Ten years ago Pim Fortuyn was killed by an animal rights activist who wanted to save Dutch Muslims from prosecution at his hands. Ironically a study earlier this week showed that six in ten high school students actually think that he was murdered by a Muslim…
Which was actually my greatest fear when I heard the news of his murder back then, before we knew the murderer had been arrested and turned out to be a white Dutch man. Had the murderer be a Muslim, the anger and fear many people felt in the wake of the murder might have been transformed into something very nasty; already there had been people setting fire to the parking lot inside the parliamentary grounds. Who knows what could’ve happened.
Reality was bad enough anyway. Dutch politics were already shifting rightward anyway, of which Fortuyn’s rise was one symptom, but with his death the dam burst. We got a media climate in which Islamophobia was no longer a taboo and and a long line of politicians exploiting this, with Geert Wilders as the end result. We’ve become much more open about our racism, with opinions that would’ve been anathema fifteen years ago now openly discussed in the media. What Fortuyn and Wilders have been saying about Islam and “non-western immigrants” this decade was also said by Hans Janmaat in the eighties, but he was treated as a pariah for them, not feted.
Fortuyn’s murder was therefore counterproductive to what his murderer tried to achieve: instead of abating Islamphobia, it encouraged it. Had Fortuyn lived it might’ve never become as prevelant as it has been this last decade.
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