by Ian Buruma
Friends of Theo claim that even his most unreasonable behavior was often inspired by a sense of principle. Max Pam: “Passion, loyalty, honesty, and principled behavior, these were things that Theo demanded from himself, but also from the people around him. As soon as he suspected cowardice or hypocrisy, that person was beyond the pale.”1
The insistence on total frankness, the idea that tact is a form of hypocrisy, and that everything, no matter how sensitive, should be stated openly, with no holds barred, the elevation of bluntness to a kind of moral ideal; this willful lack of delicacy is a common trait in Dutch behavior. Perhaps its roots are in Protestant pietism, a reaction to what was seen as glib Catholic hypocrisy. Private confession had to become public. Discretion was a sign of holding back the truth, of dishonesty. Whether it is a national trait or not, Theo van Gogh exemplified it. It explains his cruelty, but also his passion for free speech, and his defense of those whose freedoms he felt were being threatened.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali excited his sympathy when she was attacked for her hostile views of Islam. It was not so much what she said; it was the fact that people wished to prevent her from saying it. One very public thing she did, in a television documentary, was to press the twelve-year-old pupils of an Islamic school to declare their principal loyalty. Which would they choose, Allah or the Dutch constitution? It was a leading question, and of course they opted for Allah, which filled her with visible annoyance. Her point was serious. She explained that intolerance of homosexuals and Jews, as professed in the Koran, was incompatible with the equality enshrined in the constitution. But her strident tone put people off. The critical reactions were swift and often as misguided as her question. Jacques Wallage, Social Democratic mayor of Groningen, the son of Jewish survivors, claimed that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was provoking violence. She should be stopped from venting her antagonistic views of Islam in public. People should be reminded of past intolerance. Much of the Jewish community in Groningen, he said, had been wiped out during the war. Which was true enough, but perhaps not entirely relevant to this discussion.
Van Gogh’s defense of Hirsi Ali was in his usual belligerent mode. Ayaan, he said, had to be surrounded by bodyguards because “thousands of followers of that backward culture called Islam think she should be eradicated for being the whore of Babylon.” Wallage, “who thinks that her opinions create a climate that only existed in Groningen when Jewish children were deported, would also be happy if she were shot….” A typically low blow. Van Gogh was right in one respect, however: Hirsi Ali may have been wrong to harangue those schoolgirls, but she was far from behaving like a Nazi. But then Van Gogh used the war to sink in his own poisoned dagger: “If the blessings of Allah should lead to Islamic rule in the Netherlands, Wallage will be the first one to be asked to collaborate with the occupiers in the name of the Jewish Council.”2
Once more, it was back to the war, the deportations, collaboration. Back and forth it goes, in the land of guilty memories, where current affairs keep on taking on the colors of the past. If Leon de Winter or Jacques Wallage could be faulted for bringing up Jewish suffering even when it is beside the point, Van Gogh used Jewish suffering against the Jews in a way that was not just irrelevant but vicious. He never used the wartime heroism of his own family to score points, but he was still possessed by the Dutch obsession with “good” or “bad,” traitor or resister. And he did so in a way that was sometimes far from scrupulous.
5.
Theo van Gogh’s enthusiasms, apart from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, included Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the Marquis de Sade, literary taboo-breakers, bad boys who shouted out the unmentionable and the obscene. But his polemics were also in a Dutch literary tradition that goes back at least to the late nineteenth century. The writings of critics such as Lodewijk van Deyssel (1864–1952) were called scheldkritieken, literally “abusive criticism.” Personal abuse was elevated to a high style, to be taken seriously as literature. These tirades had the added piquancy that the protagonists were bound to know each other. Holland is a small place, and the world of literature even smaller. Stylized abuse was an effective way to ritualize animosities in a tight circle. It was serious, but never deadly.
The masters of literary abuse in the twentieth century were the novelists Gerard van het Reve, who took part in Zo is het, and W. F. Hermans. Both had to fight off lawsuits for insulting religion, Hermans in 1952 and Van het Reve in 1966. Hermans wrote a novel in which one of the characters calls Catholics “the filthiest, creepiest, most deluded, treacherous part of our nation. But they fuck away! They reproduce! Like rabbits, rats, fleas, lice. And they don’t emigrate!” Hermans told the court that these sentiments belonged to a fictional character and that literature should be free. He won his case.
Gerard van het Reve fell afoul of a blasphemy law drafted in 1932 when some Communists had argued for the abolition of Christmas. Under the new law, “scornful blasphemy” would be forbidden. Van het Reve wrote that God was a donkey, and he would make sweet love to the animal, making sure it wouldn’t get hurt when it climaxed. God, he also wrote, would masturbate when thinking of Van het Reve’s devotion. As always with him, the irony was laid on with such a thick brush that no one could be sure how seriously he meant to be taken. It was his tragedy to be laughed at when he was serious and attacked when he wasn’t. His case made it all the way to the supreme court before it was dismissed. Van het Reve’s blasphemy was judged not to have been “scornful.”
Theo van Gogh placed himself squarely in the tradition of abusive criticism. Hermans was one of his heroes. When Van Gogh called Muslims “goat fuckers,” or a “fifth column,” or when he spun fantasies around Leon de Winter’s sex life or likened Jesus to a “rotten fish,” he thought he was doing what Hermans and Van het Reve had done. He was, in his own words, the national “village idiot,” the fat jester with a license to tell the truth. He knew that people didn’t enjoy being abused, but not in his wildest dreams did he suspect that they would kill him for it. This was the crowning irony of his life. Van Gogh, more than anyone, had warned about the dangers of violent religious passions, and yet he behaved as though they held no consequences for him. He made the mistake of assuming that the wider world would not intrude on his Amsterdam scene, with its private ironies, its personal feuds, and its brutal mockery that was never intended to draw more than imaginary blood.
6.
It was always going to be a strange debate, at the City Theatre in Amsterdam. Organized by a group of Amsterdam students and journalists called Happy Chaos, the spectacle would feature Dyab Abou Jahjah, the Belgian founder of the European-Arab League, and a Dutch Social Democrat politician named Boris Dittrich. The debate was going to be moderated by Theo van Gogh and a movie starlet named Georgina Verbaan. The topics of the debate would be feminism, idealism, and Muslim values.
There is not much to be said about Georgina Verbaan. Abou Jahjah, however, is an interesting figure. Born in a Lebanese village in 1971, he moved to Belgium in 1990, claiming that he was threatened by the Baath Party, and studied political science at Louvain. After marrying a local woman, he became a Belgian citizen, and they were divorced three months later. He founded the European-Arab League in 2000. His model was Malcolm X. Just as Malcolm did, Abou Jahjah opposes assimilation. He would like Arabs to live like Arabs in Europe, with their own political parties and schools.
Jort Kelder, editor of a glossy magazine about money and lifestyle, Georgina Verbaan’s lover, and part-time actor in one of Van Gogh’s films, told me what happened that night, in June 2003. Abou Jahjah entered the theater, surrounded by fierce-looking bodyguards. When told that Van Gogh would be the moderator, he refused to join the debate. Van Gogh told the audience what had happened and declared his surprise that this “pimp of the Prophet” should need the protection, not just of Allah, but of bodyguards as well. Abou Jahjah and his guards left the hall, whereupon Van Gogh urged the audience to shout “Allah knows best! Allah knows best!” Dittrich, the politician, ca
lled Van Gogh “a rude prick.” Van Gogh called Dittrich “an unctuous lubricant” (Dittrich is openly gay). It was another balmy night in Amsterdam.
Outside the theater, one of the organizers was threatened by Abou Jahjah’s bodyguards. When Theo walked into the fray, he was accosted by several youths of Moroccan origin. Precisely what they said is not clear. According to some witnesses, they shouted that they would “not let the fat pig get away with this.” Jort Kelder heard them say “We’ll get that fat pig and cut him open.” Van Gogh was urged to take a taxi home. Nonsense, he said, and got on his bike.
“It was then,” said Kelder, “that I realized how deeply they hated him. For us, it was just a game, a debating game. For them it was deadly serious.”
Van Gogh called Kelder later and was clearly happy with the way the evening had gone. He loved a good row, and knew it would be widely reported in the papers. He would write about it himself in The Healthy Smoker. And yet, even though he claimed not to feel in any personal danger, something had alarmed him enough to call Ayaan Hirsi Ali on that same night, on her cell phone. She was in a taxi in New York City, driven by a Muslim driver chewing on a potent weed called khat, popular in Yemen and Somalia. Van Gogh was in a state of great excitement, cursing the Muslims and the cowardice of the Dutch authorities, and the danger of men like Abou Jahjah. Even when she explained that this was not the best time to talk, he wouldn’t stop. They had to meet in Amsterdam, he said. She said she would come and see him.
*
Hence “Provos,” short for “provocateurs.”
*
NSB standing for “Nationaal Socialistische Beweging,” the Dutch National Socialist Party.
FOUR
A Dutch Tragedy
1.
Najib delivered pizzas. Not that scootering around The Hague delivering pizzas was his real ambition. A bright young man of Moroccan descent, Najib spoke fluent French and English as well as his native Dutch, and dreamed of going to the university, making something of himself, being a success.
Najib’s father was in bad health, ruined by too many years of hard factory work. He could barely walk anymore and sat at home watching Arab TV channels and cursing the Jews and other infidels. His mother, dressed from head to toe in black, wailed in Berber about her children who didn’t understand her, her husband who beat her, and the awful fate of being stuck among strangers far from her native village in the Rif mountains. Najib’s sister, Hafidah, wore jeans and a headscarf, and watched Lebanese pop groups on MTV. Najib spoke Dutch to his sister and Berber to his parents.
Julia was a pretty young Dutch girl, rich, spoiled, privileged. She had hoped to be selected for the national field hockey team. Her trainer, Floris, a callow young man with lanky blond hair, was in love with her. She was not in love with Floris. Both lived in large houses in an expensive part of The Hague, the kind of verdant suburb where the main sounds of summer are the plock of tennis balls, the tinkling of teacups, and the quiet hiss of lawn sprinklers—a world away from the concrete “dish city” that was home to Najib.
Floris’s and Julia’s fathers, both policemen who had married above their station, had been best friends for a long time. Their wives had money and the superior attitudes of The Hague’s upper bourgeoisie. Julia’s father, Albert, had once been a coarse but good-looking man, whose air of proletarian toughness might have enticed her mother, Eefje, into an ill-considered marriage. A life of unearned comfort had turned Albert into a fat, ill-mannered slob, resentful of his wife’s intellect and class. Eefje found refuge from her youthful folly in a succession of New Age fads and meditations, and by tending to her rose garden.
Floris’s mother had died, leaving her husband, Joost, with a fortune. Joost was a loud man in flashy clothes, who drove expensive cars, kept a large yacht, and drank too much. His late wife must also, like Eefje, have had a taste for rough masculinity. But as with Albert, this quality had turned rancid long ago.
One day, Najib saw Julia in a clothing store, where he had been harassed by a shopgirl who accused him of stealing. After all, she said, all “fucking Moroccans” are thieves. Najib kept his cool and handled the situation with dignity. Julia liked the look of him. One thing led to another; telephone messages were exchanged, dates made.
Floris was furious and assaulted Najib in the street, pushing him off his scooter and kicking him when he was down. Albert, Julia’s father, tried everything to stop his daughter from seeing Najib. Joost offered to help his friend. Both wanted Floris to marry Julia—hockey coach and star player, son and daughter of wealth, blond and brunette, Dutch and Dutch.
Najib did more than deliver pizzas. Once a month, he would visit a shady character to collect money for his family. This arrangement went through Najib’s brother, Nasr, who was in prison for dealing drugs. Najib had no idea where the money came from and didn’t really want to know. The family needed the cash and he was saving up for university tuition.
Najib continued to see Julia despite opposition from her family and, once they heard about it, from his own too. Najib’s mother was terrified that he would behave like his elder sister and run off with an infidel. When her husband found out about Najib and Julia, he went into a rage and beat his wife. Najib’s younger sister, stuck between traditional family obligations and MTV-fed fantasies, was envious, as well as disapproving, of her brother.
Violence invited more violence. Floris attacked Najib again. Najib beat up Floris. Joost secretly took pictures of Najib and pretended to Julia that they were from police files. The only one to show any sympathy for the young couple was Julia’s mother, who liked the young man’s nice manners and the fact that he spoke French. But she was mostly lost in a haze of her own discontents and was not much good to her daughter. Things became even more complicated when Joost discovered that Najib was Nasr’s brother.
Joost knew Nasr. He was getting a cut from the same Colombian gangsters who were paying Najib. Nasr, a police informer as well as a small-time drug dealer, knew all about Joost, too. In exchange for the cash supplied to his family, Nasr had agreed to serve his time in prison and keep silent. Najib’s involvement with Julia threatened the whole arrangement. Najib might easily find out. Despite all this, he and Julia continued to see each other.
Joost’s drinking got out of hand, and his behavior became erratic. Certain unpleasant facts began to leak out. When Albert discovered his friend’s involvement with gangsters, he wanted to arrest the Colombians, and promised to protect Nasr by transferring him to another prison. In exchange he pressed him to stop his brother from seeing Julia. Nasr refused. Albert entered Nasr’s cell and kicked him around so badly that he fell into a coma, and died in the hospital.
Najib’s family blamed their misfortunes on Julia. Najib still loved her, but felt torn between conficting loyalties. Joost, meanwhile, tried to escape from the Colombians; he went into hiding, but was found by one of the gangsters, who hanged him. It was made to look like a suicide.
Floris blamed Najib for his father’s death. The showdown took place on Joost’s yacht. They fought. Najib fell into the water. He couldn’t swim. Floris refused to save him.
Julia’s family wouldn’t allow Julia to attend Najib’s funeral. Albert, in a last attempt to regain his daughter’s love, showed his police badge and forced Najib’s family to let her see her lover’s dead body. Julia seemed to have forgiven her father, but she left her comfortable home, headed for the beach, and kept walking into the cold waves of the North Sea until she disappeared forever.
2.
This Dutch melodrama was shown on television in thirteen parts during the winter of 2002. Justus van Oel, who wrote the script, had wanted his contemporary Romeo and Juliet tale to end on a more hopeful note. The two mothers, Najib’s and Julia’s, would meet and console one another for the loss of their children. Through their tragic deaths, a kind of reconciliation would be possible. One day, surely, Muslims and Christians, Dutch and Moroccans, would learn to live in peace, and perhaps even love one ano
ther. But Theo van Gogh, the director, had other ideas. It had to end with death. “For him,” said Justus van Oel, “it was war. The message he wanted to bang home was the total impossibility of living in peace with devout Muslims…. The series had to end badly, in every detail. There was no room for hope.”1
And yet Van Gogh was more complicated than that. Although he hated Islam as much as Christianity, and thought that religion itself was the source of all evil, he also said “there are a hundred thousand decent Muslims, to whom we Dutch people ought to reach out.” Although his multicultural soap opera ended badly, his sympathy was clearly with Najib and Julia, and Najib’s sister, who fled to France with her non-Muslim lover. Van Gogh supported anyone—in life or in fiction—who defied conventions, who rebelled against social and religious constraints. Whatever else he was, Van Gogh was no racist.
He was one of the very few Dutch directors to make films about immigrants. And, though often provocative, he enjoyed engaging with Muslims. Najib and Julia was a unique effort on Dutch, or indeed European, television. In a joint enterprise with Forum, an organization that promotes multiculturalism, Van Gogh used the series to stimulate debates, about religion, sex, tolerance, and so on, in schools and other public places. Two years after making the series, he made a film called Cool! about juvenile delinquents at Glen Mills, an experimental reform school. Many of the actors were student/inmates, mostly Moroccan-Dutch, although the most villainous character is a pasty-faced Dutch boy who speaks in an upper-class Hague accent. Two former Glen Mills pupils, Fouad Mourigh and Farhane el-Hamchaoui, used this opportunity and became professional actors, touring the country with a play of their own, about their life in the streets as petty criminals and their redemption.