This has not been a particularly good week.
As always with events that happen far away, you don’t feel that affected. Things only get a meaning once it gets too close for comfort. Such is the case with the brutal murder of the Dutch columnist and movie-director Theo van Gogh.
The murderer shot him several times while he rode along on his bike. Then he used a knife to cut his throat in the same way the extremist do this in all those videos in which they show the killing of hostages from Iraq. After this he calmly stabbed another knife in his side and one in the chest. This knife pin a pamphlet covering several pages of semi-religious threats to other Dutch people, including some politicians in his chest. After that he ran into a park and a extreme shootout between him and the police took place; he fired some 48 shots. Since it was broad daylight it was a miracle he didn’t hit any other people.
His goal was to get shot by the police so he could die as a martyr for the Islamic cause. However, since the Dutch police are all but cowboys with guns, he did not succeed in this and the police shot him in his leg and managed to subdue him. A suicide note was found in one of his pockets. One police man got hit in his chest but luckily he was wearing a bullet proof vest.
As said before this is the second political murder in short time (the last one before this being the murder of Pim Fortuyn). Before that we have to go back to the 17th century. This fact alone should tell you something about our country. We have a long lasting tradition of democracy – even though didn’t women got the right to vote until the early 1900’s.
It seems our society has no reply to this senseless act of extremism. People are still in a state of shock and while some extreme right-wing politicians try to get so advantage from this situation, I’m trying to get a grip on things.
Yes, Theo van Gogh was definitely outspoken and surely he insulted a lot of people. He also said that inviting people with such a different outlook on western civilization (meaning the Islamic people) was like importing the Trojan Horse.
Well, to be honest: he was right.
How can we live in a country with people that think woman are inferior to men, who think it’s normal to arrange marriages between people that don’t even know each other, that think you should kill gay people by throwing them of a building, think it’s legitimate to kill a woman for sleeping with another man and that say that you don’t have to feel bad about killing anyone that isn’t a Muslim, because only Muslims a really ‘people’ and all else are sheep and can be killed like sheep (hence the throat cutting).
They interviewed some of those “goat fuckers” (as Theo sometimes called them) on Dutch TV. Not one of them spoke good Dutch, so they had to subtitle each and everyone of them: even after being here for more than twenty years. So far for integration.
One of them was complaining about the fact that Theo van Gogh always said bad thing about them. “When you walk past three pitbulls they leave you alone, but if you taunt them, you should not be surprised when they bite you” one explained.
So it seems like the Dutch society took some rabid dogs into their homes without realizing how dangerous they are.
Well, now they have bitten us I have on only one solution. The same solution we would have for rabid dogs: you get rid of them. You put them out of there misery.
But hmm, if we try to defend our way of life in this way, doesn’t that make us extremists as well? Boy, do we have a problem now.
Life sucks. Then you die.