Things Worth Remembering: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the ‘Strange Death’ of Europe

Thursday’s mob in Amsterdam, which viciously attacked Israeli soccer fans, is a reminder of how little has changed in two decades—and what must be done. - Douglas Murray

Twenty years ago, as the world was focusing on an election in America, something happened in Amsterdam that, in many ways, was even more important.

• On November 2, 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the city center, in the morning, while bicycling to work. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, then 26, explained in a note stabbed into van Gogh’s stomach that van Gogh’s film Submission was guilty of “blasphemy”—it criticized Islam’s treatment of women—and he threatened that van Gogh’s colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Jews, and other nonbelievers would meet a similar end.
• Van Gogh’s murder came two years after that of gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn—shot to death nine days before a general election, which the party he led looked likely to win. His killer, Volkert van der Graaf, said he killed Fortuyn, who had called Islam “backward” and supported ending immigration, as a favor to the Netherlands’ Muslim community.