Word: goghs
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...answer is yes. Immediately after the Nov. 2 murder of firebrand filmmaker Theo van Gogh, 47 - whose recent work included a controversial attack on Muslim violence against women - a Dutch Muslim man with alleged ties to a terrorist gang was arrested for the crime. That touched off a violent anti-Muslim backlash, which has forced some Dutch citizens to question the limits of free speech, others to ask whether the country's age-old reputation for tolerance is a thing of the past, and still others to wonder whether their grand experiment in integration has ignited an all-out clash...
...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...
...Gogh, a great-grandnephew of the artist Vincent van Gogh, had just finished a film about Fortuyn when he was murdered. Amsterdam's public prosecutor says Mohammed B. 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...
...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...
...Gogh was reviled by many of the country's nearly 1 million Muslims, who comprise about 6% of its population. "It's increasingly less pleasant for Muslims in the Netherlands," says Driss El Boujoufi, deputy chairman of the Union of Moroccan Mosque Organizations. "Society is becoming more divisive...