Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance [Anglais] [Relié]

Van Gogh, a provocative media personality in the Netherlands, was shot and stabbed on an Amsterdam street in November 2004 by a young radical, the son of Moroccan immigrants, who accused him of blasphemy against Islam. When Buruma (Bad Elements) returned to his homeland in an effort to make sense of the brutal murder, he quickly realized there was more to the story than a terrorist lashing out against Western culture. Exploiting the tensions between native-born Dutch and Muslim immigrants, van Gogh drew attention to himself with deliberately inflammatory political theater that escalated beyond control. Buruma refuses to blame the victim, though, giving equal weight to critics who insist Islam must adapt to European culture rather than the other way around, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch politician who scripted van Gogh's final film, an avant-garde indictment of the religion's treatment of women. There is a strong sense of journalistic immediacy to Buruma's cultural inquiry, and if the result is a slim volume, that's because his dense, thoughtful prose doesn't waste a single word. (Sept. 11)
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In America, radical Islam is a foreign policy problem. It is, in the Bush administration's familiar litany, the successor to Nazism and communism: an alien ideology, bred overseas, that threatens to bring destruction to America's shores. But in Europe, as Ian Buruma explains in Murder in Amsterdam, radical Islam is something different: less a foreign policy problem than a domestic one. It is alien but also strangely intimate. Islam, as Buruma notes -- following the French scholar Olivier Roy -- has (again) become a European religion. And while Europeans may be horrified by its mutant totalitarian strain, they can hardly view totalitarianism with innocent eyes, given that it too has deep roots in European soil.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, perhaps nowhere has Europe's Islamic question been as fraught as in Holland. First, in May 2002, Pim Fortuyn, Holland's most controversial politician and a fierce opponent of Muslim immigration, was murdered. When the murderer turned out to be an animal rights fanatic, not a jihadist, the Dutch let out a sigh of relief. But then, more than two years later, another flamboyant anti-Muslim crusader, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered as well -- this time by a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri. Bouyeri shot van Gogh repeatedly, cut his throat with a curved machete and pinned a note to the corpse calling for holy war and the murder of other prominent citizens. Walking away from the scene, he said, "Now you know what you people can expect in the future."

Soon after that, Buruma, a prominent American journalist born in Holland, went to his homeland to investigate. The result was a New Yorker article published in January 2005 and now expanded into a book.

For better and worse, Murder in Amsterdam still reads like a New Yorker article. At book length, its lack of a clear structure is problematic. The order in which characters appear sometimes seems random, and, in typical New Yorker style, Buruma's opinions remain somewhat submerged, confined to asides here and there. Despite the book's subtitle, The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Buruma never quite explains what he thinks those limits are. He nicely frames the question: Do Enlightenment values require that anti-Enlightenment values be respected or fought? But he remains frustratingly coy about the answer.

Murder in Amsterdam's strength is less as a meditation on the limits of tolerance than as a meditation on Holland. When Americans write about Islam in Europe, they often generalize across the continent, and they often lapse into clichés: European society is secular, morally permissive, deracinated, self-loathing. Buruma's portrait of Holland is more granular and more interesting. He portrays a society that may seem bland and proper but has a thirst for vicious satire. When van Gogh, in shocking terms, accused Muslims of bestiality and claimed a Jewish antagonist was sexually aroused by the Holocaust, Buruma argues that he was tapping into a peculiarly Dutch tradition: a blend of venom and irony in which you can say virtually anything as long as you do so with a wink. It is partly that ironic culture -- politics less as persuasion than as theater -- that Buruma argues is being contested in Holland today.

For jihadist fanatics such as Bouyeri and the pursuers of Salman Rushdie, insulting Islam is a crime that merits death. But interestingly, it is not merely jihadists who distrust the Dutch ironic style. So do passionate anti-Islamists, such as the Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who denounce Dutch society for not taking politics seriously enough, for not acknowledging the life-or-death struggle between Enlightenment values and fanatical Islamism taking place on their soil. Buruma compares Hirsi Ali to an ex-communist such as Arthur Koestler, who struggled to convince easy-going Western liberals to become militants in liberalism's cause -- because evil was real, because he had seen what they could not believe.

But while Buruma knows that certain outsiders (and many on the American right) see the Dutch as happy-go-lucky relativists unwilling to fight for -- or even believe in -- much of anything, his view is richer and more complex. Holland's conversion to secular, values-neutral liberalism, he notes, is a post-1960s phenomenon. And it may be less deeply rooted than it appears. If jihadists such as Bouyeri harbor fantasies about purified Islam, many Dutch secretly harbor purification fantasies of their own, of a "rural, joyous, traditional, and white" country -- a country that replaces anything-goes relativism with cultural and moral certainty. Watching hordes of Dutch soccer fans mocking a rival team known as the "Jews Club" by hissing -- and thus imitating the sound of gas -- Buruma is reminded that brutality and fanaticism are not recent imports to this tidy corner of Northwestern Europe. Hirsi Ali may want the Dutch to stand up for their values, but Buruma leaves the reader vaguely uneasy about what those values really are.

Reviewed by Peter Beinart
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Netherlands may be the Western country most affected by radical Muslim violence, with two major assassinations since 9/11, those of politician Pym Fortuyn, who had called for restrictions on Muslim immigration (Fortuyn's assassin wasn't Muslim, however), and media celebrity Theo Van Gogh, director of a film lambasting the Qur'an on women. Buruma returned to his homeland after Van Gogh's murder to gain understanding from figures in Dutch and Dutch Muslim politics and society who might provide it, including the Somali-born politician who wrote Van Gogh's fatal film, a Muslim prison chaplain, a teacher, a historian, and another Dutch Muslim politician. Their testimony disclosed that the vaunted Dutch multiculturalism is failing second--generation Dutch Muslims, the cohort to which Van Gogh's assassin and ordinary Muslim hooligans belong. There is enough credible blame for the situation to blanket all institutions and social strata in the Netherlands. Buruma sees the problem as primarily denying second-generation Muslims a home in the country in which they were born. An ideal, absorbing companion to Bruce Bawer's excoriating While Europe Slept (2006). Ray Olson
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Like many Dutch people, my wife found the news that the filmmaker Theo van Gogh had been murdered by a Muslim extremist shocking, in two senses of the word: shocking-tragic, and shocking-weird. She had worked with van Gogh, as producer of one of his television series in 1998, "Het Is Hier Verschrikkelijk Gezellig" ("It's Terribly Nice Here"). The show revolved around van Gogh insulting and humiliating people engaged in recreational activities he considered contemptible: executives playing paintball, couples flying off for "exotic weddings," swingers' clubs. (Today, we would call it "reality TV," but that term didn't exist yet; it was coined in 1999, also in the Netherlands, when a Dutch studio called Endemol came out with the original version of "Big Brother.") Van Gogh's public persona was that of a fat, abusive, witty, politically incorrect buffoon, equal parts Johnny Knoxville and Michael Moore, the self-proclaimed "dorpsgek" ("village idiot") of the Netherlands. That such a character should become a victim of international jihad seemed an absurd joke or category error, as though the 9/11 terrorists had tried to blow up the town of South Park.

"It's Terribly Nice Here" found van Gogh at a low ebb in his career. His shtick had begun to seem less repellently funny than just plain repellent. My wife's strongest visual memory of the director was of him passed out on the couch in the editing room, a beached whale in mismatched socks. But in subsequent years, van Gogh reestablished himself by taking on more serious projects, and turning his ridicule toward a new target: Islam. Starting in about 2000, anti-Muslim sentiments, once taboo in self-consciously tolerant Holland, were voiced with increasing openness and conviction. Van Gogh jumped on the bandwagon, saying a number of things that would probably have ended an American entertainer's career, notably his use of the epithet "goatfuckers."

Ian Buruma returns to his native land to explore the great dilemma of our time through the story of the brutal murder of controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh at the hands of an Islamic extremist.

It was the emblematic crime of our moment: On a cold November day in Amsterdam, an angry young Muslim man, Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants, shot and killed the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-grandnephew of Vincent and iconic European provocateur, for making a movie with the vocally anti-Islam Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali that "blasphemed" Islam. After Bouyeri shot van Gogh, he calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete, as if performing a ritual sacrifice, which in a very real sense he was.

The murder horrified quiet, complacent, prosperous Holland, a country that prides itself on being a bastion of tolerance, and sent shock waves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native country to try to make sense of it all and to see what larger meaning should and shouldn't be drawn from this story. The result is Buruma's masterpiece: a book with the intimacy and narrative control of a true-crime page-turner and the intellectual resonance we've come to expect from one of the most well-regarded journalists and thinkers of our time. Ian Buruma's entire life has led him to this narrative: In his hands, it is the exemplary tale of our age, the story of what happens when political Islam collides with the secular West and tolerance finds its limits.

Ian Buruma is currently Luce Professor at Bard College. His previous books include God's Dust, Behind the Mask, The Missionary & The Libertine, Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, Anglomania, and Bad Elements. He writes frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and the Financial Times.