The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004, killed by a man the authorities identified as a radicalized Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri, threw the Netherlands into a bruising argument over tolerance and integration. Van Gogh had been an outspoken critic of Islam, and although Dutch Muslim organizations quickly condemned the killing, mosques and Islamic schools were struck by arson and vandalism in the days that followed, among them a bomb at a school in Eindhoven.
The backlash reached well beyond a fringe. A poll taken after the murder found that 40 percent of respondents said they hoped the country's roughly 900,000 Muslims, in a population of 16 million, would no longer feel at home, and 80 percent wanted tougher steps to compel immigrants to integrate. The argument had been building for years, breaking into the open in 2002 with the rise of the populist Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated that spring.
Some read the violence as proof that the Dutch model of a gentle, multicultural coexistence had failed. Scholars were more cautious. Han Entzinger, an immigration expert at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said the country had long lived “side by side but not together,” a habit reaching back to the era when Catholic and Protestant communities kept apart, and that Dutch society “seems open but in fact is closed.” To treat one extreme act as evidence that integration had collapsed, he argued, did not fit the facts.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in November 2004, in its own words.