Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the
Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands
Peter van der VeerIn August 2004, a short film that dealt with the theme of violence against
women in Islamic societies was broadcast on Dutch television. The key
scene showed four topless women in transparent clothing; their bodies
had been covered with calligraphically inscribed verses from the Koran
that legitimate the subjection of women. Working from a script written
by Member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the filmmaker Theo van
Gogh had created the ten-minute movieSubmission, a direct translation
of the wordIslam. Van Gogh had a long-established reputation for
being a provocateur, which included insulting the Jewish community
and references to Muslims as ‘‘the secret column of goat-fuckers.’’ He
was fat, purposefully unkempt, antiauthoritarian, satirical, and immod-
erate in his language—in short, a personification of the Dutch cultural
ethos since the 1970s. He had frequently been sued for libel and slander,
but managed to defend himself successfully under the rubric of freedom
of speech.
After the movie was released, both van Gogh and Hirsi Ali received
death threats. Van Gogh was murdered in the early morning of Novem-
ber 2, 2004, in Amsterdam by Muhammad Bouyari, a young man of
dual Dutch and Moroccan nationality who had grown up in the Nether-
lands. The murder of van Gogh triggered a nationwide panic. The Min-
ister of Finance referred to a clash of civilizations, declared that there
was a war going on between Islam and the West, and boasted that if
extremist Muslims wanted war, they could get it. This seemed to give
license to those who wanted to set arson in the country’s mosques, as
immediately happened. There was fear of widespread reprisals against
Muslims and their property, but the situation was brought under con-
trol by the more responsible elements among Dutch state authorities.
The murder of van Gogh, though generally taken to be a sign of growing
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