Word: dutchness
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...When maverick politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, the Dutch were relieved that his murderer turned out to be a radical white vegan from the small town of Harderwijk. Like Van Gogh, Fortuyn was critical of Islam - he called it a "backward culture" and demanded that immigrants assimilate into Dutch society - and many people feared his killing was the first salvo in the country's own culture war. But that battle may have finally begun with Van Gogh's murder, allegedly carried out by a Dutch-Moroccan, 26, who is being referred to in the media as Mohammed...
...shot Van Gogh as he cycled to his studio, then slit his throat and impaled a five-page letter to his body with a knife. The act was apparently in retaliation for Van Gogh's film Submission, a graphic look at abused Muslim women that was broadcast on Dutch television in August. Calling Van Gogh's murder part of a wider terrorist plot, the prosecutor's office arrested five men - four Moroccans and one Spanish-Moroccan - in addition to Mohammed B. The letter knifed into Van Gogh's body was typed and addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born...
...have been a typical second-generation child of Moroccan parents. He was by all accounts a good student, and his family attended a moderate mosque. He may have moved toward fundamentalist Islam after the death of his mother two years ago. Though he initially sought to fit into Dutch culture, he may have faced the same dilemma as other young Dutch Muslims, caught between their parents' old Islamic ways and an unaccepting modern Dutch society. "They're living between two different worlds," says Van Houcke. "They can feel in 1,001 ways that we consider them lower than us." Driven...
...People like the 135 kg, chain-smoking Van Gogh could make that difficult. Always a provocateur, he had taken verbal swipes at virtually every Dutch minority. Three cases had been brought against him for slurs against Muslims and Jews; he was convicted of anti-Semitism in 1990, attacked Catholics in his spare time, and routinely referred to Muslims with an unpublishable epithet. Wilders, now under police protection, defends him. "Van Gogh was provocative, but in a democracy you fight words with words, not bullets," he says...
...days after Van Gogh's death, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's government promised a series of new security measures, as well as proposals to strip extremists of their Dutch passports, deport radical imams, and close down radical mosques. Dutch police believe Mohammed B. was part of a terror cell called the Hofstad Netwerk, whose alleged leader, Syrian Redouan al-Issar, preached at Mohammed B.'s home. Around a dozen alleged members of the cell have been picked up so far, including Samir Azzouz, a Moroccan arrested in the Netherlands this year for allegedly plotting attacks on government and public...