Dutch find the strength to take on their 'new Nazis'

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 11/9/04 | Daniel Johnson

[saquin]

The assassination of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker whose funeral took place yesterday, is something new in Europe. There are, of course, antecedents. Fifteen years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie: the first shot in the culture war between fundamentalist Islam and the West. But there is no precedent for the ritual slaughter of a prominent artist in broad daylight on the streets of Amsterdam.

For the Dutch, this murder is not only sinister: it is symbolic. Van Gogh - distantly related to Holland's most celebrated artist - was shot on his bicycle, another national emblem. As he writhed on the ground, the murderer cut his throat without mercy and left him with two knives protruding from his body: a method that is apparently common in North Africa, but unheard of here. Just in case there was any doubt about the symbolism of this butchery, a note was found pinned to his chest, containing death threats against three other public figures.

The resonance of this hideous crime, not only in the Netherlands, but across the whole of continental Europe, is difficult for the British to comprehend. We have no conception of the status accorded to the artist in countries that have known totalitarian dictatorship within living memory. The Nazis and the Communists liquidated or exiled the intelligentsia wherever they could. Persecution cast a shadow across the Continent from which it has still not wholly recovered.

Hence the reverence in which the artist is held. Hence the cult of dissent at any price, however absurd, pretentious or childish. Hence the aversion to censorship of any kind, including self-censorship. For a post-traumatic culture, the artist is a high priest. The murder of an artist for the sake of his art shocks secular Europe rather as martyrdom once shocked Christendom. Theo van Gogh is a secular martyr.

What had he done to deserve such a fate? Submission, the film that occasioned the attack, is by no means an attack on Islam as a religion. It does not, as Rushdie did, ridicule the Prophet Mohammed. What it does is to denounce the barbaric treatment of women in many Islamic societies, focusing attention on forced marriage and the penalisation of rape victims under the guise of adultery. The imagery is deliberately provocative: verses from the Koran are inscribed on a naked woman, to drive home the message that Muslim women are human, too, beneath the veil.

It does not require much imagination to see how this tableau would strike strict Muslims, who regard the Koran as the literal, uncreated word of God, and whose customs forbid the public display of the female face, let alone her body. To them, the broadcast of such an image on television is both blasphemy and sacrilege. In their eyes, it adds to the gravity of the case that the Somali woman who wrote the script of Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is a former Muslim - in other words, an apostate. She has been condemned by fatwa and survives only under police protection.

Van Gogh, as a non-Muslim, was mistakenly assumed, both by the authorities and himself, to be less at risk. In his book Allah Knows Better, however, he added insult to injury by castigating the misogyny and puritanical attitudes of local imams. Defiant to the last, he refused to alter his bohemian lifestyle, as if the Netherlands were still the haven of toleration that it had been since the revolt against Spanish rule four centuries ago.

That habit of toleration is an integral part of Dutch identity. Van Gogh's death, like that of the politician Pim Fortuyn two years ago, echoed the assassination in 1584 of the Prince of Orange, William the Silent, who is still seen as a martyr not only to the Protestant cause, but also to that of freedom of conscience. The words of the historian Motley about William the Silent - "When he died, the little children cried in the streets" - could have been said yesterday of Theo van Gogh.

In the 17th century, Holland was the only country in Europe where a Jewish apostate, Spinoza, could publish philosophical works challenging the very basis of revealed religion. The Jewish community could expel and curse Spinoza, but neither Jew nor Christian dared to harm him.

Only under German occupation was this tradition of toleration interrupted and temporarily crushed. When the Dutch Catholic bishops made a protest, the Germans responded by deporting clergy of Jewish origin, including the nun, philosopher and saint Edith Stein to Auschwitz. Anne Frank and her family were protected for four years, only to be betrayed as liberation approached. The bitter experience of occupation and collaboration has made the Dutch hypersensitive to intolerance in any form.

Now, with the manifestation of a violent form of intolerance in their midst, the iron has entered their souls. After decades of welcoming immigration and preaching multiculturalism, they now propose to expel failed asylum-seekers and to assimilate those who settle, rather than permit de facto religious segregation. If neo-conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, the Dutch are fast becoming a nation of neo-conservatives.

While the Arab-European League accused the Dutch immigration minister of giving a "Hitler speech" at a rally in protest at van Gogh's murder, the Dutch know who the real Hitlers are. Even the most liberal society is illiberal when it is a question of survival. The Dutch see those who dream of Europe under a revived caliphate as a threat to their way of life. The prospect of Islamist imams imposing sharia law on Dutch cities amounts, they feel, to a new Nazi occupation.

Unlike his great, great, great uncle Vincent, Theo van Gogh was not a genius. Was he really an artist at all? But van Gogh's murder has proved him right about the hardline Islamists. Their ideology is inimical to all that the Dutch hold dear. Last night, as van Gogh's cremation was seen on television, the tension was palpable. Holland is now the crucible of Europe. Not even the most tolerant people on earth can tolerate the Islamists.

[Max Combined]

They foolishly let them into their cities. It is too late now.

[fso301]

Not even the most tolerant people on earth can tolerate the Islamists.

Great closing sentence.

[AndyTheBear]

Failing to oppose a growing evil is very foolish. The liberal psychosis which views such opposition as equally evil invites disaster.

[karnage]

There's a lot of them here too. More than we think. They're broadcasting their imam's call to worship over loudspeakers in Hamtramck, MI.

[Castlebar]

I hope the Dutchies and other Western Europeans have the guts to fight these IslamoFacists

One of them did. Look what happened to him.

"Submission" evidently failed the Global Test.

[johniegrad]

I read a Mosque was burned, tragically thats the way to have to fight these folks , take it to their hearts.

There's nothing tragic about it at all. Kick them in the balls until they puke and then take them out once and for all. They are primitive, undisciplined, and ignorant. We have all the advantages.

[Unknowing]

". . . the iron has entered their souls."

[Free ThinkerNY]

The Mufti and the Führer

By Mitchell Bard

In 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini fled to Germany and met with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis’ anti-Jewish program to the Arab world.

The Mufti sent Hitler 15 drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and Italy to make concerning the Middle East. One called on the two countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine. Furthermore, “they accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries.”

In November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the Jews were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti's requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling him the time was not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his “thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches....The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely....the Jews....” Hitler replied.

Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine....Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle....Germany's objective [is]...solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere....In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. The Mufti thanked Hitler profusely.

In 1945, Yugoslavia sought to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for his role in recruiting 20,000 Muslim volunteers for the SS, who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary. He escaped from French detention in 1946, however, and continued his fight against the Jews from Cairo and later Beirut. He died in 1974.

The Husseini family continued to play a role in Palestinian affairs, with Faisal Husseini, whose father was the Mufti's nephew, regarded until his death in 2001 as one of their leading spokesmen in the territories.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/muftihit.html

[tpaine]

The new nazis are just like the old nazis:

"The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation."
-Arthur Koestler- writing about the holocaust.

Thus, we are driven to the conclusion that the trouble with our species is an excess capacity for fanatical devotion to 'the cause'.

[CHARLITE]

Thank you SO MUCH for posting this article. I wouldn't have seen it, if you hadn't put it up here. One of my sons-in-law is Dutch. He says that it's a nightmare all over Holland. Chaos. No REAL Dutch are eligible any longer for becoming policemen assigned to Muslim districts. What this means in everyday life is that there are organized shake-down gangs who regularly hit up elderly Dutch citizens on the day when they collect their gov't-dispensed social security checks.........AND they shake down businesses wherever and whenever they want to. One of my son-in-law's brothers owns and operates a very good restaurant in Amsterdam.

He has been robbed three times, in broad daylight. When he has telephoned the police, they have come long after the gang has disappeared. If they arrive WHILE the Muslim hoodlums are still on the premises, the "Dutch" Muslim cops just stand around doing nothing whatsoever to intervene.

I hope the French, Spanish, Germans, Danes, Italians, Swedes, Belgians and Norwegians are watching. It's only a matter of a decade or two before all of - at least - "Old Europe" - is going to be swallowed up by Islam. Period...........and it will be done by the sword. Britain will be the last one the crocodile eats, but he'll eat Britain also. . . which reminds us of what Churchill said: "Appeasers always hope that the crocodile will eat them last." Plus ça change..........plus c'est la même chose.

[crazyhorse691]

It's the Islamists who can't tolerate the most tolerant of Europeans, the Dutch. Should be interesting.

[John Thornton]

That's worthy of a tag line.

[Revolting cat!]

The thing for the Western countries to do is say, thanks but no thanks, you diaper heads, we'll wash our own dishes, blow our own leaves, drive our own taxis. You go back to where you came from.

Unfortunately, this is not going to happen. The Consttutional structures of the Western democracies are incapable of dealing with gradual deterioration of the culture and politics, are incapable of drastic measures when drastic measures are required. Every country needs a military coup every once in a while, the kind that South American countries used to have before they too went soft and apologetic for the superiority of their Western Christian civilization.

There are millions of these vermin in Western Europe, many of them born and raised there, what are you going to do? We're watching a train going full speed towards a flooded bridge.

[angkor]

More likely, they will turn their anger into more Bush hatred.

They hate the Islamists more than they hate GWB. More than a year ago, a normal, middle class Dutch fellow told me that the solution to the Islamists was "Kill them all." I was shocked that he was so serious about it, and with his clarity on the idea that the Islamists "hate American freedom."

[angkor]

Interesting post.

I was last in Amsterdam on business in summer 2001. Sitting on a park bench next to one of the city canals, and some middle Easterner on a bicycle came up and offered drugs for sale. "No thanks," and I thought he drove away. But a few seconds later there was again, offering his drugs. "No, please go away." He persisted and I finally said "Hey, we don't want any. F*** off!"

He pulled about 10 feet away, turned around, and issued a long string of invective until I got up from the bench and stared him down for a bit.

I've never, ever had anything like that happen anywhere I've traveled. From a Muslim, of course.

[Inyokern]

In 1985, American Jew Leon Klinghoffer was murdered on a European ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Europe turned its back on the incident. They had the chief terrorist in custody but allowed him to go free.

Europe is now paying for this.

[jan in Colorado]

It will happen in this country as well.

[dennisw]

very good!!!!

[dennisw]

You have the makings of a Bob Dylan song there.

[Revolting cat!]

"Leaf Blowers in the Wind"?