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[Yaya]

Year After Murder, Netherlands on Edge

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - With Egyptian mangos and Surinamese prawns stacked alongside Dutch cheeses, the vast open-air Hague Market and its crowds of immigrant shoppers are a multicultural picture that used to make the Netherlands proud. Today, a year after the gruesome murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist, pride has given way to tension and suspicion.


Van Gogh was shot, stabbed and nearly decapitated Nov. 2, 2004, because of a film that 27-year-old Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutchman born to Moroccan parents, regarded as insulting to Islam. In the month of violent reactions that followed, authorities counted 174 bias attacks, 47 of them on mosques and 13 on Christian churches.

"You can still feel the difference on the streets," said Marc Verwaal, 17, an ethnic Dutchman on neighborhood watch in the immigrant neighborhood around the Hague Market. "There is more tension and people are on edge."

The sense of old certainties crumbling was first felt in May 2003 with the shooting of Pim Fortuyn, a gay, populist politician who stridently accused Muslims of maltreating women and homosexuals. Although the killer was an animal rights extremist whose motives were unrelated to anything Islamic, the murder triggered anger against Muslims and led to a government crackdown on illegal immigrants.

It was Van Gogh's slaying, by a Muslim born and raised here, that was burned into the Dutch minds as the country's own version of 9/11.

Now, in a nation that used to feel so safe that high-ranking officials and royalty got around on bicycles, two prominent lawmakers have been driven into hiding because of their criticism of radical Islam.

The country's 1 million Muslims feel unfairly targeted by the anti-terrorism measures that followed Van Gogh's slaying — looser rules on wiretaps and evidence admissible in court, police powers to conduct searches without apparent cause and hold suspects for longer periods without charge.

Authorities say they are tracking hundreds of young Muslims who may be inclined to violence against a society they reject. Police have detained dozens of North Africans suspected of plotting terrorist attacks in the past 12 months, and have alleged the existence of a conspiratorial terrorist group known as the Hofstad Network.

Though tension has been rising across Europe since 9/11, worsened by terrorist bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London last July, it's all the more striking in the Netherlands, a country renowned for its tolerance of soft drugs, immigrants and same-sex marriages.

After the Van Gogh killing "we got a hard smack in the face," said Mohammed Ousalah, a Moroccan-born imam, or Muslim preacher. "We notice the hardening against us, not just in the general sense, but with specific things: the mosque burnings, the racist remarks."

Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen says his top priority after the murder was "keeping things from falling apart" in a city of 170 nationalities.

The number of racial attacks has dropped sharply since that violent November, but the distrust festers. "Muslims, for example and to my regret, are having a tougher time finding jobs and internships," said Cohen.

Bouyeri targeted the director after he made a short film depicting ill treatment of women in Muslim households. A letter he pinned to Van Gogh's chest with the murder knife threatened more attacks. In court, before being jailed for life, he further dismayed the nation by refusing to express remorse, saying he would do it again, and telling Van Gogh's family: "I don't feel your pain."

And the scene at the market in the Hague, 25 miles from Amsterdam, seems to accentuate a mood of drawing apart. About 80-90 percent of its 40,000 weekly shoppers are nonwestern immigrants, making the few ethnic Dutch vendors feel increasingly isolated.

Fatima, a young Turkish woman selling soap and cleaning products, said the conservative government's tough response hurts honest, hardworking immigrants.

"Van Gogh insulted the Prophet Muhammad, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go out and kill him," said the woman, who declined to give her full name.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051101/ap_on_re_eu/holland_s_year_of_fear_1

[Yaya]

Why Islam is disrespected by Jeff Jacoby

It was front-page news this week when Newsweek retracted a report claiming that a US interrogator in Guantanamo had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet.

Everywhere it was noted that Newsweek's story had sparked widespread Muslim rioting, in which at least 17 people were killed. But there was no mention of deadly protests triggered in recent years by comparable acts of desecration against other religions.

No one recalled, for example, that American Catholics lashed out in violent rampages in 1989, after photographer Andres Serrano's ''Piss Christ" — a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine — was included in an exhibition subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts. Or that they rioted in 1992 when singer Sinead O'Connor, appearing on ''Saturday Night Live," ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.

There was no reminder that Jewish communities erupted in lethal violence in 2000, after Arabs demolished Joseph's Tomb, torching the ancient shrine and murdering a young rabbi who tried to save a Torah. And nobody noted that Buddhists went on a killing spree in 2001 in response to the destruction of two priceless, 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha by the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Of course, there was a good reason all these bloody protests went unremembered in the coverage of the Newsweek affair: They never occurred.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don't call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain. But when Reuters reported what Mohammad Hanif, the imam of a Muslim seminary in Pakistan, said about the alleged Koran-flushers — ''They should be hung. They should be killed in public so that no one can dare to insult Islam and its sacred symbols" —was any reader surprised?

The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.

From the White House down, the magazine was slammed — for running an item it should have known might prove incendiary, for relying on a shaky source, for its animus toward the military and the war. Over and over, Newsweek was blamed for the riots' death toll. Conservative pundits in particular piled on. ''Newsweek lied, people died" was the headline on Michelle Malkin's popular website. At NationalReview.com, Paul Marshall of Freedom House fumed: ''What planet do these [Newsweek] people live on? . . . Anybody with a little knowledge could have told them it was likely that people would die as a result of the article." All of Marshall's choler was reserved for Newsweek; he had no criticism at all for the marauders in the Muslim street.

Then there was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who announced at a Senate hearing that she had a message for ''Muslims in America and throughout the world."

And what was that message? That decent people do not resort to murder just because someone has offended their religious sensibilities? That the primitive bloodlust raging in Afghanistan and Pakistan was evidence of the Muslim world's dysfunctional political culture?

No: Her message was that ''disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States."

Granted, Rice spoke while the rioting was still taking place and her goal was to reduce the anti-American fever. But what ''Muslims in America and throughout the world" most need to hear is not pandering sweet-talk. What they need is a blunt reminder that the real desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an ''insurgency" in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to ''martyrdom."

But what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet's Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to ''converge on our nation's capital for a rally against terrorism" — and having only 50 people show up.

Yes, Islam is disrespected. That will only change when throngs of passionate Muslims show up for rallies against terrorism, and when rabble-rousers trying to gin up a riot over a defiled Koran can't get the time of day.

http://jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby052005.php3