Murder in Amsterdam (19 page)

“Liberate yourself!” he admonished young Muslims, in a weird echo of 1960s Provo rhetoric. “Come out of that coffeeshop, out of that bar, out of that corner. Listen to the cry of LA ILAHA ILLA ALLAH [Forsake all others and worship only Allah]. Join the caravan of martyrs.” In fact, of course, it was not at all like Provo. For the liberation preached by Mohammed was the liberation of death, of oblivion, the kind of heroic sacrifice that inspired European fascists in the 1930s.

To claim that there are similarities between Mohammed's Islamism and other kinds of extremism is not to say that they are the same. But the death wish in the name of a higher cause, a god, or a great leader is something that has appealed to confused and resentful young men through the ages and is certainly not unique to Islam. Mohammed's views on the U.S., expressed in the same document, also have a deeply European provenance, to be found in the right-wing politics of the 1930s as well as in a long left-wing tradition of anti-Americanism. “If we take the example of the mother of all
democracies, America,” he wrote, “and compare its social statistics (crime, violence, etc.) with those of other nations, we can only conclude that it is an utterly sick society. It is only a matter of time before the whole social order collapses into chaos.”

In the muddled mind of Mohammed Bouyeri, then, ran a deep current of European anti-liberalism combined with self-righteous moralism and Islamist revolutionary fervor. This explosive mixture gave him a reason to murder the enemies who stood in the way of his vision of world salvation. The targets of his rage could be quite random, from a security guard at a local welfare office, whom Mohammed threatened with murder (“I'll rip your heart out!”), to the entire Dutch people: “The dark clouds of death gather over your country. Prepare for something you can never be prepared for. You will pay with your blood for the torture and martyrdom of our brothers and sisters.”
⁷

Random, but also quite specific, and there was a sexual element. Two of the three most immediate targets of Mohammed's murderous intentions were immigrants: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a frequent subject of violent fantasies at gatherings in Mohammed's apartment, represented the civilization Mohammed wished to destroy. Ahmed Aboutaleb, the Amsterdam city councillor, was a Muslim who had allegedly turned on his brothers by working for the enemy. The third target was the populist right-wing politician, Geert Wilders, who
had been trying to step into Pim Fortuyn's shiny shoes, with diminishing returns. Wilders was denounced mainly because of his alleged homosexuality. There was no basis to this allegation. Perhaps he was mixed up with Fortuyn. Or possibly his enemies were confused by the politician's trademark dyed-blond bouffant hairdo. In any case, Hirsi Ali and Aboutaleb, a thoughtful and tough-minded Social Democrat born in Morocco, were the main enemies, one an apostate, a Whore of Babylon, and the other a degraded Muslim, a
zindiq,
who was nothing but an infidel in the eyes of the followers of Takfir, and thus unworthy to live on this earth.

8.

T
he common view of Mohammed Bouyeri's rhetoric and deeds is to see them as deeply alien to Dutch tradition, as aspects of an exotic invasion from the mysterious and increasingly terrifying Orient. But at least one newspaper columnist recognized a similarity between the killer of Van Gogh and the fanatical vegan who murdered Pim Fortuyn. Both were “idealistic narcissists” who felt hindered in their quest for a better world, or the Truth, by loud-mouthed media celebrities.
⁸

It would indeed be surprising if the general coarsening of
public rhetoric, encouraged by a constant battle to be heard in the cacophony of the mass media, and by the modern Dutch notion that “everything must be said,” no matter how offensive, had not infected the habits and words of a young Dutchman of foreign extraction. Mohammed, in this sense too, was perhaps more a child of south Amsterdam than of Douar Ikhammalen.

Ali Eddaoudi, the prison imam, has no patience for the “young generation of Moroccan criminals.” They are “animals,” in his view, uncouth, left much too free, obsessed with money and status. Turks still send their most unruly boys back to Turkey for a while, to learn manners. Moroccan parents used to do this too, until Dutch social workers put a stop to it, thinking it was a form of “oppression.” Eddaoudi would love to take some of those “animals” back to Morocco, where he would soon teach them manners by “totally humiliating them.” Over there, he said, you get beaten for bad behavior. You get ostracized. You have no friends. But in Holland, it's the reverse: “If you steal, and drive around in a big car, you get status.” The culture of “the old country, where few of these boys were born, isn't the problem,” he concluded. “The problem is right here, in Holland.”

Naturally, Mohammed Bouyeri would not regard himself as a common thug. On the contrary, he touted his brand of
Islam as the solution to the bad behavior that both he and Ali Eddaoudi condemn. Nor has he been treated as a common criminal. Judges and lawyers in criminal trials do not normally spend so much time pondering the “ideological and religious development” of the defendants. But this, too, may have something to do with an older story, much older than the current crisis among Muslims in large European cities: violent crime and revolutionary violence are not always far apart.

In November 2005, the Amsterdam police arrested a Moroccan-Dutch kid called Maik. He had twice posted violent threats against Geert Wilders on the Internet. When the police searched his house, they found homemade explosives in the basement. Maik was a street kid, like many others, with a passion for kickboxing and fireworks. He was attracted to excitement, craved action. September 11 immediately captured his imagination. His Moroccan friends at school thought Islam was cool and tough. He began to rummage around the Internet for more information. After the murder of Van Gogh, he established some kind of contact with the Hofstad Group and met Nouredine. He adopted the name Talib el-Ilm, Student of Knowledge. His hero, whose picture he used on his user profile on MSN, was his “Great leader and teacher” Mohammed Bouyeri. Maik, the kickboxer, was all of seventeen years old.

9.

N
ovember 2004 was Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, when all Muslims fast between sunrise and sundown. It is a time of gathering with family and friends, of prayer, and, especially toward the end of Ramadan, of charitable thoughts and good deeds.

On the evening of November 1, Mohammed received his friends at his Amsterdam apartment, which he shared with another friend named Ahmed. Jason, the half-American, was there, and Ismael, and Fahmi, and Rashid. The friends from The Hague had brought some soup. They talked about the old days, when Mohammed used to get high and tell fantastic stories. They laughed. Time passed quickly. It was past midnight when Mohammed decided to go for a walk around the Sloterplas, a pond near his apartment. He was accompanied by Rashid and Ahmed. Mohammed didn't say much, but pointed to the night sky and remarked how beautiful and peaceful it looked. They listened to Koranic prayers through their headphones attached to digital music players. Nothing much more was said.

Back at the apartment, Ahmed and Mohammed went straight to bed. It was late and they had to rise early. At 5:30
A.M
. they prayed and had a light breakfast. Ahmed went back
to sleep. When he woke up a few hours later, Mohammed had already left the apartment. On his bicycle, like so many other Dutch people, he was making his way to another part of Amsterdam, where he would meet another man on his bicycle. There were no surprises. He had cycled this route many times in the weeks before. He knew exactly what he was going to do.

SEVEN
In Memoriam

A
nd so the bickering went on. Should a memorial be built on Linnaeus Street, on the spot of the murder, or in the neighboring park, or perhaps in the center of
Amsterdam, or maybe not at all? And what kind of monument should it be?
Het Parool,
a newspaper founded by the Dutch resistance under Nazi occupation, invited its readers to come up with ideas for the most appropriate memorial: a two-meters-high cigarette, suggested one reader, from which puffs of smoke would emerge at regular intervals; a sculpture of a great happy pig, said another, on whose pink flanks people could write their opinions. Many liked the idea of a sculpture in the form of a giant cactus—a cactus, in the words of one reader, employing the quaintly old-fashioned jargon of postwar novels about war heroes, “that was just as big and strong as Theo, as a beacon of prickly power, as an inspiration to stand tall, proud and undaunted.”

The cactus had become something of a trademark for Van Gogh. He would always end his television talk shows by kissing one, after inviting his guests to do the same. One of his guests, Roman Polanski, refused. Van Gogh, who idolized Polanski, said he loved kissing cacti. Polanski replied that everyone has to be good at something.

Erecting monuments to their own bravery and suffering during World War II had become so prevalent a Dutch practice in the late 1940s and early '50s that people spoke of a “monument rain.” The largest and most famous one, a kind of fluted stone phallus with reliefs all around of suffering Dutch humanity in chains, is the National Monument on Dam Square, opposite the royal palace in Amsterdam. The
Queen lays a wreath there every year to remember World War II—not the Holocaust, which was hardly an issue in the 1950s, but the suffering of the Dutch people under German occupation. It is where the nation feels most sorry for itself. (It is also where the world's young gathered in the 1960s and '70s to strum guitars, make out in their sleeping bags, and smoke dope.)

One of the readers of
Het Parool
took the view that the National Monument should make way for a cactus monument that would be just as large and imposing. In the eyes of such people, Van Gogh had finally become what he had aspired to be: the symbol of Dutch resistance, the national hero who stood tall, a freedom fighter who did his uncle and grandfather proud. The cactus idea won. A decision was made by the borough council of East/Watergraafsmeer to erect the stone cactus in the park where Mohammed Bouyeri was arrested, not far from the place where he killed Van Gogh.

The bickering did not stop with the monument, however. Just as contentious was the first anniversary of the murder, to be commemorated in Linnaeus Street. Job Cohen, the mayor, would speak, and so would the prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende. This was enough reason for the Friends of Theo to stay away. “We have not been invited,” Theodor Holman sniffed in his weekly column for
Het Parool,
and surely Cohen “must have” regarded Theo as an anti-Semite—“which he wasn't.”

And so, intoned Theo's best Friend: “Fuck off, Job Cohen! We know you always hated Theo….

The language, as usual with Holman, was extreme, and the sentiments deeply unpleasant. Yet it is worth quoting because the tone was not unique. I hesitate to attach national characteristics to this particular air of aggrieved self-righteousness, but Holman's outburst, in a perfectly respectable Amsterdam daily, expressed something that is not uncommon in Holland today: offensiveness projected as a sign of sincerity, the venting of rage as a mark of moral honesty. Theo van Gogh himself, of course, had done much to set this tone.

As it happened, the memorial ceremony in Linnaeus Street was a calm and dignified occasion. There were flowers, a teddy bear, messages of grief, and a large pale green cactus, sticking up from the bicycle path like a hairy cucumber. The one bit of discord was a placard held up by a woman that read: “Balkenende, you're here one year too late.” But
after the prime minister went over to have a quiet word with her, she raised her thumb and praised him for being such a fine fellow. She had only been upset, she said, because he had visited vandalized Moroccan schools after Theo's murder. Why, she asked him, did he have to pay so much attention to “those Moroccans”? After all, she said with tears in her eyes, he was the “Dutch prime minister.”

The crowd was relatively small, a few hundred people at most. Followers of Pim Fortuyn wore T-shirts with portraits of Van Gogh and their own hero fraternally side by side, as freedom fighters. Balkenende spoke about the importance of the rule of law. The murder, he said, was an attack on “everything we hold dear in the Netherlands.” Cohen, too, appealed to reason: “We must be free to believe what we want, free to say what we think, and free to go where we wish, without fear.”

The crowd began to disperse. It was just another office day. Of the dignitaries, only the Amsterdam council member, Ahmed Aboutaleb, lingered. He explained to reporters, in his faint Moroccan accent, that he was there in support of the constitution, which had been brutally assaulted by the murder of Van Gogh. Candles were lit by one or two of the Fortuyn followers. A gust of wind caught the flames and the prickly cactus was swiftly reduced to a pile of ashes.

There was one more commemoration that day, in the Arena Hotel in Amsterdam. This time, Theo's family and
Friends did turn up, even though Job Cohen spoke once again, about freedom and tolerance and the need to face life without fear. Theo's father, Johan, thanked people for their support, and a discussion followed, which was largely an opportunity to express goodwill and liberal sentiments. Oh, for “a brilliant debater like Theo van Gogh,” lamented one observer. How deplorable that “most people there were well educated and susceptible to reason.” Only Holman did not disappoint. “Do you really think Theo would have been happy with this?” he roared. “He would have loathed it! Can I say that I read the Koran and thought it was a fucking rotten book? Only at the risk of my life.”

The fighting over Theo van Gogh's remembrance was unseemly, but not untypical of a country with a long tradition of religious strife. Memory, especially in ceremonies for the dead, is not about debate, but about shared emotion, often cast in a religious or quasi-religious form. The Netherlands, like the rest of western Europe, may have become a largely secular society in recent decades, but the habits of faith die hard. Preaching still comes naturally to the Dutch, as does the venting of moralizing emotion—that sense of being “in a total rage.” Emotion, one year after Theo's murder, had largely lifted the victim out of the history of actual events and elevated him to an almost mythical status as a martyr for the pure and absolute truth.

It is always easier, particularly in what was once a deeply
religious country, to erect memorials and deliver sermons than to look the angel of history directly in the face. The way people remembered Theo van Gogh was marked by a surfeit not of reason but of sentimentality. It is a common feature of the secular age, these outbursts of displaced religiosity, often expressed at the funerals of media celebrities: Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II, Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh. The tearful farewells to people we never knew have replaced the established forms of organized faith, which used to absorb, in the shape of confessions or common prayer, more personal anxieties and discontents. Collective sentimentality is the easiest way to deal with matters we would rather not face head-on. This is evident in many painful memories, including those of the darkest past, that still haunt the Dutch, perhaps even more than other Europeans. If Clio is the muse of history, the ghostly presence of Anne Frank has hovered over the collective memory of Nazi occupation.

2.

I
was struck by this news item, not because I begrudged a persecuted writer his refuge in Amsterdam. Offering an Algerian, or any other writer, a place to work in freedom and peace is a good and noble undertaking. But the exact recreation of Anne Frank's old family apartment, so that a writer can dwell in her ghostly presence, is morbid and indeed sentimental—as though the past could be relived by recreating its settings, as though there is anything to be learned, apart from one or two things about interior decoration, by restoring the period fixtures of Anne Frank's living room. Sometimes it is better to let the past be.

Yet I, too, found it hard to forget the past during the
summer months I spent in Amsterdam. Friends had lent me their house in the oldest part of the city. It stands on a narrow street that once ran through a medieval nunnery. The area, now part of the most famous red-light district in Europe, is nothing if not cosmopolitan. On one corner of the street is a Thai massage parlor, on the other a brothel with three Brazilian transvestites, one of whom advertised his particular assets in a photograph of a large brown penis drooping above a gartered leg.

The virtually naked “window prostitutes,” from all the poor countries in the world, pose in their dimly lit rooms along the canal, in old houses decorated with gracefully carved seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gables and neon signs offering live sex shows. It is easier in that part of town to buy a large electric dildo than a newspaper. Drunken Englishmen in T-shirts and razor haircuts slouch past the windows in groups, sniggering and pointing at the girls from Guatemala or Ukraine. Turkish men with sad mustaches negotiate prices with their hands, while black men from Suriname do drug deals under the trees by the bridge. Bewildered groups of Chinese tourists are ushered into the sex shows by Dutch hawkers, who offer “fucky fucky, sucky sucky” while making obscene gestures with their tongues. Sex shops are stacked with magazines and DVDs catering to fantasies of every conceivable taste. Inflatable dolls with
wide-open mouths, rhino whips, leather masks, penis rings, and large photos of blowjobs and anal penetrations are openly on display.

A stench of beer, marijuana, rotting garbage, and piss hangs like vapor over the historic canals. A friend of mine once admonished a couple of Moroccan youths for urinating against the wooden door of a fine seventeenth-century townhouse. Why not use the canal, he suggested. For an instant, they were taken by surprise, but then told him in perfect Amsterdam accents to “mind your own business, you fucking Jew!”

Perhaps Western civilization, with the Amsterdam red-light district as its fetid symbol, does have something to answer for. Maybe these streets are typical of a society without modesty, morally unhinged. Such a naked display of man's animal instincts could be seen as a form of barbarism. For people whose faith is predicated on modesty and whose code of honor prohibits any display of female sexuality, every single window along that Amsterdam canal is an intolerable provocation. You might say that nobody asked those people to live in Amsterdam. But they were encouraged to come and work there, and their children were born there. They
are
there, whether one likes it or not, and the Dutch prime minister is their prime minister too.