The American Spectator

After being harassed by groups such as VMO, farmers asked the Second Chamber of the Dutch government to investigate who was funding their activities. No wrongdoing was found. However, the chief investigator on the case had once overseen payments to VMO.

Action Network, it is suggested, held too much influence in Dutch political parties, Green Left and the PdA (Labor Party). Both faced an unexpected populist challenge from Fortuyn.

If true, the motive behind Fortuyn’s murder runs deeper than an act of passion by a tightly wound, malnourished madman out to save the skins of minks and the hides of cattle. Indeed, the killing sheds light on another paradox facing the tolerant West: the rise of green fundamentalism in its institutions.

At the fringes, the green movement sees human life as a scourge on the planet. Human economic freedom and its resulting affluence is a grave threat to the Edenic mirage imagined by those beholden to the cult of Gaia.

Fortuyn feared a Holland under the yoke of an oppressive Islamic theocracy, which sustains itself by legally eradicating free will. What he did not bargain for was being the target of another kind of religious fundamentalism: one that despises economic freedom, and by extension, human existence. He could detect the creep of a foreign brand of intolerance, yet did not sense the danger posed by the politically charged eco-terrorists in his midst.

Indeed, the green left, animal activists and other fringe groups have found themselves in a sympathetic alliance with Islamic extremists since 9/11 at marches and protests. They have one enemy: Western freedom, broadly defined. Whether it is free markets, or free will, both are fixated on removing the conditions under which human beings thrive, or even survive.