Dutch Death
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
By Ian Buruma
The Penguin Press, 2006
(278 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Joan Frawley Desmond
Theo van Gogh was a Dutch pundit who shattered taboos for sport. A man of apparent contradictions—anti-immigrant, openly homosexual, and nationalistic—he enjoyed bashing the precepts of Holland’s regime of Tolerance. No one escaped his sting—not the bureaucratic overseers of political correctness, not the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and certainly not the Muslims who found his incendiary attacks inexcusable.
In November 2004, Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch-born son of Moroccan immigrants, shot him dead as he bicycled down an Amsterdam street. Bouyeri was angered by Possession, a film Van Gogh made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali—a Somali-born Member of Parliament, author, and opponent of Islamic orthodoxy—in which phrases from the Koran are projected onto the skin of naked, abused women.
Stumbling Europe
Van Gogh’s death triggered an orgy of national soul-searching that contributed to the defeat of the European Constitution. The aftershocks intrigued Ian Buruma, the Dutch-born journalist and author whose recent books include Inventing Japan: From Empire to Economic Miracle 1853–1964, and Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. Now living in New York, he is the Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College.
Buruma returned to Holland, where he talked with Hirsi Ali, Van Gogh’s friends, and peers of Mohammed Bouyeri. Though by no means his best book, Murder in Amsterdam offers a microcosm of a troubled European society stumbling toward a multicultural future.
The author is a sharp observer of cultural blind spots. His portraits illustrate the clash between the Muslim immigrants’ conflicted and often self-defeating struggle for survival and the mainstream’s complacent disregard for its own institutions.
Yet he has blind spots of his own. In previous works, such as his 1994 book, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and in Japan, he advocated the disentanglement of religion from politics as the best way to secure vital democracies and resist future totalitarian threats. The Netherlands, once a deeply religious nation, embraced this nostrum decades ago.
The heart of the problem is his refusal to engage the Christian faith’s decisive impact on the evolution of the Dutch nation up to the mid-twentieth century. His lack of interest in such matters renders his cultural analysis incomplete, and potential solutions—the revitalization of Holland’s Christian churches, for example—go unexamined.
The author’s difficulty with Christianity and the public role of organized religion is nothing new, but it is a little surprising that he hasn’t refined his thinking over the years. In arguing his case for a secularized politics, one that views faith as an opponent of reason, he never clearly distinguishes between religion and ideology, or between Judeo-Christian political philosophy and the social teaching of other belief systems.
Joan Frawley Desmond is a freelance writer who lives with her husband and three children in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She is a recent graduate of the John Paul II Institute for the Study of Marriage and the Family.
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