A very Dutch killing: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2006/10/15 > A very Dutch killing

A very Dutch killing
Sunday, October 15, 2006 - Reviewed by Jonathan O'Brien
Murder In Amsterdam, by Ian Buruma, Atlantic Books, €19.10.

There was something extremely Dutch about the fact that Theo van Gogh, one of the most famous people in the Netherlands, was travelling to his workplace on a bicycle when he was murdered on November 2, 2004. As the film-maker trundled along an Amsterdam street on a bitterly cold morning, a young man named Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants, stepped forward and blasted him off his bike with eight bullets, before standing over the corpse, slitting its throat and leaving two knives embedded in the chest.

The Van Gogh murder was described as awake-up call for Dutch society, an incident of naked brutality that would shake it out of its cosy complacency.

As Ian Buruma explains in this illuminating account of the killing and its sociopolitical context, however, it turned out to be both more and less than that.

To describe Van Gogh as a far more rabid Dutch version of Eamon Dunphy - he was a motormouth controversialist ready to spout an opinion on everything from immigration to rape - wouldn’t come close to capturing his unique essence.

He was a nauseating boor whose worldview could be summed up in the words: if it moves, insult it. Yet Buruma describes him here as ‘‘not at all an ignorant man’’. Perhaps his vitriol came from a dark, deep-seated nihilism, rather than a mere attention-seeking impulse.

During numerous appearances on Dutch TV, he described the prophet Mohammed as ‘‘a pimp’’ and Muslims as ‘‘goat-fuckers’’.

Eager to be viewed as an equal-opportunity provocateur, he let the Jewish community have it with equal vehemence, accusing one of his contemporaries, the novelist and film-maker Leon de Winter, of only being able to ‘‘satisfy his wife by wrapping barbed wire around his penis and crying ‘Auschwitz!”‘

Buruma is himself a native of the Netherlands, and returned there in the wake of the Van Gogh murder to attempt to make sense of how it could happen in a country that had spent centuries moulding and shaping itself as the ultimate liberal democracy. Though, as it turned out, this ceaseless striving for social perfection had had the knock-on effect of suffusing the Netherlands’ political culture in overwhelming self-satisfaction.

Two and a half years before Van Gogh met his end, the country had already experienced what might be termed its first Olof Palme moment, when the politician Pim Fortuyn, a charismatic right-wing populist who wore his homosexuality on his sleeve, was gunned down in a radio station car park in Hilversum in May 2002.

Fortuyn’s own politics fed off the national smugness, making him a splash of lurid colour on the country’s grey political canvas. ‘‘Holland is full,” he liked to say on the subject of immigration - then, without drawing breath, he would launch into a reverie about his penchant for sleeping with Moroccan youths.

As Buruma explains, Van Gogh presented the starkest of contrast s with the well-groomed Fortuyn in his expensive double-breasted suits: ‘‘the huge pink belly straining under old t-shirts, the nicotine-stained teeth, the nose-picking, the scratching, the general disdain for personal hygiene’’.

Whereas Fortuyn wanted to join the boss-class on his own terms, Van Gogh saw class as just one more thing getting in the way of his message.

The third figure in the story is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born politician whose detestation of extreme Islam saw her cast herself in the role of a righteous moderniser bringing enlightenment to Holland’s Muslims. She is depicted here as a well-meaning do-gooder whose ‘‘real ambition was to be the Voltaire of Islam’’.

Van Gogh’s most notorious project, and the one that arguably got him killed, was Submission, a 10-minute film about violence against women in Islamic societies. Full of images of misogynistic passages from the Koran inscribed on naked and half-shrouded female bodies, with a voiceover provided by Hirsi Ali herself, it provoked a string of death threats against him. Van Gogh’s response was as derisive as his attitude to everything else. ‘‘Who’d want to kill the village idiot?” he scoffed.