28 Comments

1. Mark in Mexico:

And the Dutch Prime Minister says “…the motive of the killer is unknown.”???

Nov 4, 2004 - 9:06 pm 2. Mark in Mexico:

And the Dutch Prime Minister says “…the motive of the killer is unknown.”???

Nov 4, 2004 - 9:07 pm 3. Mark in Mexico:

Sorry for the repeat. Received a message that said you have programmed in a delay and I should try later, so I did and both attempts appeared.

Nov 4, 2004 - 9:09 pm 4. Terrye:

It must be awfully frustrating to be a Jihadi in Europe and not be able to make anybody take you seriously.

Nov 4, 2004 - 9:13 pm 5. Final Historian:

Terrye, I suspect that isn’t the case, and the Jihadis know it. Europe is afraid to acknowledge its Islamic problem, and this is one more example of denying the elephant.

Nov 4, 2004 - 9:39 pm 6. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

The US does its own denial. The attack on El Al and LAX was by a muslim and done as a terrorist attack. The Washington area snipers were driven my Islamic fanaticism.

Nov 4, 2004 - 10:57 pm 7. Sandy P:

And here after the election I thought the problem is we’re believing fundamentalists…..

Nov 4, 2004 - 11:05 pm 8. mbro:

Final Historian- I don’t think this is the case either. I just don’t think they have come to any conclusions on how to handle the problem.

Nov 5, 2004 - 12:40 am 9. Tagore:

I suppose the poem is correct, if you take the long view. I hope we go under a long time after the strain of fundamentalism that motivated this killing is put to bed.

I’m pretty confident we will outlast it- as ugly as things seem sometimes, I tend to think that the Republic has a few years left in it, and that when it does finally give up the ghost, it will appear once more, in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by its authors.

Well, we can hope.

Nov 5, 2004 - 1:34 am 10. geezer:

Roger, would that more Americans could get as worked up about this atrocity as you are. If only the murder victim was a white female in CA, it’d get more play on FoxNews and CourtTV, I guess…

That’s not an anti-right knock, as I’m a fire-breathing Repub and no doubt ’bout it. I’m just sick of our media’s culture of sensationalism, and would wish for ALL senseless killings to be treated (and therefore covered) equally, regardless of sex, race, creed, color or nat’l origin.

It’s still obvious our Euro-pals will take a bit more “waking up” than we… just hope it doesn’t take too much longer.

Nov 5, 2004 - 1:41 am 11. David Thomson:

ìAnd the Dutch Prime Minister says “…the motive of the killer is unknown.”???î

The Old Europeans prefer to lie to themselves. They are pampered victims of their welfare culture and refuse to pay the price required by the war on terror. Think of the alcoholic who is never sober and vomits blood every morning and still refuses to seek treatment.

Nov 5, 2004 - 2:14 am 12. jedrury:

David Thomson:

I just returned from England and Holland and it is clear that major parts of Western Europe are in complete and utter denial.

This stabbing death of Van Gogh is shocking because in Amsterdam urban life is so close to you; narrow streets, bike lanes taking up a

third of the street, canals encroaching everywhere. The hit was so easy, so planned, so Tony Soprano, so horrifically vicious in all its gory details.

Reading the excellent Peaktalk, you see the Dutch really don’t know how to effectively deal with the surging Muslim populations and the violence. The Dutch sense of the tolerance is a huge impediment.

The government is hamstringed by a lack of decisive and effective political will.

John Ashcroft, where are you, kinda thing.

Nov 5, 2004 - 3:13 am 13. Oyster:

The statement, “The motive of the killer is unknown,” is simply insane given that there was a letter attached. The approach so many Europeans are taking is akin to offering a robber your possessions with no other thought than pity for his plight.

The Europeans must join us in this. They must redirect their loathing for America to the true enemy, put down their hookahs and pick up their swords or eventually they will be stoned to death for not appearing at Mosque 5 times a day.

Nov 5, 2004 - 3:25 am 14. jerry:

Oyster:

Europeans are like the wimps and woosies in high school. They hate the the tough kids not because they the tough kids bully them [the truly tough don't bully anybody] but because they lack the courage to be like them. Deep down in side of every American hating Euro is a resentment that they cannot muster America-like courage to save their own societies.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the will to overcome your fears.

Nov 5, 2004 - 5:22 am 15. Knucklehead:

I just now became aware of the Terrorism Knowledge Base. My early impression is that it will be a very interesting place to poke around.

Nov 5, 2004 - 6:00 am 16. Lola:

Here’s a letter from a Marine in Iraq that everyone should read. Whatever your spiritual beliefs are, the Marines certainly deserve lots of prayers and good thought for the upcoming task.

Nov 5, 2004 - 6:52 am 17. syn:

Roger

Thank you for your attention to this murder thus far and must ask you to please stay on top of this story, the implications of this event are far too disturbing to ignore.

Nov 5, 2004 - 6:55 am 18. Dilys:

metacomment OT to Tagore:

“The Republic will…appear once more, in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by its authors.”

Not only wonderfully erudite allusion to Ben Franklin’s epitaph, the overtones of resurrection echo what I thought on September 11, 2001.

They can kill us all, but it’s too late. The Idea of Principled Liberty is out, and won’t be put back into the bag.

Is this a valuable forum, or, like, y’know, What…

And, on-thread, the denial of the Europeans is the outcome of their refusal to recognize, in Richard Weaver’s terms, that Ideas Have Consequences. However, from what I know of the eventual triumph of self-interest over principle among my French and German acquaintances, the denial cannot last forever. Unfortunately, it may take events like this.

Nov 5, 2004 - 7:27 am 19. Clio:

Here’s a vital twist to the story that no one here has commented on yet.

Van Gogh’s murderer is a second generation, Dutch-speaking citizen (though some of his co-conspirators are immigrants). According to an op-ed piece in today’s WSJ, his parents adapted well and achieved a fair bit of economic success. Their son, however, has a record of violent radicalism and aggressive tendencies.

What does this say for the proposed “solution” to Europe’s burgeoning jihadi crisis, namely to teach them how to be more European (language classes, promoting tolerance, ending racial discrimination, etc.)?

I am not suggesting that assimilation and/or integration of Muslim immigrants cannot be achieved (obviously, not only did this monster’s parents succeed, so too has the Somali politician whose life is now on the line). But that alone will not solve the problem Europe now faces, and until they acknowledge this obvious fact, they cannot hope to even strategize against the threat, let alone defeat it.

That Dutch politicians are even now talking about protecting vulnerable public figures RATHER THAN rounding up hundreds, if not thousands of suspected terrorists and their sympathizers, closing down their meeting places, deporting illegal residents, etc., tells me that they are still not even close to seeing the daunting task ahead of them. Maybe they don’t need a John Ashcroft, but they could sure use a Nicholas Sarkozy to take the situation in hand.

If history is any guide here, I’d have to say the portents are not good. Europeans have always had a tendency to allow things to get way out of hand, descending even into anarchy, then reap a whirlwind of savage violence. They have mislearnt their own history. It is by denying early warning signs like this one, by failing to stem the tide of radicalism, that societies are pushed into all out war and madness.

I realize that many of you here (including our fine host) are advocates of gay marriage. But only a blind partisan could fail to see that by giving its opponents a chance to (peacefully, constructively) express themselves this week, we have likely averted a much worse outcome one or two years from now, when an angry populace comes face to face with a radical social change of which they never approved.

Today we see the seething rage of (some) Blue Staters and not a few foreigners who cannot BELIEVE anyone with a brain could vote for the other guy. How much worse would it be, however, if they actually got their way against the wishes of at least 51% of their fellow citizens, then had to face the wrath of all those (well armed) folk?

Americans are like a bickering couple who vent their spleen on an ongoing basis and will (probably) manage to live more or less happily together forever. Europeans, however, are like a picture perfect family where (unbeknownst to the wife) the husband is actually screwing the maid, the wife is a drug addict, and sooner or later the teenage child does a Lizzie Borden on the whole lot of them. Which family would you rather belong to? I thought so.

Nov 5, 2004 - 7:32 am 20. ricpic:

I wonder, does Islam have a commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill?

Or is it, Thou Shalt Not Kill except the infidel in time of jihad, which is all the time?!

Nov 5, 2004 - 7:55 am 21. Lola:

Yiiiikes . . . imagine if he’d been elected instead of Bush? Trench Warfare.

Nov 5, 2004 - 8:23 am 22. micje:

Speaking of “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, a Rotterdam artist who sprayed that text on a wall of his house as a reaction on the murder was ordered by the Rotterdam mayor to remove it because it was… sit down, put down your drinks… PROVOCATIVE!

Huge outcry of course, but still, are we insane or what?

The latest rumor is that islamist extremists have a death list (killfile?) of prominent politicians marked out for assassination by brainwashed Morrocan youths.

Incidentally, for the curious, you can probably download Van Gogh’s short film Submission on E-Mule. It’s English spoken, 11 minutes.

Nov 5, 2004 - 8:50 am 23. micje:

Latest headline: Dutch government declares war on terrorism. Whatdyamean everything happens 50 years later in Holland?

More money for intelligence, more powers for law enforcement, possible closing of radical mosques. The question is how far they are willing to go. When the government tried to enforce immigration laws by expelling asylum seekers who had been rejected, there were mass protests.

Nov 5, 2004 - 9:06 am 24. Robert Crawford:

The Dutch sense of the tolerance is a huge impediment.

What they’re practicing is not tolerance. Letting people practice their religion in peace — even though your own beliefs say they are wrong — is tolerance. Accepting that others will have different political beliefs is tolerance.

Letting people get away with violence, with murder is not tolerance.

It’s surrender.

Nov 5, 2004 - 10:04 am 25. Knucklehead:

Gotta love the deep intelligence of people who look at the outcome of an election in the world’s oldest republican democracy and see “bloodlust” and look at people who strap bombs onto children and send them forth to commit murder and suicide and see “an understandable reaction to American policies”. Gosh how I wish I weren’t a knucklehead and could master such deep thinking techniques.

Nov 5, 2004 - 10:17 am 26. Sandy P:

Bjorn Staerk of Norway has a 200-post thread on this topic.

Nov 5, 2004 - 10:31 am 27. PeterUK:

The point to understand is that mass immigration is hugely unpopular with the European Street,there has never been a popular mandate for the scale of immigration that has taken place since 1945.

The post war levels of immigration into the UK for example is greater than that of the Angles,Saxons and Jutes,The Roman Conquest,the Viking invasions,the Norman Conquest,The Hugenots,the Jewish Diasporas in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Our politicians know that they are presiding over a simmering and deep seated discontent,what is happening here is they are trying to keep a lid on it.Since they cannot, for reasons on racial discrimination suppress Islam,politicians use the other option and suppress the natives.

The elite know there is a problem but cannot acknowledge it for fear of appearing to give support to the extreme right.So the charade continues and the elite hopes that given a couple of generations things will settle down or at least lurch on until their watch is over.

Nov 5, 2004 - 5:00 pm 28. Erik:

What PeterUK said.

The polls here regularly show between 60% and 80% in favor of limiting immigration. (I dont remember the exact number, and it varies a bit regarding what the exact question is.)

The politicians here make a point of never ever letting this become an issue in any election, and to paint anyone that tries to raise a debate as a bigotted racist.

There is no open debate about it here, and there never will be if the politicians have their way.

Since the system here is based on voting for a party rather than a person, the parties can agree to keep an issue out of the debate. (Anyone that raises it in a debate then will simply find themselfes on an unelectable spot on the party ballot.)

Actually, just before last election here, there was a hitjob done by national TV. They sent undercover reporters with hidden cameras out to the parties information huts and pretended to be anti-immigration, and tried to get agreement from the party members there. A few fell for it, and was promptly displayed as bigots on TV a few days before the election. The opposition parties dropped maybe 5% in some areas as a result.

It will take a viable political party to bring the issue up, and risk the labeling, or that people get so upset with this single issue that they will vote for anything that supports it.

Austria has seen it, Sweden had a brief period with a party that was labeled as bigots, France almost got LePen as president, Holland had Pim Fortyun, and Denmark has a government now that has brought it front and center.

When the people get a viable choice, and are allowed to choose, they will make their voices heard.

Nov 6, 2004 - 5:08 am

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