Speak your mind, lose your life

20 November 2004

Anthony Browne says that the terrible murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam is further proof that radical Islam is not compatible with liberal democracy

The government declared ‘war on extremism’, and quickly uncovered a network of Dutch Islamic radicals who were plotting to kill other leading ‘enemies of Islam’ and were linked to the terrorist attacks in Casablanca and Madrid. Two politicians were taken into police protection, one of whom was the subject of a video on the Internet offering paradise for anyone who decapitated him. Three policemen were injured when they came under grenade and gunfire attack by Islamic radicals in a 15-hour siege in The Hague. Religious violence spread. More than 20 mosques, churches, Islamic and Christian schools and Muslim community centres were attacked by arsonists and vandals. Muslims and non-Muslims now live in a country afraid of itself, and what it has become.

At least, though, the Left in the Netherlands has seen that there is a clash between liberal democracy and cultural relativism; that some cultures are simply not compatible with Western traditions of freedom and tolerance; and that the old distinction between evil right-wingers and cuddly left-wingers no longer makes sense. It is one thing to turn a Christian church into a mosque, quite another to get radical Islam to accept liberal democracy. Outside the Netherlands, however, the Left has yet to learn these lessons.

Van Gogh himself was a child of the Left. He did not discriminate when he decided whom to offend. He had deeply upset Christian and Jewish groups, who made written complaints about him. His mistake, however, was to offend Muslim sensibilities. His ten-minute film Submission showed actresses depicting real Muslim women speaking of their experience of domestic violence, including forced marriage and rape by relatives. The women were shown nearly naked, with their skin covered with Koranic verses which endorse domestic violence, such as ‘And those [wives] you fear may be rebellious admonish, banish them to their couches, and beat them.’ (It is because of verses like this that Ken Livingstone’s mate, the homophobic, terrorist-supporting cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, endorses wife-beating.) Van Gogh made the film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian woman who sought asylum in the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage and who is now a Liberal MP and a fierce critic of her former religion. She received death threats for denouncing Mohammed as a ‘pervert in the modern sense’ because he married a six-year-old girl, Aisha, when he was 53.