Murder in Amsterdam Read Free Page B

television program Nova, Van Gogh’s mother reproached the prime minister for … visiting a mosque as well as an Islamic school, while forgetting about a little boy whose father had been murdered in Amsterdam.
    NRC HANDELSBLAD, DECEMBER 21, 2004
    I mmediately after Van Gogh’s murder, the bickering began. Within hours, shock curdled into recrimination. Ministers in The Hague blamed the AIVD, the domestic intelligence service, for its failure to keep a closer eye on Mohammed Bouyeri. The prime minister and the minister of justice were blamed for not tackling hate speech in the mosques. Job Cohen, the Amsterdam mayor, blamed the AIVD for not sharing intelligence with the Amsterdam police. The interior minister, in charge of the AIVD, was blamed for letting terrorists roam free. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was blamed for causing unnecessary offense with her polemical film. Theo van Gogh was blamed for insulting the Muslims. The Friends of Theo, a select band of quotable voices in the national and internationalpress, blamed Cohen for being a coward, the government for being careless, the Muslims for being in denial, the prime minister for being unfeeling, and the Netherlands for being a miserable little country that let one of its geniuses die. And the Friends of Theo were accused in turn of being “merchants of fear.” The real rot, yet others opined, set in with a generation of arrogant Social Democrats who had failed to see the emerging “drama of multiculturalism” and denounced those who did as racists.
    This is the other side of complacency, of being a little too satisfait. When smugness is challenged, panic sets in. There was in the finger-pointing a tone of wounded amour propre , of resentment that things had suddenly gone wrong, a sense of pique, of being affronted by one’s own shattered dreams. There is a Dutch word that perfectly expresses this feeling: verongelijktheid, to be wronged, not by an individual so much as by the world at large. You could see it in the faces of people who turned up on TV, quarreling in the wake of the murder. You often see it in the way the much-heralded national team plays soccer.
    Proud of their superior skills, their multicultural makeup, the almost mocking manner of their free-flowing play, maddening the players of more prosaic teams, like Germany, the stars of Dutch soccer usually start their games with all the swagger of swinging Amsterdam. In their playful individualism, their progressive daringness, they know they are thebest. And sometimes they are. But when things go against them and the plodding Germans, or the bloody-minded Italians, or the cussed English, go up a goal or two, the heads slump, the bickering starts, and the game is lost in a sour mood of verongelijktheid: Why did this have to happen to us? What did we do to deserve this? Aren’t we the best? Well, fuck you!
    In November 2004 things had clearly gone badly in the experimental garden. The mood of peevish disillusion was articulated most clearly by the writer Max Pam, a prominent Friend of Theo, in a television program broadcast on the day after the murder.
    Pam was asked whether he really wished to leave Amsterdam and move to Germany, as had been reported. Well, said Pam, that was an exaggeration. But, as it happens, he had recently bumped into Harry Mulisch, one of Holland’s most famous novelists, and Mulisch had said he no longer liked living in Holland either and was considering a move to Germany. Pam sympathized. For he, too, was fed up. What distressed him more than anything was the end of a particular way of life, a kind of “free-spirited anarchism,” full of “humor and cabaret,” a life where it was possible to make fun of things, to offend people without the fear of violence. “A kind of idyll,” he sighed, had come to an end. Watching Pam, I kept thinking of the Dutch soccer team. After Theo’s death, things were no fun anymore.
    Like Heine’s