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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

Even by the grisly standards of ritual killing, it was shocking. On 2 November in Amsterdam the Dutch iconoclast and film-maker Theo van Gogh was dragged from his bicycle in broad daylight and murdered. His killer, a bearded Dutch-born Islamic radical of Moroccan descent, shot him six times and, as he pleaded for his life, slit his throat through the spinal column with a butcher’s knife, almost decapitating him. The assassin then impaled a five-page declaration of ‘holy war’ into van Gogh’s chest.

The slaughter of the film-maker — who was also a TV chat-show host, a Big Brother contestant, a newspaper columnist, and the great-great-grand-nephew of Vincent — plunged Europe’s most liberal, tolerant and multicultural society into (in the words of its Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende) ‘a maelstrom of violence’.

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