The American Spectator

Special Report

Imagine if America woke up tomorrow to discover that Rush Limbaugh had been savagely murdered on the sidewalks of New York by a Islamic jihadist in protest of Limbaugh's political statements. All hell would break loose in this country, or at least 52% of it. Now double, or even treble that hell, and you'll have an idea what is happening in Northern Europe, where the cornered Dutch people have been forced to pull their collective finger out of the dike holding back the war on terrorism.

On November 2, exactly 911 days after 9/11, a Muslim terrorist and Dutch-born Moroccan living in the Netherlands gruesomely murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh. After firing his gun six times at van Gogh as he bicycled along an Amsterdam bike path and knocked him to his knees, the assailant, whom police call Mohammed B., approached his victim. Wounded and bleeding, van Gogh pleaded aloud for mercy and (typical for a Dutchman) attempted to engage his assailant in conversation. Mohammed's response was to cut vigorously but patiently through van Gogh's throat, very nearly decapitating him.

Then, in the nauseatingly precious understatement of AP and other news services, this murderer "pinned" a five-page letter of protest to van Gogh's chest. The "pin" happened to be a knife the size Jim Bowie favored, and Mohammed buried it to the hilt. A crime scene photograph of van Gogh's draped body shows the pornographic outline of the long knife handle projecting from his stilled heart, a violent phallus, erect and determined on further murderous impalements.

Make no mistake, that knife is intent on violence. It bides its time for the next fatal thrust into the perceived soft belly of liberal, tolerant Netherlands. The pinned letter contains a list of prominent Dutch citizens scheduled to be murdered. It includes both the Jewish mayor and Moroccan-Dutch vice-mayor of Amsterdam, along with the head of Dutch immigration and several members of parliament and anyone else who offends any self-righteous Muslim with a knife or gun. The letter also promises that "hair-raising screams will be squeezed from the lungs of the non-believers."

This sort of brutality is not new to the Dutch, who remember occupying Germans stringing up by the neck random citizens and leaving them there for a few days as a reminder they didn't like being offended, especially by the Dutch resistance. I'm looking right now at an old photograph of 20 bodies dangling in an Amsterdam square.

Now, the Dutch, along with their soft-socialist neighboring countries, have until last week exercised appropriate, politically correct, and Kerryesque handwringing anguish and self doubt regarding how to treat immigrant Muslims.

But no more. They've had their 9/11, and it's arguable their reaction is stronger than was ours. Top government officials now compare radical Muslims to Nazis of days of old. While not voting on a formal declaration in Parliament, many have publicly announced that the Netherlands is now at war against terrorism.

WITH THE MURDER OF Theo van Gogh, a crazed hell that only his great grand-uncle, Vincent, might have painted in his most anguished of fits has broken loose in the Netherlands. Suddenly, 15 million Dutch regard the 1 million resident Muslims with a genuine fear. Or at least they so regard the 300,000 Muslims who, in a recent poll, fervently support the continuation of the most radical, fundamentalist Muslims centers and schools.

Of course there is a sort of remnant PC craziness in these first days of shock. Throughout the Netherlands, TV stations are canceling or refusing to run van Gogh's ten minute film, "Submission." Management claims it's afraid it will invite violence and death to its employees. Van Gogh made the film with liberal Dutch Parliament member, Somali refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now an ex-Muslim.

"Submission" tells of a Muslim woman forced into an arranged marriage. Her husband abuses her, an uncle rapes her. A famous scene shows a woman in see-through clothes, her flesh covered with welts from a whipping alongside the inked lines from the Koran. (View the English language film online linking through the most excellent blog, www.zachtei.nl, and clicking its November 5 edition). It's hard to believe any group can be more sensitive than our own ever-aggrieved American liberals, but apparently the entire Dutch Muslim community was in an uproar over the film. Maybe I'm insensitized, but I see Hollywood TV treat Christians and conservatives with a sharper sword on a weekly basis. By our standards, van Gogh's "Submission" is safe fare.

Directly across the square from a Rotterdam mosque, a Dutch artist protested the murder by painting a mural of an angel ascending into heaven with the Biblical commandment (which is also part of the Koran, or I am much mistaken) "Thou shalt not kill," on the exterior of his own wall! Turns out them's fighting words for the Moroccan youths who crowded to spit on the mural.

It gets crazier. The mosque complained (about the mural, not the loogie-launching youth), and the Rotterdam mayor order the mural removed. (Let us note that the offended mosque was not the one the murderer Mohammed B. regularly attended, which distributed books instructing Muslims to chuck homosexuals from the top of tall buildings! Headfirst!!!)

And crazier. Police arrested a video crew recording the event, taking away their video tape. At the same time, police in Amsterdam converged in certain neighborhoods to prevent likely Muslim riots.

These vestiges of liberal supplication have only served to harden the anger and determination of the greater Dutch population.

In Amsterdam neighborhoods, thousands of insensitive blue-eyed Dutch banged on pots and pans and honked horns to protest the murder.

topics:
Television, Islam, Books, Hollywood, Law, Immigration