Theo Van Gogh's collaborator Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes his brutal killing is linked to their controverisal film work, writes John Henley.
After the shocking killing of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh this week, his collaborator Ayaan Hirsi Ali is convinced that the attack was related to their controversial criticism of Islamic misogyny.
Hirsi Ali has called the prophet Muhammad a "lecherous tyrant", Islam a "backward religion", and the Koran "in part a licence for oppression". Theo Van Gogh dubbed Muslims "goat-f**kers", a radical Islamic leader "Allah’s pimp", and Islam a "retrograde and aggressive" faith.
Van Gogh, the 47-year-old greatgrandson of Vincent’s brother and a talented if wildly provocative film-maker, columnist and TV interviewer, died after being stabbed on a street in eastern Amsterdam last Tuesday morning.
"I feel terribly guilty," a shocked Hirsi Ali told Dutch media, adding that she was "very much afraid" that Submission, an 11-minute film about Islamic violence against women that she wrote and the film-maker produced, was the cause of his death. Hirsi Ali lives under 24-hour police protection.
The elegant 34-year-old MP for the free-market VVD party, a Somalian refugee who 12 years ago fled from an
arranged marriage and calls herself an "ex-Muslim", has every reason to be distressed: Van Gogh's death was brutal.
The film-maker was shot several times as he rode his bicycle down the Linnaeusstraat to his office, but still managed to stagger some distance – 30 or 40 metres, witnesses said – before being caught in a second hail of gunfire by his attacker. On his knees, the eyewitnesses said, Van Gogh twice begged for mercy. But the suspect fired again and then drew two butcher’s knives, slitting his victim’s throat before driving the blades into his chest.
Police reportedly found a letter on the body, addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. "Dear Mrs Hirshi Ali [sic]. Since you stepped into the political arena in the Netherlands you have been constantly busy terrorising Muslims and Islam with your remarks," the letter said, calling Hirsi Ali a "disbeliever fundamentalist".
A Dutch-Moroccan man accused of the killing will also be charged with participating in a group with "terrorist intentions" and conspiracy to murder others, including a prominent member of parliament, prosecutors said yesterday. The 26-year-old man, identified by Dutch media as "Mohammed B."
The killing has sparked a heartfelt national outcry in the traditionally tolerant Netherlands, sparking fears of a rise in racial tension in a country whose population of 16 million includes some one million Muslims, mainly of Turkish or North African origin.
Recent opinion polls show the Dutch to be increasingly hostile towards immigrants and fearful of Muslim extremism. Islam, immigration and integration have shot to the top of the political agenda since the rise of Pim Fortuyn, the populist anti-immigrant politician who was shot dead by an animal-rights activist in May 2002.
The centre-right Dutch government has called for greater integration of immigrants, but fuelled controversy with plans to repatriate up to 26,000 failed asylum seekers.
In the midst of this tinderbox, insisting on their right to speak freely and with support from many people, Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh scattered sparks – a blistering critique of Islam – with disregard for the feelings they might offend.
The slender, couture-clad Hirsi Ali has had several fatwas issued against her and spends her life in the company of a brace of bodyguards; Van Gogh also received death threats but refused protection, saying the bullets would never come for him. "No one can seriously want to shoot the village idiot," he said recently.
Their film was broadcast on Dutch national television in August. It depicts, among other scenes, a beautiful young Muslim girl addressing Allah in a mosque. She wears a veil that covers her face, but her naked body is clearly visible through a transparent gown. "All praise to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds," says the text that scrolls across the actress’s throat and down her breasts: the fatiha, or opening of the Koran.
In another, a woman’s bruised and beaten shoulders are covered with lines from verse 34, chapter 4 of the Koran. "Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made them excel . . ." it reads. "The good women are therefore obedient. Those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places, and beat them."
The film was a potent, if undeniably provocative, interpretation of Hirsi Ali’s thesis. Brought up as a Muslim in Somalia, she suffered circumcision at the age of five and, sent to Germany to meet her intended Somali partner in an arranged marriage, fled to the Netherlands in 1992. Penniless, speaking no Dutch, she worked as a cleaner, in a biscuit factory and as a translator before studying political science at Leiden University.
In 2001, after graduating, she wrote about "honour killings" of Muslim women that served as a savage indictment of the 30-year Dutch experiment with multiculturalism, describing it as a "disastrous error" born of
"misplaced guilt".
The report embarrassed the Dutch Labour party, which commissioned it, but the VVD – which has a tough stance on immigration – welcomed her, first as a researcher, then as a candidate. On TV talk shows and in newspaper columns, Hirsi Ali has denounced the "cruelty and abuse" meted out to many Muslim women living in western societies.
Damning Islam as a "backward, 12thcentury religion", a "medieval, misogynist cult incapable of self-criticism and blind to modern science", she says orthodox Muslim men routinely indulge in domestic violence against omen, as well as incest and child abuse. To make matters worse, she argues, their behaviour is invariably hushed up. "The Netherlands is a country that worships consensus and peace, but here you have newcomers who are not integrated into this system," she said last year.
"They exploit an open, liberal society to reach illiberal ends. Everyone knows the position of women in Islamic countries is horrendous, but the Dutch like to think it doesn’t happen here."
The solution, Hirsi Ali argues, is for fundamentalist Islamic books to be banned, Mullahs to be banished and for western societies "not to bend over backwards to accommodate a culture that advocates the degradation of women . . . but to ensure that the Muslim men who perpetrate such barbarity are brought to justice".
The "Lapsed Muslim" last year found an effective and articulate artistic partner in Van Gogh who, as well as having made a dozen feature films in his 25-year career, was also a much-loved, deliberately provocative and often obscene columnist and pamphleteer who published numerous indictments of an over-radical Islam in an over-tolerant Netherlands.
Fired over the years by almost every Dutch newspaper and magazine for offending its readers, he wrote most recently for the daily freesheet Metro and ran his own highly popular website, De Gezonde Roker (The Healthy Smoker).
Fraught Dutch commentators had no hesitation in saying this week that the country had become a "front-line state" in a brutal collision between two cultures. "In France or Belgium, you don’t have this same kind of very Dutch cabaret-like figure who rages about goat-f**kers," one commentator, Rene Cuperus, told De Volkskrant. "They must know that they’ve landed up in the most liberal country in the world, the land of abortions and gays and all that – but Muslims don’t see it. There’s just no way to bridge that gulf in a politically correct way."
An academic, Norbert Both, posed the question that, one imagines, is now troubling Hirsi Ali – as well as a great many less outspoken Dutch people. "The great dilemma, in confronting intolerance, is that you cannot reply with tolerance," he said. "If you do . . . you lose your own identity. Can we, despite the emotion, remain ourselves? That's the question." (– Guardian Service)