"Murder in Amsterdam"

Ian Buruma's riveting account of the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist shows how a clash between European Enlightenment values and Muslim fundamentalism is ripping Dutch society apart.

By Matt Steinglass

Read more: Books, Terrorism, Reviews, Holland, Amsterdam, Book reviews

Sept. 27, 2006 | Like many Dutch people, my wife found the news that the filmmaker Theo van Gogh had been murdered by a Muslim extremist shocking, in two senses of the word: shocking-tragic, and shocking-weird. She had worked with van Gogh, as producer of one of his television series in 1998, "Het Is Hier Verschrikkelijk Gezellig" ("It's Terribly Nice Here"). The show revolved around van Gogh insulting and humiliating people engaged in recreational activities he considered contemptible: executives playing paintball, couples flying off for "exotic weddings," swingers' clubs. (Today, we would call it "reality TV," but that term didn't exist yet; it was coined in 1999, also in the Netherlands, when a Dutch studio called Endemol came out with the original version of "Big Brother.") Van Gogh's public persona was that of a fat, abusive, witty, politically incorrect buffoon, equal parts Johnny Knoxville and Michael Moore, the self-proclaimed "dorpsgek" ("village idiot") of the Netherlands. That such a character should become a victim of international jihad seemed an absurd joke or category error, as though the 9/11 terrorists had tried to blow up the town of South Park.

"It's Terribly Nice Here" found van Gogh at a low ebb in his career. His shtick had begun to seem less repellently funny than just plain repellent. My wife's strongest visual memory of the director was of him passed out on the couch in the editing room, a beached whale in mismatched socks. But in subsequent years, van Gogh reestablished himself by taking on more serious projects, and turning his ridicule toward a new target: Islam. Starting in about 2000, anti-Muslim sentiments, once taboo in self-consciously tolerant Holland, were voiced with increasing openness and conviction. Van Gogh jumped on the bandwagon, saying a number of things that would probably have ended an American entertainer's career, notably his use of the epithet "goatfuckers."

At the same time, he made some intelligent and well-received Islam-related films, including a miniseries called "Najib and Julia," a Moroccan-Dutch Romeo and Juliet story. In 2004, the Somali-born women's rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, then a Dutch M.P., enlisted van Gogh to direct her short TV film "Submission," which pictured a woman in a see-through hijab with Quranic verses projected on her skin, telling the stories of Muslim women abused by their husbands. Muslim viewers were predictably outraged. On Nov. 2, 2004, a Dutch-born 26-year-old named Mohammed Bouyeri followed van Gogh on his bicycle and shot and stabbed him to death on an Amsterdam street in broad daylight, staking a note to his body that vowed that Hirsi Ali would meet the same fate. Bouyeri was caught at the scene by police, and ultimately sentenced to life in prison.

Ian Buruma's "Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance" places van Gogh's murder at the fulcrum of Dutch politics and society at the turn of the 21st century. A better book about the contemporary Netherlands has not been written. Like van Gogh, Buruma grew up well off in The Hague of the 1960s and '70s, and he brings to his portrait the deep understanding one can only have for those from one's native town and class. But Buruma has lived outside Holland since 1975, and has written extensively on the Far East and, more recently, the worldwide clash between political Islam and the secular West. These two perspectives, particular and global, interweave throughout "Murder in Amsterdam," in the classic fashion of the murder story as social investigation -- one thinks of "In Cold Blood," or the Dylan song "Who Killed Davey Moore?" As in the song, a lot of people turn out to bear some responsibility for van Gogh's death, and few of them are willing to own up to it.

The book opens with an account of van Gogh's slaying, and of the feverish months afterward, when tensions between Holland's white and immigrant communities made Buruma feel the country had come "unhinged." Buruma then begins laying out the back story. Mohammed Bouyeri is the son of one of the hundreds of thousands of Moroccans who, along with Turks, were allowed into the Netherlands in the '60s and '70s to perform unskilled jobs. Their children have had difficulty assimilating; Moroccan boys especially have high rates of criminality. The left-wing multiculturalist consensus in Dutch politics from the '70s to the '90s tended to brand any discussion of such problems as racist. But by the late '90s, that consensus was falling apart, and many Dutch on both the left and the right began to phrase the problem as one of upholding European Enlightenment values -- religious and sexual tolerance, equality for women -- against Muslim fundamentalism. "The Enlightenment, in other words," Buruma writes, "has become the name for a new conservative order, and its enemies are the aliens, whose values we can't share."

Buruma turns next to the figure who best exemplified this trend, Pim Fortuyn. He is the first of a series of incredible characters: a bespoke-suited, flamboyantly gay university professor in a chauffeured Bentley who used the anti-Muslim card to upend the Dutch political landscape in two short years, becoming a favorite for prime minister before himself being assassinated, in 2002, by an environmental extremist. Fortuyn used his homosexuality as armor for his anti-immigrant conservatism: It is because we Dutch believe in equality for gays and women, he would say, that we cannot put up with the fundamentalism of these "kut-marokkanen" ("cunt-Moroccans"). The fact that equality for gays and women had only been accepted in Holland itself 30 years earlier went unmentioned.

Buruma concentrates on Fortuyn's inauthenticity, his self-willed makeover from second-rate sociologist to outrageous conservative rock star. Part of what Fortuyn represented was a rebellion against the gray uniformity of the Netherlands' famously dull politics, long dominated by the "pillar" model, in which the country's different religious communities split up the national pie in reasonable negotiations. The pillar model began to disintegrate from the '60s on, but in the '90s was succeeded by an equally dull and reasonable right-left "purple" coalition. The Dutch are simultaneously proud and resentful of their plodding moderation, and at key moments, as with Fortuyn, the resentment bursts to the surface. Ironically, the politician who claimed to be defending Dutch values from an alien threat was himself behaving in ways that were profoundly, and calculatedly, un-Dutch.

One of Fortuyn's biggest fans was van Gogh, a foulmouthed iconoclast from a very respectable, if not quite elite, family. Yes, they are those van Goghs: The painter's brother Theo was the filmmaker's great-grandfather. More interesting yet are van Gogh's father, a retired intelligence agent with staunch middle-left politics, and his late uncle, a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance executed in the last days of World War II.

Buruma uses this family history as an occasion to trace how the war continues to structure the Dutch moral imagination, distinguishing whose ancestors were "right" (anti-racist, resisters) and whose were "wrong" (racist, collaborators). The war reinforced a self-righteous, self-pitying strain in Dutch nationalism, a vision of the country as the resistant victim of fanatical foreigners (Catholic Spain in the 16th century, Nazi Germany in the 20th), which does not entirely square with the modern record. The Dutch under Nazi rule were mostly resentful but obedient; a larger percentage of Jews were exterminated in Holland than in any European country but Poland.

Van Gogh himself rebelled against such pieties. In the '80s, he got into a public feud with a Dutch Jewish writer after accusing him of capitalizing on Holocaust nostalgia. (Specifically, he said the writer wrapped his penis in barbed wire and shouted "Auschwitz!" when he came.) The content of such declarations is less important than the eagerness to give offense. Van Gogh was part of an Amsterdam cultural scene that delighted in such stunts, and that traced its roots to the white-jeaned "Provos" of the '60s, whose absurdist provocations touched off the transformation of Holland from one of the most conservative and religious societies in Europe to one of its most secular and progressive. At the same time, as Buruma shows, there was something puritanical in van Gogh's hostility to social conventions, something of Holland's famous Calvinist rectitude, harking back to the country's origins in a literal wave of iconoclasm, the smashing of Catholic icons in the cathedrals of Flanders in the 1560s.

Next page: Van Gogh's death produced an outpouring of anti-Muslim sentiment ... but it also produced a slow backlash against Hirsi Ali