Posted on 11/09/2004 11:34:11 AM PST by areafiftyone
(Recasts with details from filmmaker's funeral)
By Marcel Michelson and Emma Thomasson
AMSTERDAM, Nov 9 (Reuters) - The Netherlands mourned the outspoken filmmaker killed a week ago by a suspected Islamic extremist, while Dutch Muslims rallied to urge reconciliation on Tuesday after a wave of apparent revenge attacks on mosques.
A 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan has been charged with the murder a week ago of film director Theo van Gogh, whose criticism of Islam enraged Muslims.
The service was broadcast live on national television and was watched on a screen outside the crematorium in Amsterdam by about a thousand members of the public who carried flowers and candles and held placards including one that read: "Never submit to fundamentalism".
"It is time for the silent majority to speak out because the fundamental rules of our society are at stake," Bram Peper, a former mayor of Rotterdam, told the funeral service.
Since van Gogh was shot and stabbed as he cycled to work, a wave of arson attacks has targeted at least eight mosques.
A Muslim school in Eindhoven was also badly damaged in a small bomb blast on Monday that police said they suspected was in retaliation for the murder.
Van Gogh's father and sister told the funeral the film director would have deplored the attacks on Muslim buildings.
"SPIRAL OF VIOLENCE"
But some Muslims signalled they were ready to strike back. Fire bombs were thrown at two churches in the central Netherlands in early hours of Tuesday, ANP news agency reported.
A little-known Islamist group threatened to strike the Netherlands on Tuesday after the attacks on Muslim buildings.
The country had already been the subject of several threats by Islamic extremists due to the presence of 1,300 Dutch troops in Iraq.
"Stop the attacks on our mosques, schools and the Muslim community in Holland...before you pay a heavy price," said the statement attributed to the Islamic Tawhid Brigades, which claimed responsibility for bombings last month in Egypt.
Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk met Muslim groups on Tuesday to discuss the threat of a "spiral of violence".
"The ministers and the organisations are in agreement that everything must be done to call a halt to these negative developments. They strongly reject any form of extremism from whichever side it comes," they said in a joint declaration.
About 60 young Dutch Muslims wearing orange shirts with the slogan, "We won't put up with extremism any more," cycled through Amsterdam stopping at mosques to protest against van Gogh's murder.
They then joined a Dutch-Moroccan rally of several hundred in a park near the street where Van Gogh was killed.
"It is action, reaction. Extremism is not only Islamist but also the right wing," said Mustapha Laboui, a 39-year-old Dutch-Moroccan. "It's not good to divide people into foreigners or Dutch. We have to solve these problems together."
In Groningen, one of the towns where a mosque was attacked, a Muslim community leader was due to join Jewish elders at a commemoration of the Nazi "Kristallnacht" attacks on Jews on Nov. 9, 1938.
Van Gogh was to be cremated in a simple wooden coffin strewn with flowers. His production company said he would not have wanted a repeat of the flamboyant funeral two years ago of murdered politician Pim Fortuyn, whose white hearse was showered with flowers as it drove through the streets.
Hundreds of people have laid flowers, candles and notes at the spot where Van Gogh was killed. They also left cactuses, a tribute to the filmmaker's prickly nature, and bottles of beer. Dozens of people circled the site on Tuesday.
"Stop the senseless violence in our beautiful, free Amsterdam and Netherlands," read one note. "You are not alone. You died for freedom of thought," read another.
I personally think that a little rage would go a long way at this juncture.
It's amazing how pacifism evaporates when you're on the front lines.
ping
Exactly right. It is going to take alot for Euroweenies to start fighting back. This is just a small step.
From tolerance to acceptance to indifference to nuissance to irritation to fear to anger to hatred to racism to death.
Europe has been down this road before. It is called fascism and it's rearing its ugly head once more.
If it is a fight between Islamist, and Euroweenies, it would not take a genius to figure who will win.
And these governments do consider themselves smart and civilized and make fun of 2nd amendment: sweeping a problem under the rag and waiting for an explosion is neither smart nor civilized.
Yet a 'tolerant' European country has one murder in the name of the religion. No fanfare, just a run of the mill murder on a sidewalk. No buildings burned to the ground...no jumbo jets carrying the likes of a Todd Beamer and Barbara Olsen, and yet, they are scaring the crap out of the Muslims because of retaliation abounding from their one and only 'terrorist attack'.
Does anyone else find this incredible?
With a little luck, the "Reconquista" of Europe may have begun. Matamoros!
I have no idea who this filmmaker is. But it is kinda strange.
Thodore van Gogh was a relative of Vincent van Gogh. He had just finished a documentary on the oppression of women in the Islamic culture...he was very polular from what I understand, to the Dutch people...
What are the Dutch waiting for? They need the close the Al Queda branches mosques and terrorist training camps Muslim schools ASAP. Islam in effect must be BANNED until all terrorist can be weeded out, arrested, shot, deported.
I love the way Reuters strains our credulity by saying the attacker was a SUSPECTED Islamic extremist. The attacker left a long note explaning exactly who he was - "pinned" to van Gogh's body with a huge knife driven deeply into his torso!!
Attn.Dutch you'd better call on the
French Army.
A Conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Let the Dutch defend their homeland, and throws this trash out!
now they want some reconciliation but you better believe when they are in the position of power they dont want reconciliation.
Reconciliation, forget it. What Holland needs is to repeal its anti-gun laws, posthaste. Then it needs to deport its Muslim non-citizens and end its "multiculturalism" policies in dealing with immigrants. Maybe then they'll be able to forestall a civil war. The alternative is that they just surrender & become good dhimmis.
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