No tolerance, please, we’re Dutch

Rod Liddle says that Islamic terrorism has turned the liberal Dutch into hard-headed neocons, almost

Amsterdam

They’ve been doing a spot of mosque-burning recently, the Dutch. Couple of petrol bombs through the front door and woof — that’s Friday prayers postponed indefinitely. I don’t suppose they bothered to take their shoes off, either, the perpetrators.

It’s all very nasty and very, very unDutch. Holland is the country where everything is allowed, where everything is tolerated, from dope in the coffee houses, to fat-thighed whores baying for your money in frowzy shop windows, to imams suggesting that it’s OK to beat up women every now and then. The Dutch model seemed to be this: we’ll have our whores and our homosexuals and our cannabis over here and you can smack your women around over there in your Maghrebian ghetto. Live and let live. Mutual tolerance.

But all that is changing. What’s happened in Holland is a warning: one commentator calls it ‘Education By Death’ — the process which made the silent majority in America become militant after 9/11, which galvanised the Australians after the Bali bomb, which led to the fall of the Aznar government after the Madrid train bombing. The transformation of achingly liberal and endlessly tolerant Western people into resolute neocons. And in the case of Holland, the death which has been doing the educating was that of an iconoclastic film-maker and broadcaster, Theo van Gogh, a distant relative of that one-eared painter.

Van Gogh was murdered by a savage from the Dark Ages, a savage with extensive contacts within the world of militant Islam. It was not enough simply to kill him. The assailant, a 26-year-old Dutchman of Moroccan extraction called Mohammed Bouyeri, shot van Gogh eight times. But van Gogh was still not dead, so Bouyeri stabbed him through the heart with one knife and then attempted to hack off his head with another before plunging the knife through his stomach and affixing a scrawled letter of Islamic hatred and illiterate doggerel to the man’s body. A letter which also issued a fatwa against a bunch of Dutch politicians, some of whom are now in hiding with the benefit of police protection.

This was back on 2 November. Since then Holland has been in shock. Van Gogh was undoubtedly a controversialist and, despite a background on the unorthodox Left, was not well liked by the liberals. His last film, Submission, about Muslim mistreatment of women, was the one that did for him — that and a book called Allah Knows Best which showed the author mocked up as an imam. So he was not to everybody’s taste. And maybe the Dutch politicians could have been forgiven for expecting his murder — however brutal and horrific and very unDutch — to arouse little more than a passing sadness. But instead, it enraged and frightened the nation — the flowers placed at the site of the murder stretched across the street and around the corner. And then we had the mosque burnings and, by way of retaliation, a few church burnings, too. And, together with this, a fundamental rethink of that old notion, tolerance, and a re-evaluation of multiculturalism.

The Dutch immigration and intervention minister, Rita Verdonk, said this: ‘For too long we have said we had a multicultural society and everyone would simply find each other. We were naive.’ Still are, it might be argued. The government has responded to the public clamour by attempting to deport 26,000 illegal immigrants, mostly from Morocco, and introducing a rather more rigorous citizenship test than the one we have in Britain. In Holland, immigrants are responsible for their own integration and must pay €3,000 to take the test. Failure to comply results in fines or being booted out of the country. Again, all very unDutch. There are other encouraging signs, too: some two thirds of Holland’s lower house now wishes to revoke the 1930 Blasphemy Laws (exactly what Labour are now proposing, by the way).

But these are only small stirrings which have done almost nothing to address the fundamental problem — and the anger of the indigenous white population grows more splenetic by the day. I daresay this anger is exacerbated every time a ‘moderate’ imam appears on television to announce that although he regretted the murder of Theo van Gogh, he’s nonetheless very glad indeed that he’s dead. This happened just a few weeks ago.

In truth, though, the liberal political elite still clings to this rather fuzzy notion of tolerance, despite the acceptance in government circles that Bouyeri was not a lone nutter but part of an organised Islamic cell known as the Hofstad Group, which constitutes ‘a violent movement against the principles and values of the state’. And despite the fact that, as ministers trawl the Muslim ghettoes attempting to make them feel part of a caring and inclusive society, the official Muslim denunciations of the murder are at best equivocal. It’s a bit naughty, but we can understand how it happened, they say, shaking their heads. (But not, as it happens, shaking the hands of the female government ministers, because Allah wouldn’t like it.) Shortly after the murder of van Gogh, the Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, clambered aboard a bandwagon which had been set rolling by a bunch of ‘concerned’ media moppets. This was for everyone in the country to wear an orange wristband signifying unity and tolerance. You can also buy badges bedecked with a picture of a little bumblebee in support of the government slogan ‘Bee Tolerant’ (geddit?). But it has not done much to pacify the country. Right now, Dutch tolerance is in short supply.

There are broader fears at large. One recent study suggested that within six years at least three large Dutch cities will have an effective Muslim majority. There’s also the nightmare scenario of the Low Countries’ caliphate. There are enormous and growing Muslim populations in towns and cities dotted along the coast from Lille to Rotterdam — populations which will one day be in the majority. That’ll put an end to the booze cruises, then.

And all of this is aided and abetted by the European Union, its liberal immigration laws, its espousal of multiculturalism and, crucially, its implicit disavowal of the concept of a sovereign nation state with a coherent national identity. Holland is a small country which has become accustomed to not throwing its weight around. It gave up the guilder without much of a fuss. Its very language seems happy to take a back seat: you will find Dutch far less in evidence at Schiphol airport, for example, than you would find Welsh at Cardiff-Wales airport, and the language of Holland’s capital city is, effectively, English.

How, then, do you attempt to inculcate a belief in unity and nationhood among new citizens when the nation is withering away in front of you? For the Islamists, democracy and nationhood are subordinate to the will of Allah, but for too long Holland has ceded its own democracy and nationhood — and lan guage and currency — to Brussels. Brussels versus Allah. I wonder who would win?

I spoke to one of Theo van Gogh’s closest friends, Theodor Holman. He’s a columnist and film-maker too. ‘We fear the end for the freedom of speech in our country,’ he told me. ‘Now we are not allowed to say what we believe. We must be very careful. We might be killed. And the politicians who brought us to this mess are not doing anything about it. Orange wristbands!’ he laughed. ‘Still they tell us we must respect Islam. Why must we?’ It is a question you hear more and more frequently; in Holland but also in Britain, where the government pursues the same line of threatening to punish people who attack the Islamic creed while locking up others who espouse it.

Van Gogh was murdered on a cold November morning at 8.40 a.m., just down the road from the huge police station near the Oosterpark. After he had been shot eight times he lay on the ground incapacitated, and Bouyeri approached, gun held out before him. It was during this appalling, terrifying moment that van Gogh, a scourge of the liberals, uttered a very Dutch plea for tolerance.

‘Please ... stop... , ’ he said. ‘We can still talk about this.’ And then, as Bouyeri removed his knife: ‘Please. Have mercy.’ But he was addressing someone to whom the civilities of Dutch life are anathema. There was no talking to be done. And there was no mercy.