Redstate

By Charles Bird Posted in User Blogs — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

One of the articles sitting on my virtual reading stack is a piece in the Weekly Standard by Christopher Caldwell, who wrote of the cultural dissonance in the Netherlands between Muslims and non-Muslims. Long a tolerant country, the Dutch were once again shaken out of their multicultural fugue with the murder of Theo Van Gogh. The conflicts between mainstream Dutch society and the unassimilated Muslim community have escalated over the years, and Van Gogh's murder looks to be a breaking point. The disturbing part to me are the death threats against those who have criticized Muslims and their practices:

Early this month, another Schiedam native, a 30-year-old man known in his police dossier as Farid A., was found guilty of issuing death threats over the Internet. When the conservative Dutch politician Geert Wilders described Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat last year as a "terrorist leader," Farid A. posted a picture of him on an Islamist website urging: "Wilders must be punished with death for his fascistic comments about Islam, Muslims, and the Palestinian cause."

Wilders has not changed and, in fact, he went the other way and became more emboldened. But it came at a cost since he is now in hiding. The man who made the death threats, Farid A., was sentenced to 120 hours of community service. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born parliament member who worked with Van Gogh on Submission, has received numerous death threats for her outspokenness. Hirsi Ali may have been a higher-priority target, but the security precautions she took made Van Gogh the easier mark. How did the Netherlands come to this point?

Perhaps the Dutch did with immigration what most countries do with most things: They thought too much about their own history, and then misapplied it. The concept that Dutch political scientists use more than any other to describe their society is "pillarization."

Pillarization is how the differing religious and secular groups coexisted peacefully in the Netherlands over decades and centuries, sort of a separate but equal society. When the 1960s hit the culture, it took form as a "rebellion against church authority". The result was highly tolerant multiculturism and laissez faire immigration policy. Dutch leaders thought the Muslim community could be a new Dutch pillar, but the experiment failed. Why?

Real pillarization of the sort that worked in the past rested on shared and nonnegotiable understandings of three things: language, history, and law.

Those understandings did not extend to the new wave of immigrants who came to Holland's shores. The Dutch now believe that their society has gone too far, since 80% perceive their country as "too tolerant". Meanwhile, this same tolerance has not been practiced by its Muslim inhabitants. Wouter Bos is a leader of one of Holland's political parties and a staunch defender of the existing multicultural model, yet even he has "received threats from Islamists, and travels with bodyguards". The Muslim community in Amsterdam has bristled against living under two Jewish mayors and "threats have been made, too, against Cohen's deputy, the Moroccan-born alderman Ahmed Aboutaleb, who has his own security detail." Afshin Ellian is an Iranian-born scholar who is one of the leading proponents for a reformed Islam in Holland, but he also is living under police protection. In another sign of the times, an imam refused to shake the hand of the Dutch minister for immigration and integration because she is a woman.

The problem is, of course, the prevalence of radical Islam in the Netherlands, exacerbated by the lack of assimilation into European culture and the lack of moderate Muslims who will stand up and challenge the fundamentalists. The other question is the composition of the Muslim community.

There were incidents of wild rejoicing across Holland in the wake of the September 11 attacks, notably in the eastern city of Ede. The weekly magazine Contrast took a poll showing that just under half the Muslims in the Netherlands were in "complete sympathy" with the September 11 attacks. At least some wish to turn to terrorism.

The Dutch have let this fester for too long, and they will have to take concrete steps to excise its radical elements. It is time for them to really join the War on Terror. If its citizens have to retain bodyguards after exercising their free speech rights, something is seriously wrong since, like it or not, they are the victims of this ideological war.