Twenty years ago this month, a Dutch Islamist named Mohamed Bouyeri slaughtered filmmaker and prominent Islam critic Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam. The second-generation Dutch-born Moroccan shot the older provocateur several times, then slit his throat. Bouyeri, now serving a life sentence, said he did it for Allah. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim apostate and friend of Van Gogh’s, had to go into hiding for her life after Bouyeri threatened to kill her too.
If you publicly criticized Islam, it wasn’t safe for you to walk on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. Things have changed since then. As we saw on Thursday night, now all it takes to get you ambushed by violent Muslims in Amsterdam is to be a fan of an Israeli football team. Well, the Netherlands always has prided itself on ‘progress.’
Sarcasm aside, the shocking pogrom that raged on Amsterdam’s streets after a football match between the Dutch team Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv reveal, to the surprise of no European conservative, that the Dutch authorities have learned nothing from events this century.
The Netherlands’ ruling class and their institutions have always considered right-wing politician Geert Wilders, a strong critic of mass migration, to be a greater threat to the country’s well-being than the large numbers of Muslim migrants and their offspring that live in what is traditionally one Europe’s most peaceful, liberal states.