Afraid very liberal Dutch are going to have to do a rethink about just about everything. I just hope they have enough time...

Posted by: Morgane at July 16, 2004 7:02 AM

Do you think that their opinions might change once a bomber splatters their children across a wall? That always seems to bring liberals back down to Earth...

Posted by: Bob Owens at July 16, 2004 9:44 AM

When the far-seeing Pim Fortuyn was murdered by van de Graff, a madman agitated at Fortuyn's views on Muslim immigration,at the funeral the Times reporter recorded a woman, weeping, old enough to have lived through the war, that war which the guiltless Anne Frank did not survive, and in which the guilty Menten not only survived, but thrived on the loot stolen from his prewar Jewish friends and patrons: "Now we are lost." The statement stuck in one's brain; it seemed an extravagant remark.

Was it? Will the spirit of Pim Fortuyn or that remarkable journalist of the 1930s and 1940s, Pierre van Paassen, prevail -- or will it be the craven spirit of Menten, and of plutocrat and central banker Wil Duisenberg's antisemitic and, not surprisingly, philo-Muslim wife?

In any case, were I the Director of the Rijksmuseum, or of those museums in Den Haag or Delft, I would be making plans to wrap it all up, in both senses. During World War II the United States of America received among its human gifts the great art historians of the Continent, and not only from Germany, but from other countries of Occupied Europe -- such as the French art historian Henri Focillon. In World War IV, as Europe perhaps dies its quiet death, slowly succumbing to Islam (an entirely avoidable fate), perhaps the art of Europe's museums will now follow.

Happy to oblige.

Posted by: Hugh at July 16, 2004 10:05 AM

Hugh :
"When the far-seeing Pim Fortuyn was murdered by van de Graff, a madman agitated at Fortuyn's views on Muslim immigration,"

Wel Volkert van de Graaf didn´t murder Pim because of his vieuws on muslim immigration ,but because Pim wantend to revoke laws that would lead to closer of furfarms. There are even supsions that Volkert killed an bureaucrat of everminatol issues a few years ago because that bureacrat wasn´t animalfriendly enough.

I can understood why it is easy to make this mistake because the media almost only paid attention to Pim muslimvieuws.

Posted by: wodan82 at July 16, 2004 12:07 PM

THIS!! is funny.

Posted by: Mullah Omar at July 16, 2004 2:08 PM

I know that the Dutch press, the same one that carried on its relentless campaign of vilification of the admirable Pim Fortuyn, kept referring to van de Graaf, or van der Graaf (the name seems to be quite a generator, don't you think) as an "animal rights activist." And so he was, and a vegetarian to boot -- just like Adolf Hitler.

But he made clear, both in November 2002, and in March 2003 at his court hearing, that he had murdered Pim Fortuyn because the latter, in his view, had attacked the "most vulnerable members of society" -- and he was talking not about geese and rabbits but about Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn, of course, was not "anti-immigrant" -- he was "anti-Muslim-immigrant" which is a very different thing.

You can google, for yourself, "Pim Fortuyn" and "van de Graaf" and "Islam" and discover for yourself that that was indeed the motivation for the attack.

One more thing. This van de Graaf was an obsessive, a fanatic. It would not have been hard, in Rotterdam, where 45% of the population consists of Muslims, to become aware of this fellow, to find that his early interest was "animal rights," and to play upon that, and then to elide seamlessly into Fortuyn's "attacks" on the most "helpless members of society" -- you know, drawing a connection for the hapless van de Graaf, between helpless animals, and equally "helpless" Muslims. All over the Western world, Muslims engaged in Da'wa and all manner of miching mallecho are preying on the marginal -- the John Walker Lindhs, the Richard Reids, the Jose Padillas, and of course even the occasional upper-class twit who thinks it would be great fun to become a Muslim, or any one of those goddamn seekers-after-truth who are tiresome when they discover Rolfing, or crystal therapy, or any other nonsense, but at least they are not, as a result, a mortal danger to the rest of us. Please, all you truth-seekers, try Buddhism. Or trainspotting. Or poetry. Or better living through libertinage. Anything but Islam.

Posted by: Hugh at July 17, 2004 6:30 PM