Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance

A 26-year-old Moroccan-Dutchman, Bouyeri was a radicalized Muslim who took it upon himself to assassinate Theo van Gogh in response to van Gogh’s part in the making of the short film Submission. Bouyeri both shot and stabbed van Gogh, leaving a letter threatening the life of his collaborator on Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, harpooned in van Gogh’s chest. Intending to become a martyr for the faith, Bouyeri was instead captured by policed and forced to stand trial in the Netherlands, where he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Described by those in the courtroom as being coolly detached from the goings on around him, Bouyeri serves as a prime example of Muslim youth living in the Netherlands who feel that, although they wish to be part of the society, they are actively barred from fully entering into it. Pulled between the Netherlands, the land of his birth, and Morocco, the land of his forefathers and culture, Bouyeri suffered from a type of cultural displacement in which he was in many ways neither Dutch nor Moroccan. Radicalized following a series of failed attempts at self-betterment, Bouyeri is both a cautionary tale and a warning for Europe in its attempt to find a way to both enable the integration of Muslim immigrants into its culture and allow for them to maintain central elements of their culture, the latter which may at times conflict with European liberal ideals.  

Originally a Somali refugee, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a vocal activist against violence against women and political Islam. Having come from a background and culture where Islam was both the prime social norm as well as the foundation for social law, Hirsi Ali’s exodus and life in the Netherlands serves as a stark backdrop to the suppression and struggle common to many Muslim women living in Muslim countries. Quick to criticize any Muslim women living in Europe who fail to “break free” from the shackles of Islam, she has been both lavishly praised and roundly criticized. Her many critics citing the fact that she is, in many ways, playing the part of the European and using her past as a means to garner the support of liberal and conservative ideologues alike who feel that Islam is a threat to Western European culture. As the driving force behind the film Submission, Hirsi Ali required round the clock protection until she was ultimately forced to leave the Netherlands for applying for refugee status under false pretenses. 

Cohen was the Mayor of Amsterdam at the time of Theo van Gogh’s assassination. Cohen is of Jewish ancestry and seen as another divisive political figure in Dutch politics and society. Caught between the far right, who view him as a liberal apologist for the faults within the Muslim community, he is also seen as a Jewish, and therefore untrustworthy by many in the Muslim community.

An Iranian émigré living and working as a professor in the Netherlands, Ellian is another harsh critic of political Islam: “Seen by some as a dangerous agitator, and by others as a hero who arrived from the Muslim world to shake the Dutch from their deep sleep,” Ellian believes that “no religion or minority should be immune to censure or ridicule” (25). A proponent of Enlightenment ideals, he believes that Islam requires its own Enlightenment, its own “Voltaire [or] a Muslim Nietzsche” (25), in order to shock the system of Islam into modernizing some of its more backward traditions. Ellian is also equally critical of Western Europeans who have no idea what they have and their seeming readiness to cede centuries of social progress in the name of blind multi-culturalism.

“A populist outsider who almost became Prime Minister” (37), Fortuyn was a Dutch politician, civil servant, sociologist, professor, and author. A loud, flamboyant homosexual man, he, despite this fact, manage to galvanize much of the conservative base of the Netherlands. Referred to as a “peddler of nostalgia” (47) by Buruma and “the divine baldy” (39) by van Gogh, Fortuyn was of a modest middle-class background but aspired to gaudy grandeur. Widely published and influential as a “purple” (50) politician, that is a hybrid between the traditional liberal and conservative Dutch political parties, Fortuyn was a myriad of contradictions: a Catholic in a profoundly Protestant country; flamboyant in a culture that prides itself on frugality of appearance; and a highly opinionated opponent to multi-culturalism in a country known for tolerance. He was murdered by Volkert van der Graaf, an animal rights activist on May 6, 2002. After his murder, Fortuyn was topped a “poll” (45) done by a Dutch television station that asked the citizens to determine the greatest figure in Dutch history. 

A Dutch animal rights activist, Volkert van der Graaf assassination the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn on May 6, 2002. He apparently believed Fortuyn to be “like Hitler” (41). He objected to Fortuyn’s “opportunism […] unwillingness to sacrifice his own interests […] his arrogance” (41). Van der Graaf supposedly most despised Fortuyn for using the Muslim issue within the Netherlands for personal political gain and believed that he was doing the country a service by ridding it of someone so objectionable to normal Dutch Calvinist principles.