Abstract

Dutch Tolerance Tried

The article looks at how competing forms of intolerance feed on each other to disastrous effect, as seen in events in the Netherlands. In some ways the murder of columnist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh was a very Dutch affair. Van Gogh used free speech as a vehicle for racism and the Dutch tradition of "killing taboos" to boost his own career. This poster boy for free expression found a collaborator in Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim who came to the Netherlands as an asylum-seeker from Somalia, where she had suffered genital mutilation and faced forced marriage. Her well-researched, outspoken opposition to such practices in the Netherlands won her a place in Parliament. "Submission," the film she made with van Gogh that so angered his assassin, illustrates the intimate testimony of abused Muslim women with soft-pornography imagery. Some Dutch Muslim women beaten by their husbands reacted angrily when it was shown on television, saying it made a travesty of their suffering. The journey of van Gogh's accused killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, is almost a mirror image of Hirsi Ali's. If the "Muslim problem" is not to become Europe's new "Jewish question," a conversation has to be continued and expanded, openly and without censorship on either side.