirsi Ali, criticized the treatment of women in Islam and features a Muslim woman in a see-through burka telling the story of her abusive marriage. She has text from the Koran written on her naked body condoning family violence.
While the movie helped coalesce extremist forces against van Gogh and Ms. Hirsi Ali, the pair had long been vocal about their disdain for Holland's radical Islamist immigrants. Not only did van Gogh call them a "fifth column," but disparaged them, in gutter language, as having sexual relations with goats. Ms. Hirsi Ali, for her part, quit the Dutch Labor Party because, she said, the liberals were too soft on Islam.
Both she and van Gogh had received death threats after "Submission" was released. Ms. Hirsi Ali accepted police protection, but her collaborator waved off the suggestion, saying he was just "a merry village idiot," whom no one would bother to kill. Ms. Hirsi Ali has gone into hiding since the van Gogh murder last week.
The Dutch government said the murder was "an act against freedom of expression" and organized a rally in Amsterdam in support of Van Gogh - whose great-great-grandfather was the brother of the artist Vincent van Gogh - and the freedom of expression he has come to represent. Some residents of the city have grumbled about revisionist history.
"Theo van Gogh is one of those guys who liked to stir things up," a bookstore worker, Jan von Kampen, said. "I know that he said some of the things he said just to get a reaction, to try to get people to talk. But there were a lot of people who didn't understand that and were pretty upset." Mr. von Kampen cited van Gogh's obscene references concerning Allah as particularly offensive.
Regardless of whether van Gogh goaded his critics, what is clear is that his death has opened old wounds between ethnic Dutch and the nearly 1 million Muslims in the Netherlands. At the time of his death, van Gogh was working on a film about another politically motivated murder, that of a flamboyant anti-immigrant populist, Pim Fortuyn. He was killed in May 2002 by an animal-rights activist.
Three years after that murder, many Dutch feel that the time has come for the Muslim minority to try harder to adopt Dutch values.
There is a move, for example, to compel Dutch Muslims to learn the Dutch language. Many Dutch Moroccans and Turks bristle at the government's push for assimilation. They wonder why they are tagged as foreign when they have been born and educated in the Netherlands.
In the current climate, though, that argument is arousing little sympathy.
In recent days the city's liberal newspaper, the Telegraaf, published an editorial that called for a "very public crackdown on extremist Muslim fanatics" to ensure they don't "cross over the boundaries." Editors called for tightened controls on international cash transfers and the suppression of magazines and newspapers that incited extremism. Mosques should be shuttered if their imams encouraged illegal acts.
"This should also apply to extremists who have dual nationality," the editorial said. "They have no business here. In addition, the range of extremists to be kept under surveillance needs to be expanded. If more money is required for all this, then that money must be made available. It is more than worth it for the sake of the citizens' safety."
Other newspapers picked up similar themes. The Netherlands is clearly rethinking its position on being the beating liberal heart of Europe.
Mr. Zalm, the deputy prime minister, said the Cabinet is also considering taking action against a mosque that Van Gogh's accused killer regularly attended.
"I know it is just one murder," Ms. Houton said, "but this has changed us."
Europe had better find its balls.....Its going to need them.....