The 2004 van Gogh murder punctuated Dutch racial tension over Muslim immigration

Evidence

On November 2, 2004, the morning of the US Presidential election that would reelect George W. Bush, Theo van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam Street a stone’s throw from the Tropenmuseum, the former colonial and now multicultural institution of art and culture. Van Gogh, the great-grandson of Vincent van Gogh’s brother, Theo, was a filmmaker best known outside of Dutch circles for a short television film, daringly titled Submission, deeply disparaging Islam’s treatment of women and homosexuality. The film was made with the equally outspoken Asaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and vocally lapsed Muslim, one-time darling of Dutch conservatives, then member of the Dutch Parliament even while in semipermanent hiding in the face of a fatwa, and Readers Digest European of the Year for 2006. Van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death by a bearded man of dual Dutch and Moroccan citizenship, who pinned a note to the dead body. The note, a long, rambling if articulate account of the barriers facing Arab immigrants in the Netherlands, ended with a chilling warning that Hirsi Ali too is a marked woman. She fled for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, though recently has returned to make futile demands that Dutch taxpayers continue to fund her security detail even while a US resident (estimated at $2 million annually). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 818

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to chapter 5’s evaporation thesis on European racialization and to the broader arc of the book on racial neoliberalism, plus the two earlier chapters’ americanizing/palestinianizing theses.
• CANDY: Hirsi Ali demanding Dutch taxpayer funding for her security while living in the US is a sharp, quotable detail.