It may just be for the best that Dutch filmaker and writer Theo van Gogh was killed on the day of the US elections, as that way we may possibly be spared the mock outrage and parading of hobby horses by rightwing know-nothings we got when Pim Fortuyn was murdered. Certainly the media here in the Netherlands were filled to the brim with the sort of comments we saw two years ago, full of jeremiahads and dire warnings about the state of free speech and democracy in the Netherlands.
All bullshit.
Theo van Gogh was a provocateur, a shock jock, somebody who sought controverse as much because he relished it as out of genuine conviction. He was an arrogant crude bastard, one of those people, of whom we have had far too many these last two years, who thought freedom of speech meant being able to say anything he wanted, any way he wanted, without regard to the consequences. If you call an entire religion backward, call its adherents goatfuckers and make a movie about domestic violence in Islamic families which is deliberately provocking, by putting half nude women in see through burkas, their bodies painted with verses from the Koran, should you be surprised that somebody wants to kill you for this?
And of course what he wrote, said and filmed does not excuse his murder, no matter how provoking or insulting. However, his murder is not an attack on democracy or freedom of speech; it was far more personal than that. It looks more like a revenge killing, a honour killing.
Let’s not forget the context in which his murder took place. In the last three years or so years, especially after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the political and cultural climate in the Netherlands has been one in which the right had appropriate to itself the right to talk as loudly and freely as it wanted to, without regards to consequences. Van Gogh was not hounded for his opinions; he was lauded for it. And his grandstanding did not do the cuase he was allegedly championing, domestic violence against Muslim women any good, when you realise his movie, if it had been made about domestic violence amongst Hassidic Jews, would’ve branded him an anti-semite. But because it is anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, it is all right.
If a genuine criticism could be made that until recently, too many existing problems had been taboos, could not be discussed, that there was too much tolerance in the Netherlands for things that should not be tolerated: crime, antisocial behaviour and the like, the last two years the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. We have become too tolerant in the other direction when we have people saying things that are borderline or wholly racist and getting awy with it, with whole population groups –Muslims, immigrants, Moroccans– being demonised, blamed for the failure of the Dutch society to adjust them to it and it to them.
It is therefore not surprising that someone who by all accounts was already radicalised, somewhat of a nutter and who took his religion very serious, would be so insulted by van Gogh’s movie that he was wanted to kill van Gogh for this insult.
Condemn his murder, but do not make Theo van Gogh into a martyr of free speech. He wasn’t. He was killed because he insulted people, not because he told them the truth.
