Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  Submission—the film Hirsi Ali wrote and for which her friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered—is only eleven minutes long. It depicts women in transparent veils and low-cut wedding gowns, with red lash marks on their flesh and blackened eyes. Texts from the Koran have been inscribed directly on their skin. Among these texts are the passages sanctioning the physical punishment of disobedient women. The women pray out loud, asking Allah for strength to bear their suffering.

  I wish I could report that Submission is a triumphant artistic achievement. It’s awful, actually. It’s set to music that sounds like a porn flick sound track overdubbed with the muezzin’s call to prayer— bow-chicka-mow-mow-allahu-akbar! Even worse than the sound track is the acting, which manages, curiously, to be both leaden and overwrought at once. After eleven minutes of watching these prissy martyred creatures roll their eyes heavenward as they supplicate and whinge to Allah, one finds sympathy for the urge to slap them around. But the film’s artistic merits are not the point. No one should die for making a crummy movie. The film’s moral message is one to which no civilized person—and particularly no feminist—should object.

  Submission aired in the Netherlands on August 29, 2004. On November 2, 2004, a man dressed in a traditional Moroccan djellaba shot Van Gogh as he cycled to work in central Amsterdam. The filmmaker pleaded for mercy while the assailant stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. When Van Gogh tried to stumble away, his attacker shot him again, stabbed him again, slit his throat with a butcher knife, then used the knife to skewer a five-page letter to his chest, lodging the blade all the way to his spinal column. The letter called for the murder of Hirsi Ali, who was aligned, it said, with “Jewish masters,” and threatened several other Dutch politicians, including the Jewish mayor of Amsterdam (who, curiously, responded to the murder by calling for greater trust between native Dutch and Moroccans). 22 It described the sounds the author expected presently to hear throughout the streets of Europe: “Screams, Miss Hirsi Ali, that will cause shivers to roll down one’s spine; that will make hair stand up from heads. People will be seen drunk with fear while they are not drunk. FEAR shall fill the atmosphere on that great day.”3 It concluded:

  I know for sure that you, Oh America, will go under;

  I know for sure that you, Oh Europe, will go under;

  I know for sure that you, Oh Holland, will go under;

  I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go under;

  I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist,

  will go under.

  In the ensuing shootout with police, the assailant also wounded a police officer and an eyewitness. The murderer was subsequently identified as twenty-six-year-old Mohammed Bouyeri, an Islamic extremist with dual Dutch and Moroccan nationality. He was believed to belong to a terrorist network affiliated with al Qaeda and linked to the May 16, 2003, terrorist attack in Casablanca that killed forty people. Bouyeri had been born and raised in Amsterdam. Like the London Tube bombers, he was a homegrown European monster. At his trial, he made a point of taunting Van Gogh’s mother: “I don’t feel your pain. I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a nonbeliever.” He stressed to the court that he would kill Van Gogh again if given a chance: He had, he said, acted out of conviction.

  On July 26, 2005—a few days after the second set of attacks on London—Bouyeri was sentenced to life imprisonment. It was the maximum sentence possible under Dutch law, but it must be allowed that many fates are worse than spending one’s life in a Dutch prison. De Telegraaf, a leading Dutch newspaper, recently published an article about life in the Esserheem Prison, which houses murderers and other violent criminals: “Life is nowhere so relaxed as in Esserheem,” said Martin K., who was serving a sentence for two murders. “In our own café ‘Club 91’ we have a party every weekend. . . . While enjoying a delicious snack, an ice cream or a malt beer, we play pool or listen to music. If the weather allows, we play tennis, since we have a tennis court outside.”23 Bouyeri retains his right to vote—and to stand for parliament. Prosecutors had asked the court to strip him of both; the judges declined.

  Soon after the murder, the Dutch government took some obvious, if long-overdue, measures. It began deporting terrorist suspects, closing extremist mosques, and shutting down Islamist websites. Police stepped up surveillance of radical groups and made quite a few arrests. Yet at the same time, many prominent Dutch politicians and civic officials displayed a public and almost parodic inability to recognize the significance of the murder or respond to it appropriately. Van Gogh was, as his name suggests, a descendant of the artist whose achievements rank among the great triumphs of Western culture. His assassin was a welfare recipient: he had been not only tolerated but nourished by the Dutch state, just as the London bombers had been nourished by the British state. The symbolism of this murder could scarcely be more obvious, and if anyone missed it, the note stabbed to his body should surely have filled in the blanks. After the murder, Deputy Prime Minister Gerrit Zalm made the perfectly self-evident observation that the Netherlands was at war with Islamic extremism. Note his careful phrasing: Islamic extremism, not Islam. He was sharply chastised by his colleagues. “We fall,” said Green Left leader Femke Halsema, “too easily into an ‘us and them’ antithesis with the word ‘war.’” Many other prominent politicians, including the mayor of Amsterdam (who had been specifically marked for death in the murderer’s letter), echoed or applauded her high-minded rebuke. That sort of language, said the mayor, was not helpful and might lead to an “us-and-them” divide.

  An us-and-them divide? It is you versus them, you phlegmatic Dutch dolts. Just read the note. Jan Marijnissen, the leader in the Dutch parliament of the Socialist Party, was not on the note’s copy list, apparently: “If rationality is pushed aside,” he said primly of the deputy prime minister’s comments, “hate could lodge itself in the heads of extremists.” I personally suspect that a bit of hate just may be lodged in their heads already. Now, this Dutch tolerance business is all very inspiring, but the “them” in question happen to be, as Van Gogh himself put it, “a fifth column of goatfuckers.” If these politicians really can’t tell the difference between themselves and Islamic extremists, I propose they spend a year living under Islamic law, preferably in one of the countries where Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised.

  In the aftermath of the murder, the stories of perverted tolerance multiplied. In a now infamous incident, a Rotterdam artist created a street mural—on the exterior of his own wall—with the words “Thou shalt not kill.” Moroccan youths gathered around the mural and spat on it. The head of a local mosque complained to police that he found the mural offensive and racist. The mayor of Rotterdam ordered the mural, not the Moroccan youths, removed by police. When a video crew attempted to film the destruction of the mural, Dutch police seized the videotape. The Netherlands was once the only country in Europe where figures such as Spinoza could be guaranteed freedom of expression. Now it is the only country in Europe where the Sixth Commandment is subject to immediate censorship.

  Immediately following the murder, Hirsi Ali was sped out of the country on government orders. Members of the Dutch parliament were forced into hiding. These developments met with surprisingly little outrage. The parliamentarian Geert Wilders, who has called for closing Holland’s radical mosques, now spends every single night in a high-security prison cell; his security guards say they cannot protect him otherwise. He is permitted a weekly meeting with his wife. Can anyone imagine an American senator—John McCain, say—spending his nights in a high-security prison cell because the U.S. government was unable or unwilling to take appropriate measures to protect him?

  This particular story is a Dutch one. But the tolerance of Islamic radicals who are dedicated to Europe’s destruction is not limited to the Netherlands. Throughout Europe, funded by foreign money, thousands of mosques import a belligerent strain of Islam that rejects assimilation and embraces jihad, the complete subjugation of wom
en, and vitriolic anti-Semitism. France’s 1,200 mosques are nearly all funded by foreign money, and most of the imams who preach in them are foreigners. An Algerian-born imam in Strasbourg, Mohamed Latreche, has established the PMF—the French Muslim Party—on a platform that consists largely of demonizing Jews and denying the Holocaust. Representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah participate in his rallies. The imam of Hamburg’s al-Quds Mosque, where 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta regularly worshipped, announced in a videotaped sermon prior to September 11 that “the Jews and crusaders must have their throats slit.” Many prominent Islamic spokesmen in Europe dream openly of the day when the Continent will be governed by sharia. Europe tolerates all of this.

  THE NEW ORDERING PRINCIPLE OF EUROPEAN SOCIETY

  Why do we find Europe in the grip of this strange passivity? The diffidence finds its source in the new ordering principle of European society—a form of weak rationality, a kind of utilitarianism. Europeans now obey their authorities not because they rule by divine right, nor because those authorities promise a utopian future, but because law and order are preferable to chaos and anarchy. This is reasonable enough, but hardly a principle to set men alight with passion.

  Social and moral structures in Europe are now, essentially, bureaucratic structures: These structures, like Turing machines, serve ends that aren’t specified and may not even exist. Throughout Europe, the replacement of supernaturalism with rationalism has led to an open question: Why must we do things the way we always have? The response—No reason, I suppose—has vitiated innumerable seemingly pointless demands of manners, propriety, culture, and behavior. With the exception of a few core demands, ancient social structures have been in large part demolished. But the loss of many small principles can add up to a catastrophic failure of the system as a whole.

  Consider, for example, soaring rates of drunken vandalism in Britain. The culture of loutishness has become so pervasive there that voters now consider antisocial behavior—drunkenness, vagrancy, vandalism, street brawling, public urination—to be their greatest concern. Why is this behavior rising so alarmingly? One explanation: No one now believes, in principle, in any argument stronger than the assertion that there really shouldn’t be so much drunken vandalism. To this, it is only too easy to reply, “Why the hell not?” Why the hell should people not urinate in public? And why the hell should they fight to protect European civilization?

  “The fall of ideologies now casts a deadly shadow over every ideal,” writes the French philosopher Chantal Delsol, a professor at the University of Marne-la-Vallée and a shrewd observer of modern Europe. Utopian ideologies, she remarks, were in their capacity to awe and inspire like cathedrals, and Europe has watched the collapse of one cathedral after another.24 Delsol likens experiments in utopianism, particularly in its communist and fascist expressions, to Icarus’s attempts to soar to the sun, and remarks that the failure of these experiments has left modern man as she imagines the fallen Icarus, humbled and paralyzed by self-doubt. (Modern European man, I should interject: Americans neither conducted these experiments nor do they live with their consequences.) Modern Europeans have come, as a consequence, to condemn zeal and faith in all their forms, theist or atheist, in preference for bureaucracy, weak solutions of moral relativism, and quiet despair. Delsol is not unsympathetic to this ideological uncertainty and lack of moral self-confidence: Rigid orthodoxy, after all, did give rise to both the Inquisition and the Holocaust, she reflects, or at least were associated with both. Europe, in other words, has lost its mojo for good reason.

  Lacking any sense of purpose, Delsol observes, and fearful of taking a stand—about anything, even the essentials of self-preservation— Europeans instead enshroud themselves in technological and physical comfort, leading mediocre lives, avoiding risk at all cost, and mouthing vapid, unexamined clichés. She calls these clichés “the clandestine ideology of our time”—clandestine because no overt, passionate adherence to ideology is now socially permissible. Delsol correctly observes, however, that the banishment of the economy of ideology has encouraged a black market to flourish in its place, an underground moral code steeped in sentimentality but untempered by reason and serving no larger, coherent principles.

  The code she describes is a close cousin to what is termed, in America, political correctness, but whereas political correctness in the United States is confined for the most part to the universities and the coastal cities, it is the unspoken foundation of the modern European welfare state—a society predicated on an ever-expanding sense of entitlement. Increasingly, Delsol observes, that to which men feel entitled is described as a right or, for special emphasis, a human right:

  Anything contemporary man needs or envies, anything that seems desirable to him without reflection, becomes the object of a demanded right. Human rights are invoked as a reason for refusing to show identification, for becoming indignant against the deportation of delinquent foreigners, for forcing the state to take illegal aliens under its wing, for justifying squatting by homeless people, for questioning the active hunt for terrorists. 25

  A leading principle of this code is the estimation of “tolerance” above all other virtues. The idea of tolerance, originally defined as the absence of state prohibition against certain ideas and behaviors, has come, she notes, to be conflated with legitimization—the general social acceptance of those ideas and behaviors, to the point of encouraging them with legal and material aid from the state, ultimately to the detriment of the entire commonwealth.4 This in turn gives rise to an ambient culture of moral quasi-relativism—“quasi” because, as Delsol rightly observes, its adherents unquestionably accept moral absolutes (“one must be tolerant”), yet tend simply to affirm that they indignantly reject moral absolutism. Delsol finds this pernicious, of course, and rightly so: One need only to look at the Netherlands to see exactly where it leads.

  THE NIHILIST ASSASSIN RETURNS

  At the time of his death, Theo van Gogh was preparing a documentary about the murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, whose assassination prefigured Van Gogh’s by exactly 911 days. The story of Fortuyn’s death and its aftermath is particularly illustrative of this European tendency to conflate tolerance and somnolence.

  On May 6, 2002, nine days before the general election in which he was expected to win the balance of power in the Dutch parliament, Fortuyn gave a radio interview in the dozy city of Hilversum, a residential suburb of Amsterdam. As he exited the radio station and entered the parking lot, he was shot five times from behind, at close range, in the head, chest, and neck. Attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. A thirty-two-year-old Dutchman, Volkert van der Graaf, was arrested minutes later at a nearby gas station, covered in Fortuyn’s blood, the pistol still on his person.

  Upon hearing the news, Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt declared that he had believed something like this was “impossible in this day in age, in the European Union, in the 21st Century.”5 Two years later, no one would express surprise—dismay, yes, but not surprise—that an event like this could occur in the European Union. We are all aware now that the place has a few problems.

  Although Fortuyn was widely described after his death as a neofascist, this is ridiculous. Ideologically, he was closer to traditional figures on the European left than on the right. This was a man with portraits of Marx and Lenin hanging on the walls of his home, for God’s sake. The former Marxist sociology professor—that’s right, Marxist sociology professor—embraced the Netherlands’ permissive laws on drugs and prostitution. He supported the Netherlands’ policy on euthanasia.6 He was an open homosexual who applauded Holland’s full legalization of same-sex marriages, although he himself had no taste for monogamy or domesticity and frequently called attention to the racial diversity of his bedmates as proof of his liberal bona fides. Given his views, it scarcely even makes sense to call Fortuyn a man of the Right, no less a fascist.

  How, then, did Fortuyn acquire his reputation? His alleged fascism amounted to two positions: He had come
to view the Netherlands’ highly collectivized economy as overweening; he favored economic decentralization and privatization. Given that most Dutch citizens pay more than half their incomes in taxes, his ideas were hardly far from the mainstream, although they obviously represented an evolution from his early Marxism. But no one could truly be shocked that a modern European politician might adopt these views after the fall of the Berlin Wall, particularly given the visible stagnation of Europe’s more regulated economies.

  More notoriously, he ran his campaign on an anti-immigration platform. Specifically, he opposed Islamic immigration, because wide-scale Islamic immigration, he held, threatened the Dutch tradition of left-wing permissiveness. Islamic immigrants, he pointed out, tended to take a dim view of homosexuals such as himself. His homosexual friends had been attacked in the streets by Muslim youths; imams in Holland’s mosques openly called for homosexuals to be stoned to death. Traditional Islamic values, he observed, were incompatible with the sexual openness and equality practiced in the Netherlands. He deplored forced marriages, honor killings, and female genital mutilation, all of which had been brought to the Netherlands by Muslim immigrants and by no other kind of immigrant. He was deeply disturbed by Islamic anti-Semitism. He observed, correctly, that young men from Islamic countries committed a disproportionate share of street crime in the Netherlands, and that levels of that crime had been rising sharply. Fortuyn was widely pilloried in the press for referring to Islam as “backwards.” Less often was it noted that he made this comment in response to a Rotterdam imam’s remark, on prime-time television, that homosexuals were worse than pigs. That Fortuyn came to be portrayed as the intolerant one in this exchange is a wonderment.