I received an invitation to have an hour-long dialogue on a national radio show in the Netherlands (presumably the interview will be of the "local boy makes good" variety). The show's makers are kind to ask, and since I obviously feel that everybody is entitled to my opinion, I'll gladly get behind that microphone and pontificate until even the most placid of listeners have fingernail imprints in their palms.
Now, as I scrolled through the program's online archives, I noticed there had been a special broadcast on November 2, the day Dutch writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a Muslim fundamentalist. This is the brief explanation on the site: it says the regular format had been canceled "due to Theo van Gogh's demise."
His demise?! I think I'm not just engaging in obscure dialectics when I say the Dutch ought to consider finally calling a spade a spade. In the context, demise is a weasel word. Demise could mean that Theo was run over by a bus, or that he choked on a hot dog. Instead, he was killed by a Quran-thumping fascist wielding a gun and two big knives. Theo, for the crime of speaking his mind, was shot multiple times, stabbed, and virtually decapitated, all in broad daylight in a moderately busy street in Amsterdam. In my dictionary, that's called — at the bloody minimum — a murder.
Anyway, now my interest was piqued, and so I listened to that day's broadcast. It featured an interview with a Dutch friend and colleague of Theo's, a documentarian I'd never heard of but whose name is something like Katharina Reger. She sounded understandably distraught. Then it turned out that her pain was caused not just by Theo's assassin, but by the lack of hospitality of the indigenous Dutch. Here's a direct translation of what she said:
"If you treasure freedom of speech, or you think it's so terrible that human beings can be killed just like that, you could ask yourself, 'What do *I* do about it? How many Moroccan friends were at my birthday party, and how many black people?' I can tell you how many: 0.007 percent."
It's OK to read that again — I did a double-take myself. She really does seem to be arguing that if only the Dutch were nicer to outsiders, bloodbaths like Theo's murder might not occur. As often as I've seen this upside-down reasoning before, it's still fascinating to behold. The killer was really the victim; and the native Dutch are closet racists who, by withholding birthday-party invitations from their swarthier brethren, compel otherwise peaceful Muslims to become brutal killers.
Ultimately, I guess the savagery of 9/11 is not the fault of murderous terrorist scum either, but of the 300 million Americans who never invited Mohammed Atta to their Fourth-of-July cookout.
Clearly, I'll have plenty to talk about when I'm on the show.
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