PETER VAN DER VEERIslamic terrorism, also seemed to mark the end of an era of cultural transformation in
the Netherlands.
These events did not fit the Netherlands’ global image and tourist branding as a
wealthy, tolerant, and perhaps excessively liberal society. Discussions in Holland after van
Gogh’s murder focused on the intolerance of Islam, the threat of Muslim extremism,
and, perhaps most significantly, Muslims’ lack of humor. As many Dutch commentators
remarked, Muslims simply could not take a joke; they took life and especially their reli-
gion too seriously. Much emphasis was placed on freedom of speech and artistic expres-
sion. The terms of the debate resembled those generated by Salman Rushdie’sSatanic
Verses, in which Muslim illiteracy in satire was identified as a sign of deep cultural back-
wardness. Nevertheless,Submissionwas not an especially funny film, and scriptwriter
Hirsi Ali saw it as a quite serious political challenge to Islam’s sexual violence against
women. Before the film was broadcast, the leading Dutch liberal newspaper had already
described it as a ‘‘new provocation by Hirsi Ali.’’ Rather than the supposed lack of humor
among Muslims, what needs to be explained is the aggression of the Dutch against a
Muslim minority that forms some 7 percent of the Dutch population and is by and large
a socially and culturally marginal group. Most discussions in the Netherlands, however,
have not been about Dutch society and culture but about the nature of Islam and global
terrorism. Van Gogh was indeed killed by a Muslim fanatic, who made his religious moti-
vations and desire for martyrdom explicit in a letter pinned to the breast of the murdered
filmmaker. Islam is a global signifier of trouble and terrorism, and the Dutch follow the
general tendency of explaining incidents like the murder of van Gogh within the frame-
work of the rise of militant Islam. It is important to understand, however, how these
global images of Islam are appropriated and used in different arenas to interpret very
different situations.
The main issue in the murder of van Gogh is not Islam but Dutch culture. But
whenever Dutch culture comes under scrutiny, the focus has been on its tolerance and
liberal values. Jonathan Israel, for instance, who has written extensively on early modern
Dutch society and especially the Radical Enlightenment of Baruch de Spinoza, has argued
in the Pierre Bayle Lecture of 2004 that tolerance was an Enlightenment value developed
by thinkers like Spinoza and Bayle in the Netherlands. His analysis of the events sur-
rounding the murder of van Gogh was that the Dutch had forgotten their own history of
tolerance because the Dutch educational system had suffered from financial cuts. While I
agree that one has to look to the majority population to understand what is going on
today, Israel is wrong in his understanding of the history of Dutch tolerance. What I want
to argue here is that current events in the Netherlands must indeed be understood in
relation to Dutch culture rather than Islam, but that such an analysis requires a different
genealogy from the one laid out by Israel.
The murder of van Gogh was preceded by another murder, one committed not by a
Muslim but by a radical animal-rights activist. On May 6, 2002, a day after the national
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