An intriguing analysis of the van Gogh killing from Reuters, with thanks to LGF:
AMSTERDAM, Nov 3 (Reuters) - The killing of a filmmaker critical of Islam puts new strains on Dutch traditions of tolerance and will fuel demands for tougher treatment of immigrants, analysts and commentators said on Wednesday.Theo van Gogh, who angered Muslims with a film that said Islam encouraged violence against women, was shot dead on Tuesday. A man with Dutch and Moroccan nationality was arrested for the killing, and suspected of Islamic extremist motives.
Commentators said the murder showed attempts to integrate immigrants had failed and threatened to make race relations worse in a country where 10 percent of the population is defined as "non-Western" foreigners -- many Muslim Moroccans and Turks.
"...threatened to make race relations worse..." There they go again. This is not, for the thousandth time, a racial problem. I don't care if Sharia advocates have skin that is brown or white or green or blue. This is a conflict of ideologies, and until Europe and America realize that, they will continue to have a dangerous blindspot in regard to radical Islam.
Maybe that blindspot is clearing today in Holland.
"This event shows what kind of climate we have allowed to develop. What kind of people we have allowed in and just allowed to go their own way. How we have much too long just let things go to seed," sociologist Herman Vuijsje told the Volkskrant daily.A country built on trade, with a reputation for openness and liberal policies on issues from drug use to gay marriage, the Netherlands has seen a rise in hostility towards foreigners since the rise in 2002 of taboo-busting populist Pim Fortuyn.
Tapping into a wave of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, the openly gay Fortuyn said the Netherlands could not absorb more foreigners, demanded tougher integration policies and criticised Muslim views on homosexuality and women.
TOO TOLERANT?
Noting that Fortuyn's murder and that of Van Gogh came 911 days apart -- a reference to the U.S. abbreviation for Sept. 11 -- De Telegraaf newspaper said lenient immigration policies had turned an open society into a "resentful and intolerant" one.
"Afraid of being called racist, we have been so tolerant with regard to these religious fascists that they have been allowed to merrily undermine the roots of our freedom," it said.
A group of far-right protesters shouting "Islamists, parasites" were arrested in The Hague on Tuesday after the killing and a right-wing group of Fortuyn supporters were due to hold a demonstration in Amsterdam later on Wednesday.
"I don't rule out unrest. The climate is seriously hardened," said Interior Minister Johan Remkes.
Mat Herben, a Fortuyn supporter, said Van Gogh's death had shown that the country was embroiled in a clash of cultures:
"Society is threatened by extremists who reject our culture. They are the fifth column and Theo saw that more than anybody."
"Afraid of being called racist, we have been so tolerant with regard to these religious fascists that they have been allowed to merrily undermine the roots of our freedom," it said.
For my Dutch friends, wisdom from the mouths of babes:
Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.
European papers and writers must start using the term 'da'wa' to describe the way so-called 'integration' is conceptualized by Muslims.
Da'wa...not integration. Integration, as that notion is understood in the West (acceptance of basic value systems and the political authority of the new home country), is utterly irrelevant, a conceptual impossibility in Islam.
And the logic of da'wa:
The issue is not how to Muslims must adapt and 'integrate' to their new Western homes, but how these Western homes ('homes' that rightfully belong to Allah) can be made to adapt to Islam.
And the time horizon is indefinite, as long as it takes, for 'Allah sees and knows all things..'
Some time ago a French blogger said that he had so loved Hugh's article 'Douce France' that he had forwarded it to everyone he knew, and that no one cared to discuss it.
I post a link to that article again. Perhaps there are now more ears to hear.
Douce France
Or if you would just like the URL:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/002334.php
And here is a URL to a translator:
http://www.systransoft.com/
Best to all
What the heck. Let's pull out the stops. Here it is.
Douce France
By Hugh Fitzgerald
Posted DhimmiWatch, June 23, 2004
"Imagine that you are a cosseted member of the French elite. One child is doing the khâgne, aiming for rue d’Ulm. Another is now a politechnicien. You are very comfortable, working for the state. You and your spouse are journalists, or writers, or one of that vast tribe of people conducting “recherches” and life is comfortable, good, the way it should be. Yes, you do notice more and more Muslims about you as you walk, no longer in the banlieues, but in the center of Paris, or Toulouse, or Lyon. And you remember how uneasy you felt, four years ago, when you happened to be walking on the Cannebière in Marseille. You decided, then and there, that you would not return.
And you have friends who live in the south. And they tell you that the beurs – some call them maghrébins -- make life hell for everyone. They attack French children on the way to school. They vandalize cars. They threaten, and do more than threaten, anyone who is still foolish enough to walk out wearing a kippah or a cross. Whole areas of cities in the south, as in the north, and east, and west, have become off-limits to non-Muslims. In the schools, the teachers have lost authority. They cannot even cover the subjects of World War II, the Resistance, and the murders of the Jews as the state prescribes; they fear, with reason, the violent reaction of the Muslim students.
And as the schools become more and more dangerous for non-Muslim students and teachers, with more time and resources devoted to discipline rather than to learning, French parents and would-be parents are now silently factoring into their childbearing plans the present value of the future cost of what, they see, will now have to be added: private school tuition. And that means, of course, that those French people will plan on smaller families. And they will also be factoring in the growing cost, paid by them, those French taxpayers, for the whole expanding edifice of security, the guards in the schools, the guards at the train stations and métro stations and airports and at government buildings everywhere, the costs of keeping the gravestones from being vandalized, the costs of protecting the synagogues and the churches, the costs for all those tapped phones and agents in mosques, and subsidies to lawyers and judges to hear charges and try cases against Muslims, and the costs of monitoring da'wa in the prisons (more than 50% Muslim).
But the Muslims are indifferent to expenses incurred by the French state. France is part of the world; the world belongs to Allah, and to his Believers. That doctrine has remained immutable for 1400 years. Imam Bouziane, the one they keep trying to deport, had 16 children by two wives, all living on the French state: a representative Muslim man. Over time, the difference between average family size of Muslims and non-Muslims steadily increases. And, over time, the education system continues to disintegrate. Right now, perhaps, you cannot see it. Your children go to the best schools, followed by the best lycées. You vacation in Normandy, or Brittany, or the Ile de Ré. And you do not take the metro often enough, or walk in the right districts, or work in the right factories or offices, to understand what tens of millions of your fellow Frenchmen now have to endure. You, for the moment, are still immune, still willfully unaware. You have spent the last few decades learning about the Muslim world from Eric Rouleau, and his epigones (after they silenced Peroncel-Hugoz, the one journalist who reported the truth) in Le Monde. You are deeply-versed in the constantly reported-upon, endlessly dilated-upon, perfidy of the mighty empire of Israel. You know what we have all had dinned into us: that the Arab Muslims are reasonable people, with clearly-justified grievances, grievances so reasonable and so limited in scope, that justice demands they be satisfied. Everyone agrees on the “solution.” It is called a “two-state solution” and of course it is a “solution” for otherwise, of course, it would not have been called a “solution.”
And everything looks the way it always has looked: the linden trees, the river, the bridges, the réverbères, the étalage in the neighborhood boulangerie. Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance. At the end of the school day, chic mothers still congregate in little towns, or small cities, outside the school – this or that Ecole Jules Ferry -- waiting to pick up their children. Here come the littlest ones, from Maternelle, running up now -- just look at how small they are. And here are the CE1 group, with those huge cartables on their tiny backs. Run, run, run, to Mommy. Oop-la. And then the years of study, study, study marked by ever-larger cahiers -- "cahier" and "cartable" are the words that identify French DNA better than Piaf or gauloises, isn't that true? And now we will read the books, and study the subjects, set down so completely and precisely by the Ministry of Education. And now we are up to the final year, preparing for the Bac, with copies of blue-backed BALISES, guides to Les Châtiments and La Peau de Chagrin. And just look at the results listed in the newspaper: Claire-Alix has a mention très bien. Fantastic. Everything is fine, everything will always stay the same, whole countries cannot change. It’s not possible.
But it is changing, coming apart, quietly, slowly --let’s not look too closely, we mustn't pay too much attention -- the streets, the schools, the hospitals, the ability to speak the truth about things, about life as it is lived, la vita vissuta as they like to say in a neighboring country. Dominique de Villepin always knew there was nothing to worry about; he was born, after all, in Salé, next to Rabat, even spent a few years of his infancy there; of course he knows his Arabs, his Muslims. And surely Eric Rouleau, who for decades in Le Monde was the resident expert on the Middle East (he was so knowledgeable that he never had to so much as mention the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunna), surely he knew everything, didn't he? And those French translations of Edward Said that denounced with such passion the Islamophobia, and those vicious cliches with which the blind and rotting West has always caricatured the Arab Muslim world. Oh, we have been so terrible to the Arabs, we colonialists, we French, we Westerners. And then there is the never-ending outrage of Israel, that running colonial sore. Of course, they have every right, those Muslims, to come here to France. We went to their countries once, now they come to ours. And they have every right to hate us, don’t they?
So now we have decided not to understand, and to cut all ties of sympathy to, Israel -- and how did we ever have any sympathy for it in the first place, the way some of our parents did back in 1948 or 1956 or 1967? How could they not have seen what the "Palestinian people" had to endure? Hanan, Yasser, Said, Saeb, Aziz, Walid, Rashid, Mohammed -- you have won our hearts and minds. Take us, do with us what you will.
No one will mention what is happening or what kinds of things we must begin to think about doing to save ourselves. No one of any decency. And whatever Le Pen and Megret say, we must say the opposite (except, of course, when they show their hostility to "the Jews"). Do not say those things, do not think them. Free thought is all very well in theory, but really -- consider the consequences. Don't dare to think outside that box brimming with idées reçues. Défense de penser au dehors du box.
No, everything will be all right as you stroll down the Avenue Paule-Anne. Those Muslims will never be a match for us. Why, just look at those legionnaires marching à pas lent down the Champs-Elysées, think of that string of desert victories. Inside our heads, it is 1930 and over here is the Exposition coloniale. You remember, tu t’en souviens, that painting by le Douanier Rousseau, don't you, with the burnoosed Arab standing next to the black Senegalese? I have it right, don’t I? France will always be France. Nothing will ever change.
At a certain point, and despite everything that causes you not to see what is staring you in the face, you realize that something has gone irreparably wrong with your country, and you, and your children, are in danger of losing that country, down to every village and house, qui m’est une province et beaucoup davantage. And you do not know what to do, or how to explain this feeling to others, or in whom to confide your secret fears, or what can be done. It is so confusing, and so upsetting. You cannot vote for Le Pen. You cannot endorse "cowboy" Bush or those ridiculous Americans. You have no place to go.
And then you learn what Jacques Chirac -- who now has a Muslim grandchild himself -- and Dominique de Villepin, do not wish you to learn. For if you did, you might be very angry. You discover that 1 out of every 3 babies born in France today is a Muslim baby. And that means, in 20 years, one of every three 20-year-olds in France will be a Muslim twenty-year-old. And that means, twenty years after that, at present rates of reproduction, France will have a majority Muslim population. Where shall we hide the statues from Marly-le-roi? And the Venus de Milo? And what about all those paintings of animated life -- all those portraits in the Louvre, and the Grand Palais, and the Musée Guimet down there in linden-lined Aix, and everywhere else in art-filled artful France, mère des arts, des armes, et des loix -- that are absolutely forbidden according to the immutable strictures of the Qur'an. Should they be sent for safekeeping to those Americans across the seas? By then most of the Jews in France will have left, gone across the oceans for their own safekeeping, to Israel or to English-speaking Canada (they were worried about the Muslim population of Quebec, you see, which had been allowed to grow under the Province of Quebec's policy of encouraging francophone immigrants, preferring North Africans to potential immigrants from Italy, Greece, Spain), and above all, to America. What luck those Americans have had. No more bequests to France by the likes of the Rothschilds, or Nissim Camondo. No more Donations from another Pierre Lévy. Enjoy the Kufic calligraphy; some find it endlessly fascinating.
For the moment, you allow yourself to believe that something will come up. Most likely, all those Muslims will simply convert. I mean, they do that, don't they, quite easily I'm told. Of course, why didn't I think of it, that is exactly what will happen. The situation is always saved in time. Just like during the war. Nothing to worry about. Nothing."
Nothing must be allowed to interfere with our masters' grand plans for Euro-Arab integration, which itself is part of a wider plan to isolate and usurp America. (The latest recruit appears to be China, with the latter signing up for Galileo, and working closely with the French.) The lives of little people like Theo van Gogh, or anyone else who gets in the way, count for nothing. The oil money will continue to pour into the bank accounts of our politicians and their media lackeys, and the muslim hordes will follow, as surely as night follows day.
Hmmm it seems all of the 'tiny extremist minority' seems to have passed by the same place at the same time.
Take a look at this article. Summary: An artist creates a life sized portrait of Theo van Gogh. Morroccan bystanders starts chanting slogans and even spit on the image!
http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/15329121/Marokkanen_spugen_op_portret_Van_Gogh.html
Great article, Hugh.
Being highly sympathetic to the older Gereformeerde tradition, I have a thought or two on Dutch tolerance.
Although it led the nation to victory in the Eighty Years War, the Reformed churches never had the clear-cut majority in the northern Netherlands that they had in other countries where they were influential (Scotland; certain Swiss cities and Cantons; Turkish vassal Hungary and Transylvania briefly). Many remained Roman Catholic, and the Anabaptists--many of whom were driven into the fighting Reformed Church by the brutalities of the Duke of Alva's troops--never really disappeared.
It was probably easy for the Reformed Netherlands to accept a range of Protestant dissenters; especially if they were Anabaptist of the Mennonite rather than Jan of Leyden variety. The Jews were no military-political threat, and also provided links to Mediterranean and Baltic commerce. Yet it seems that an Islam in ferment is a difficult community to absorb.
Maybe it is time for Europeans (and North Americans) to re-appropriate their Christian heritage and do a little "Da'wa" of their own--perpetually remind Muslims that the Qu'ran shows every sign of being the half-baked notions of someone who got his biblical lore by word of mouth and then decided to become a prophetic charlatan--a 7th century Joe Smith.
I've already suggested to translate the Douce France of Hugh into french. Alors si vous le voulez bien Mr Fitzgerald faites-moi signe ...
And thank you HUGH, for retaining at least temporarily , my comments to your eloquent Douce France, which i have recopied having forgotten i wrote it.
Chevalier de St George