Murder in Amsterdam

Ian Buruma

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782395652
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

It was an emblematic crime: on a November day in Amsterdam, an angry young Muslim man shot and killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, iconic European provocateur, for making a movie with the anti-Islam politician Ayaan Hersi Ali. After shooting van Gogh, Mohammed Bouyeri calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete. The murder horrified quiet, complacent Holland - a country that prides itself on being a bastion of tolerance - and sent shock waves around the world. In Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma describes what he found when he returned to his native country to try and make sense of van Gogh's death. The result is Buruma's masterpiece: a brave and rigorous study of conflict in our time, with the intimacy and control of a true-crime page-turner.

Contents

ONE
Holy War in Amsterdam

TWO
Thank You, Pim

THREE
The Healthy Smoker

FOUR
A Dutch Tragedy

FIVE
Submission

SIX
A Promising Boy

SEVEN
In Memoriam

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

ONE

Holy War in Amsterdam

1.

Ton (48), eyewitness to the murder of Theo van Gogh on November 2, 2004: “I heard Theo van Gogh beg for mercy. ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it!’ he cried. I saw him fall onto the bicycle path. His killer was so calm. That really shocked me. How you can murder a person in such cold blood, right there in the street?

“I had sleepless nights for weeks…. Every night I see Theo van Gogh fall and Mohammed B. quietly finishing his job…. Since then I trust very few people. Mohammed B. could be one’s neighbor. If I say ‘fucking nigger’ to a Surinamese, I’m called a racist, even though he can call me a whitey. You can no longer say what you think these days. No, we’ve become foreigners in our own country.”

NRC HANDELSBLAD, JULY 30, 2005

It was the coolness of his manner, the composure of a person who knew precisely what he was doing, that struck those who saw Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Moroccan-Dutchman in a gray raincoat and prayer hat, blast the filmmaker Theo van Gogh off his bicycle on a dreary morning in Amsterdam. He shot him calmly in the stomach, and after the victim had staggered to the other side of the street, shot him several more times, pulled out a curved machete, and cut his throat—“as though slashing a tire,” according to one witness.

Leaving the machete planted firmly in Van Gogh’s chest, he then pulled a smaller knife from a bag, scribbled something on a piece of paper, folded the letter neatly, and pinned it to the body with this second knife.

Van Gogh, a short fat man with blond curls, was dressed in his usual T-shirt and suspenders. Most people in Holland who watch TV or read the papers would have been familiar with this ubiquitous figure, known less for his films than for his provocative statements on radio and television, in newspaper and Internet columns, and in various courts of law, about everything from the alleged exploitation of the Holocaust by Jewish celebrities to the dangerous presence of a Muslim “fifth column” operating in Dutch society. He lay on his back, his hands stretched above his head, two knives sticking out from his chest, slaughtered like a sacrificial animal. Bouyeri gave the corpse a few hard kicks and walked away, without hurry, easy as could be, as though he had done nothing more dramatic than fillet a fish.

Still calm, he made no serious attempt to escape. While he reloaded his gun, a woman who happened by screamed: “You can’t do that!” “Yes, I can,” Bouyeri replied, before strolling into a nearby park with several patrol cars rushing to the scene, “and now you know what you people can expect in the future.” A shootout began. One bullet struck a policeman in his bulletproof vest. Another hit a passer-by in the leg. But then Bouyeri caught a police bullet in his own leg and was arrested. This was not part of the plan. Bouyeri had wanted to die as a martyr to his faith. We know this from statements he made later, and from the letter on Van Gogh’s chest.

The content of Bouyeri’s letter was not released to the public for several days. Perhaps it was thought to be too shocking, and likely to provoke further violence. It was in fact a long rambling tract, written in Dutch with a few quotations in Arabic, calling for a holy war against the unbelievers, and the deaths of a number of people mentioned by name. The tone was that of a death cult, composed in a language dripping with the imaginary blood of infidels and holy martyrs. The Dutch is correct but stilted, evidence of the author’s lack of literary skill perhaps, but also of several layers of awkward translation. Much of Bouyeri’s knowledge of radical Islamist rhetoric came from English translations of Arabic texts downloaded from the Internet.

The manner of Van Gogh’s murder, too, appears to have been inspired by imagery shooting around the world on websites. A CD-ROM disk was found in Bouyeri’s apartment with video film of more than twenty-three killings of “the enemies of Allah,” including the American reporter Daniel Pearl. These were taken from a Saudi website edited in London. Apart from the detailed images of men of various nationalities being beheaded, the CD contained pictures of a struggling man slowly having his head sawed off, taken from a Dutch porno site.

Bouyeri’s “open letter” was not actually addressed to Theo van Gogh himself, but to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somaliborn Dutch politician, who had made a short film with Van Gogh, entitled Submission, dramatizing what she saw as Islamic abuse of women by projecting quotations from the Koran onto the naked bodies of several young women. The film was first shown in a television program in which Dutch celebrities are asked to select scenes from their favorite films or television shows. Hirsi Ali chose Submission. Selecting one’s own work was unusual, perhaps even unprecedented, but Hirsi Ali was not a run-of-the-mill celebrity. In the year before Van Gogh’s murder she had become the most prominent critic of Islam in the Netherlands, speaking out in meetings with Muslim women, at party conferences, and on TV talk shows, repeating her message, over and over, that the Koran itself was the source of violent abuse. A delicate African beauty, Hirsi Ali had caught the public imagination by the eloquence and conviction of her public warnings against a religion which already had a sinister reputation. Here was a Muslim, or ex-Muslim, from Africa, telling Europeans that Islam was a serious threat. This was a disturbing message in a society used to public figures preaching multicultural tolerance, but it was also something many people wished to hear, some of the same people who would later turn against her.

Bouyeri’s letter was addressed to Hirsi Ali, as a heretic who had rebelled against her childhood faith and become a willing tool of “Zionists and Crusaders.” She was called a “soldier of evil” who had “turned her back on the Truth.” She was “a liar” who would “smash herself to pieces on Islam.” She would be destroyed, along with the United States, Europe, and Holland. For death would “separate Truth from lies,” and Islam would be “victorious through the blood of martyrs.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the most prominent target of this holy rage, but she was not the only one. Her “masters” were described in the letter as a Jewish cabal that ruled the Netherlands. This cabal included the mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, a secular man who actually tried his best to find common ground with the Muslim communities in his city (“holding things together,” as he put it). In a twist of awful irony, Cohen had also been attacked quite viciously by Theo van Gogh, among others, as an appeaser of Islamic extremism.

The shadow of World War II, the only war to reach the Dutch homeland since Napoleon’s invasion, is never far from any Dutch crisis. Van Gogh, with his unfailing instinct for the low blow, compared Cohen to a collaborationist mayor under Nazi occupation. Still, in Bouyeri’s jihad, Cohen would have to be annihilated. Another member of the alleged cabal was Jozua van Aartsen, then leader of the conservative VVD,* People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, which Hirsi Ali had recently joined as a member of parliament. The fact that he wasn’t Jewish at all was of course irrelevant. In the holy war against “Zionists and Crusaders,” ancestry counts for less than association.

Van Aartsen, too, invoked the last war. “These people,” he wrote in the NRC Handelsblad, the most august of the national newspapers, “don’t wish to change our society, they want to destroy it. We are their enemy, something we have not seen since 1940.” His party colleague, the finance minister, Gerrit Zalm, a personal friend of Van Gogh’s, declared that “we” were “at war” with the terrorists, and extra measures would be taken “on all fronts.” Matt Herben, leader of the populist LPF** party, founded by the late Pim Fortuyn, saw Islamic and Western civilizations at war on Dutch soil. Society, he said, “is being threatened by extremists who spit on our culture. They don’t even speak our language and walk around in funny dresses. They are a fifth column. Theo said this better than anyone.”

First it was a mosque in Huizen—three men tried to torch it with turpentine and gasoline. Then a mosque in Rotterdam was targeted, though only the door got scorched. There was another arson attempt at a mosque in Groningen. And in Eindhoven a bomb exploded in an Islamic school. Jan Peter Balkenende, the prime minister, quickly announced that “we” were not exactly at war; Holland was just “doing battle” against “radicalism.” Three Christian churches were attacked, in Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Amersfoort. Another Muslim school, in Uden, a small town in the south, was set on fire. Someone had written “Theo R.I.P.” on the wall. “The country is burning,” said the announcer on the television news.

In fact, the country wasn’t burning at all. The arsonists in Uden were a bunch of teenagers looking for kicks. The “civil war” that some feared, the pogroms on Muslim areas, the retaliations by newly recruited jihadis, none of this actually happened. Most people kept their cool. But the constant chatter of politicians, newspaper columnists, television pundits, headline writers, and editorialists in the popular press produced a feverish atmosphere in which the smallest incident, the slightest faux pas, would spark endless rounds of overheated commentary.

An orthodox imam from Tilburg refused to shake the hand of Rita Verdonk, minister for the integration of minorities. With all respect, the Syrian-born cleric said in halting Dutch, she was a woman, and his religion forbade physical contact with strange women. “But surely we are equals,” replied Verdonk a little peevishly, unsure what to do with her outstretched hand. She was right, they were equals, but equality may not have been the point. The imam’s refusal, maladroit no doubt, but not of huge significance, made the front page of every major newspaper. The sturdy figure of Rita Verdonk facing the bearded imam became a prime symbol of the Dutch crisis, of the collapse of multiculturalism, the end of a sweet dream of tolerance and light in the most progress...