Murder in Amsterdam (4 page)

But not every pious Muslim is a potential terrorist. To see religion, even religious orthodoxy, as the main enemy of Enlightenment values is misleading. For even though the modern terrorist has latched onto a religious faith, he might as well have chosen—and in different times did choose—a
radically secular creed to justify his thirst for violent death. Besides, there is a difference between the anticlericalism of Voltaire, who was up against one of the two most powerful institutions of eighteenth-century France, and radical secularists today battling a minority within an already embattled minority.

There is also a difference between the eighteenth-century
philosophes
and conservative Dutch politicians of the twentyfirst century. The pioneers of the Enlightenment were iconoclasts, with radical ideas about politics and life. The Marquis de Sade was a typical man of the Enlightenment, as much as Diderot. In terms of Islam, Ellian and Hirsi Ali are certainly iconoclasts. It is harder to see a link between a respectable conservative EU commissioner and the great chronicler of sadism. But then, of course, a desire to smash sacred icons is not why many conservatives joined the battle for the modern Enlightenment in the first place.

The sacred icons of Dutch society were broken in the 1960s, as elsewhere in the Western world, when the churches lost their grip on people's lives, when government authority was something to challenge, not obey, when sexual taboos were publicly and privately breached, and when—rather in line with the original Enlightenment—people opened their eyes and ears to civilizations outside the West. The rebellions of the 1960s contained irrational, indeed antirational, and sometimes violent strains, and the fashion for such far-flung
exotica as Maoism sometimes turned into a revolt against liberalism and democracy. One by one the religious and political pillars that supported the established order of the Netherlands were cut away. The tolerance of other cultures, often barely understood, that spread with new waves of immigration, was sometimes just that—tolerance—and sometimes sheer indifference, bred by a lack of confidence in values and institutions that needed to be defended.

The conservative call for Enlightenment values is partly a revolt against a revolt. Tolerance has gone too far for many conservatives. They believe, like some former leftists, that multiculturalism was a mistake; our fundamental values must be reclaimed. Because secularism has gone too far to bring back the authority of the churches, conservatives and neoconservatives have latched onto the Enlightenment as a badge of national or cultural identity. The Enlightenment, in other words, has become the name for a new conservative order, and its enemies are the aliens, whose values we can't share.

Perhaps it was a necessary correction. Islamist revolution, like any violent creed, needs to be resisted, and a nationstate, to be viable, must stand for something. Political institutions are not purely mechanical. But an essential part of Enlightenment thinking is that everything, especially claims to “nonnegotiable” or “fundamental” values, should be open to criticism. The whole point of liberal democracy, its
greatest strength, especially in the Netherlands, is that conflicting faiths, interests, and views can be resolved only through negotiation. The only thing that cannot be negotiated is the use of violence.

The murder of Theo van Gogh was committed by one Dutch convert to a revolutionary war, who was probably helped by others. Such revolutionaries in Europe are still few in number. But the murder, like the bomb attacks in Madrid and London, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and the worldwide Muslim protests against cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper, exposed dangerous fractures that run through all European nations. Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theaters, and places of entertainment. The French scholar Olivier Roy is right: Islam is now a European religion. How Europeans, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, cope with this is the question that will decide our future. And what better place to watch the drama unfold than the Netherlands, where freedom came from a revolt against Catholic Spain, where ideals of tolerance and diversity became a badge of national honor, and where political Islam struck its first blow against a man whose deepest conviction was that freedom of speech included the freedom to insult.

 

^*
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie

^**
Lijst Pim Fortuyn, or Pim Fortuyn's List

TWO
Thank You, Pim

1.

O
n the morning that Theo van Gogh was shot, he was cycling toward his office in the south of Amsterdam to do some postproduction work on
06/05,
a Hitchcockian thriller about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, the populist outsider who almost became prime minister. The movie was a departure for Van Gogh. Thrillers hadn't been his thing. But he had long been obsessed with Fortuyn, whose murder on May 6, 2002, provoked an extraordinary outburst of shock, grief, anger, and quasi-religious hysteria. The man who would soon become prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, not a
man blessed with great imagination, reached for appropriate words to describe the situation. All he could come up with was “un-Dutch.”

Van Gogh's movie spins an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the secret service, led by a fat gay man wearing lipstick, American arms dealers, far right politicians, and a sexy animal rights activist of Turkish descent. Van Gogh never saw the film in its final version. The conspiracy is implausible, to say the least. But the picture of Dutch society, in all its post-multi-culti confusion, is convincing. It may look “un-Dutch” to a small-town Calvinist prime minister, but it shows what life is like in the urban triangle of Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam, an area of mass immigration, American pop fashions, and green fields disappearing rapidly under more and more layers of concrete. What Van Gogh got was the air of menace simmering under the placid surface, menace that could suddenly erupt in an act of senseless violence.

It was the most sensational political murder in the Netherlands since 1672, when the brothers Jan and Cornelis de Witt were literally ripped to pieces by a lynch mob in The Hague. During its Golden Age, the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was split by a power struggle between a paternalistic republican merchant elite, known as
regenten,
and the monarchists, led by the House of Orange and backed by the interfering Calvinist Church. The mob, especially at a time of economic crisis, was on the side of
monarchy and church. The
regenten
were regarded as haughty, self-interested, and dangerously liberal. The De Witt brothers, friends of Spinoza, were typical
regenten.

Pim Fortuyn, whose rise in Dutch politics had been as sudden as it was steep, was no De Witt. On the contrary, though he was neither a Calvinist nor an ardent monarchist, his agitation was largely directed at what he described, sarcastically, as “Our Kind of People,” the contemporary
regenten,
members of a powerful “left-wing Church,” who looked after their own interests while ignoring the concerns of the common people. Fortuyn's program could be summed up in negatives; he was against bureaucracy, leftist
regenten,
and immigration, especially Muslim immigration. He was also proudly, even flamboyantly, homosexual.

Theo van Gogh fell under the shaven-headed dandy's spell, and often gave Fortuyn informal advice, phoning “the divine baldy” when he was excited about something, which was most of the time. When Fortuyn appeared as a guest on Van Gogh's chat show, Theo jokingly suggested that they run for office on the same ticket. One of his ideas was for Fortuyn to campaign in the company of a Muslim woman dressed in a burqa. Fortuyn declined, but some of his best lines were in fact written by Van Gogh. In their outrageousness they understood one another, were kindred spirits, even. And they would be inextricably linked in death.

It is hard to say which had the greater impact on society,
but the two murders are connected in ways that are not always obvious. To almost universal relief, Fortuyn was not killed by a Muslim jihadi of foreign descent, but by an earnest Dutch animal rights activist on a bicycle, named Volkert van der Graaf. (The fact that both killers arrived on bikes added a peculiarly Dutch flavor to their murders.) It happened a few minutes after 6:00
P.M
., at the Media Park of Hilversum, where Fortuyn had just concluded a long radio interview. Tired from campaigning, but in a buoyant mood, Fortuyn, carrying a bottle of champagne, was just about to slide into his dark blue Daimler, where Kenneth and Carla, his two cocker spaniels, were patiently waiting, when Van der Graaf, a small man in a baseball cap, shot him five times in the head and neck with a semiautomatic pistol. Van der Graaf had never been to the Media Park before. He had downloaded maps, as well as Fortuyn's schedule, from the Internet.

Exactly what prompted Van der Graaf's action was never clear. Van Gogh's film is not really concerned with Van der Graaf's motives. All we know is that Van der Graaf was a sworn enemy of factory farming, and mink farmers in particular, whom he pursued through the law courts with considerable success. Fortuyn liked to sport fur collars on his winter coats, and did once write that “we must stop all this whining about nature and the environment.” As far as he was concerned, fur farms should be allowed to continue. But Van der Graaf appears to have been bothered by other aspects
of Fortuyn, to do more with personality than any specific environmental policies. His hatred was moral more than political.

He thought Fortuyn was like Hitler, but not because he was a mass murderer. In some ways, Van der Graaf's idea of Hitler sounded more like the seventeenth-century mob's image of the De Witt brothers. What he objected to was Fortuyn's “opportunism,” his “unwillingness to sacrifice his own interests,” his “arrogance” toward the weak and vulnerable. Above all, he objected to his “vanity,” his ostentatiousness, his “pride.” Just the look of him was objectionable: the flashy suits, the loud Windsor-knotted ties, the silk handkerchiefs spilling rather too copiously from the pin-striped breast pocket. Fortuyn was a showboat. And that, in a nation where “if you behave normally, you are already behaving madly enough,” is a grave accusation. Van der Graaf took this puritanical Dutch homily to a murderous extreme. He may have been a pathetic figure, but he was, in his way, a man of principle, to the point of being a fanatic. It is a characteristic of Calvinism to hold moral principles too rigidly, and this might be considered a vice as well as a virtue of the Dutch. It played a part in the makeup of Van der Graaf, as well as Mohammed Bouyeri, and even Theo van Gogh. The two killings, of Van Gogh and Fortuyn, were principled murders.

Volkert van der Graaf was always a difficult child. He was born in 1969, in the same small-town Protestant environment
as Prime Minister Balkenende. His mother was a strict evangelical Christian, born in England, his father a biology teacher. Nature, animals, were always the center of Volkert's world. When he was fifteen, he found work in a shelter for injured birds, but was soon dismissed for being impossible, arguing about everything, removing mousetraps to save the mice that harmed the birds, and so on. He hated the fact that his parents ate meat, refused to sit on his parents' leather sofa, and never dined at home. While failing to complete his studies in “environmental hygiene” at the university of agriculture in Wageningen, he became a fervent antivivisectionist and a dogged enemy of intensive farming. Apart from the occasional flash of temper, Volkert was known as a taciturn, inconspicuous fellow, a bore more than a potential murderer. In 2001 he fell in love with an older woman. They had a baby daughter, and though a proud father, he appeared to be under pressure. Perhaps he was depressed. In any case, Volkert felt he had to do something big to protect the weak and vulnerable.

2.

F
ortuyn's funeral was an extraordinary spectacle, something fit for a beloved queen or a pope. He would have adored it. As a boy, Fortuyn had fantasies of being the pope.
His brother and sister were made to kneel before him as worshipful priests. These daydreams lasted well into his puberty. “Where other Catholic boys might have wanted to become bishops,” he told a reporter, “only the highest was good enough for me. It shows my extravagance, I suppose.” Pages of his autobiography are devoted to a description of Pope Pius XII's funeral. He was also impressed by the ceremony around the death of Maria Callas. All very un-Dutch.

The funeral cortège slowly made its way through the crowds in Rotterdam, tens of thousands cheering and throwing flowers in its way. The long white funeral car was followed by Fortuyn's own Daimler, driven by his butler, Herman, who listened impassively as the Slave Chorus from
Nabucco
was blasted through the car speakers. On the front seat, next to the butler, sat Kenneth and Carla, the pet spaniels. Along with the coffin, the dogs were led into the Laurentius and Elizabeth Cathedral for the funeral mass. Crowds gazed adoringly on the scene, rolling their eyes and screaming “Pimmy, thank you, Pimmy, thank you!” Some began to sing the English soccer anthem, “You'll Never Walk Alone.” They also sang the supporters' anthems to the local soccer team, Feyenoord.

Soccer anthems might seem out of place at the funeral of a politician who never showed the slightest interest in sports.
Nabucco
was much more his thing. But on reflection, they are not so strange after all. The stadium has largely replaced the
church as a place for community singing and other expressions of collective devotion. And the emotions stirred up by Fortuyn—tribal nostalgia, distrust of outsiders, hero worship—were precisely those of soccer fans.

When the coffin arrived, the crowds went wild, keening and whistling and hollering as though the home team had scored a goal. Every guest inside the cathedral was presented with a white rose. Ad Melkert, the Social Democrat leader, a studious, balding figure in glasses, was spotted by one of Fortuyn's followers, a well-dressed middle-aged lady, who hissed: “Now you've got what you wanted, you bastard!” It was an extraordinary moment: a typical earnest politician of the center-left, who had always assumed he was on the side of “the people,” had become a hate figure, who might, in different times and different circumstances, have been lynched by the mob. An usher handed the woman a white rose. Kenneth and Carla began to bark.

“God has a mission for you,” said a postcard signed by forty men in Zeeland, the native province of Volkert van der Graaf and Jan Peter Balkenende. Another admirer saw Fortuyn as “a white-winged angel.” A young woman, visiting a small museum in Rotterdam containing Fortuyn memorabilia, believed that “such a man is born only once in a thousand years.” Letters arrived after the funeral with images of the Virgin Mary, the Italian holy man Padre Pio, and Pim Fortuyn. Clemens van Herwaarden, a researcher in Amsterdam, wrote
his thesis on Fortuyn as the Messiah. He said: “People who feel unrepresented by any political party, who are relatively ignorant, and who get most of their information from television, such people saw Fortuyn as more than a political leader; he was a savior.”
¹

In November 2004, a few weeks after Van Gogh's murder, a television poll was held to determine the greatest figure in Dutch history—inspired by a similar BBC poll on the greatest Englishman (Winston Churchill). Pim Fortuyn came out on top, above William the Silent, Rembrandt, and Erasmus. Spinoza didn't even make the list. Anne Frank might well have, but since she did not carry a Dutch passport when she was murdered, she could not be included. (A question was raised in parliament as to the possibility of granting her Dutch citizenship posthumously. The idea was rejected, however, since it was deemed to be unfair to other victims of the Holocaust.) In any event, a statue of Pim Fortuyn was erected by the city of Rotterdam in the middle of the business district. His bald bronze head shines brightly over a black granite plinth, the mouth wide open, as though he is about to give a speech. The words
Loquendi libertatem custodiamus
(Let us protect the freedom of speech) are engraved in the stone. Every day people come to lay fresh flowers at his feet.

Savior, angel, the greatest Dutchman in history—all this for a politician whose career began only in 1999, when he
was chosen as a candidate for a new party started by a louche assortment of real estate developers, advertising men, and an ex–disk jockey. When he died, Fortuyn hadn't even made it into the national parliament, let alone the cabinet. A Roman Catholic fantasizer, a gay man who talked openly of sexual adventures in bathhouses and “backrooms,” a show-off with the gaudy style of a showbiz impresario. How was it possible for such a man to become so popular in a country known for its Calvinist restraint, its bourgeois disdain for excesses, its phlegmatic preference for consensus and compromise?

3.

F
ortuyn hated being compared to notorious figures of the European far right such as France's Jean-Marie Le Pen or Austria's Jörg Haider. He didn't even regard himself as particularly right-wing. When the BBC reporter John Simpson suggested that Fortuyn's desire to close the Dutch borders to foreign immigrants might be construed as racist, Fortuyn lost his cool, insulting Simpson in broken English and terminating the interview. He was thin-skinned in that way.