One of the core themes in all my writings about the Theo van Gogh murder has been that the mainstream media in most of the world was not well equipped to understand the complexities of Dutch society and the peculiar dynamics that led up to Theo’s murder two years ago this week. It requires knowledge and context and only now are journalistic efforts about the Dutch and their immigration woes starting to acknowledge that. The boilerplate “the Dutch were tolerant, immigrants Muslims moved in, a murder happened, and now tolerance is over and the Dutch have turned right” is not an adequate way to analyze the deep social and political rifts that have captured the small nation. For that you need someone with a deeper understanding of the situation and in Ian Buruma, a Dutch-English writer who spent most of his adult life away from The Netherlands, have we found someone who could probably be trusted with the task to write a book about the Van Gogh murder. His Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance is the result, and it is an excellent and riveting read.

Buruma doesn’t disappoint, putting even a mixture of shame and recognition on my face when he writes that the Dutch are a little too complacent, too smug, something that turns into absolute panic and manifest surprise when that feeling of smugness is challenged by the outside world. The best example of which is their national sport, soccer, where the Dutch have an ingrained sense that they’re the best but when they lose they scream out, “How come? We were the best!”. And this of course applies equally to the unfolding immigration farce and the ensuing murder which ended the much vaunted Dutch idyll. "Did we really deserve this? How come, we tried to be so nice, can anyone possibly explain this?" It is this lack of understanding and failure to accept basic realities as they are, which constitute a terrible default in the Dutch character and Buruma addresses it head on.

And not only that. He digs deep into the Dutch psyche, most notably the contentious relationship the present Dutch have with their chequered past role during World War II, which is a recurring theme around which much of the narrative is built. It is vital in understanding why immigrants have been treated the way they have and it is equally forceful in revealing how references to those years can have a devastating impact on the present day political debate. Buruma no doubt delves into his own vault of youthful experiences, but updates them with interviews, meetings and site visits during his stay in The Netherlands and so turns his book into a fairly comprehensive socio-political case study. From that perspective it would have been nice to have a thicker volume than the 265 pages that we eventually got, but in the end the book needs to be pumped into a mass marketing channel too I guess.

There has been a fair bit of criticism for Buruma, most notably that he failed to take a clear moral stance and was not sufficiently judgmental in taking sides in the conflict between free societies and nascent Islamism. To be frank, I was relieved to for once have a book in my hands that did not do that. Buruma is clear enough in what he thinks about jihadism, and instead gives us equal access to the Dutch and Moroccan cultures, and more specifically to Theo van Gogh’s life and Mohammed Bouyeri’s life. The only point where I do part ways with Buruma is his less than generous description of Pim Fortuyn whom he describes as 'pandering in nostalgia', even going as far as comparing the murdered professor-politician to the late Princess Diana. It’s a criticism often heard from those that do not entirely accept the intellectual underpinnings of Fortuyn’s political platform. The back to basics part is often mistakenly interpreted as a desperate “please take us back to the 1950s” call.

But the events that triggered Van Gogh’s murder are well-described. The total religious-cultural separation and potential for disaster, become very clear when Van Gogh and friends had organized a debate with the European-Arab League, led by Abou Jahjah. The latter refused to debate when he learned that Van Gogh was to be the moderator and walked out of the studio with his bodyguards. A debate followed outside the studio where young Moroccans shouted insults to Van Gogh who brushed them off with the usual crass Dutch humor along the lines of “if Allah protects you, why do you need bodyguards?”. It prompted one of his friends to say “It was then, that I realized how deeply they hated him. For us, it was just a game, a debating game. For them it was deadly serious”

That in a nutshell describes the incredible distance that even Theo van Gogh never fully understood. In a way he made exactly the same mistake as his fellow countrymen that were diametrically opposed to him when it came to dealing with immigrants. They advocated respect, political correctness and a far different approach to the issue, but they also failed to see that the mechanics of the debate were never about economics or culture. It was religion and a pretty stern and narrow approach to that, something the increasingly secular Dutch had long forgotten.

In the end of the book Buruma tries to explore ways where tolerance could neutralize the perils of radical Islam and hopes that religion can ultimately become the subject of reasoned debate, even for Muslims. This quote from the writer makes it clear where the boundaries between the Koran and fundamentalism are:

“Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China’s man made famines or the Soviet Gulag solely by inviting the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point”

Yes, correct, but this conclusion can also be explained in another direction by arguing that however well-meaning the basic tenets of Islam are, they have the potential to be turned around into a deadly totalitarian ideology. Theo van Gogh in his own distinctive way was not given to this type of socio-political analysis, but instinctively understood the dangers of history in the making. Yet at the heart he remained a Dutchman, a little too complacent and somewhat oblivious of the immediate perils. One can only imagine the panic he must have felt when he was butchered to death on an Amsterdam street.

Others Reviewing
Claire Berlinski - Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world in the Globe and Mail
Bruce Bawer – When Worlds Collide in The Boston Globe
Eric Weinberger – The Perils of Going Dutch for the Wilson Quarterly
Theodore Dalrymple - The Avant-Garde of the Apocalypse in City Journal
Brendan Kiley - Bicycle Drive-Bys in The Stranger
Matt Steinglass - Murder in Amsterdam in Salon
And our friend Tigerhawk, who is still reading the book