Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  This show of solidarity, unique in Europe, and largely responsible for the high reputation of Holland among Jews, is certainly worth remembering, but it is also misleading. Though not exactly mythical—it really happened, after all—the February Strike was a convenient symbol to shield people from more painful memories, of having stood by and watched and done nothing. Others, to be sure, had risked their lives, and those of their families, to hide Jews. But this great story of bravery, for a time, was used to mask a larger history of indifference, cowardice, and in some cases active complicity.

  I would occasionally drink coffee on Saturday mornings at a busy café on the Nieuwmarkt with a distinguished Dutch historian named Geert Mak. Mak had annoyed the Friends of Theo and other combatants in the war against radical Islam by taking a more relativistic view of the problem. A stocky man with a woolly thatch of silvery curls, Mak projects the voice of a friendly, liberal-minded small-town history teacher. He often spoke to me about the old Left, whose politics he himself largely shared; about the affronted turn of some progressives against Muslim immigrants; and about their nostalgia for “a classical Holland of the 1950s”—the Holland of Johan Huizinga, satisfait, enlightened, middle-of-the-road, bourgeois. Mak, in a way, personifies these solid virtues. His books on Dutch history are all bestsellers. They provide a comforting historical narrative for a people that feels deprived of a historical identity. Like the sentimentality at celebrity funerals, this is not a uniquely Dutch phenomenon either. National histories have become popular everywhere in a world beset by corporate uniformity.

  Despite the wild reputation of Amsterdam, Mak says, Holland never had a truly metropolitan culture. Learning to live with large numbers of immigrants is “going to be a difficult and painful process,” and people will just “have to get used to it.” After all, hadn’t the Jews in nineteenth-century Amsterdam been integrated quite successfully by enlightened policies? Hadn’t it been a good thing to subsidize schools for the Jewish poor, on condition that they be taught in Dutch and not Yiddish? The same kind of thing could work again. But this process would not be helped by anti-Muslim hysteria. Mak disapproves of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Jeanne d’Arc–like antics.” Van Gogh, in his view, was a “tragic Dutchman” who had been “tricked” into making the film that cost him his life. The problem, he maintains, is not Islam, or religion as such. It is more sociological. What we are witnessing is nothing new. Just the usual tensions that occur when uprooted rural people start new lives in the metropolis.

  Soon after Van Gogh’s violent death, Mak published two pamphlets attacking what he saw as the dangerous and hysterical intolerance of Muslims in the Dutch media and among politicians. As Holland’s most popular historian, he saw it as his role to bring common sense to the national debate. By and large, he succeeded, but even Mak, the paragon of Huizinga’s virtues, could not escape entirely from the ghost of Anne Frank, from the Dutch habit of filtering the present through guilty memories of what happened in the jodenhoek. In one of his pamphlets he compared the narrative technique of Hirsi Ali’s film Submission to the viciously anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew.

  In a very narrow technical sense—the selective use of damning quotations, for instance—he may have had a point, but the comparison struck a false note. Hirsi Ali spoke out against oppression, not for it. The exclusion of Muslims, or any other group, is not part of her program. And yet to reach for examples from the Holocaust, or the Jewish diaspora, has become a natural reflex when the question of ethnic or religious minorities comes up. It is a moral yardstick, yet at the same time an evasion. To be reminded of past crimes, of negligence or complicity, is never a bad thing. But it can confuse the issues at hand, or worse, bring all discussion to a halt by tarring opponents with the brush of mass murder. This issue is not the Holocaust, but the question of how to stop future Mohammed Bouyeris from becoming violent enemies of the country in which they grew up—how to make those boys pissing on the seventeenth-century door feel that this is their home too.

  3.

  Time magazine’s selection of Job Cohen as one of the European heroes in 2005 has left deep wounds in the ranks of his enemies … on the Pim Fortuyn Forum website we find such statements as: “Unbelievable that such a traitor is seen as a hero in the U.S.!” or “Cohen is a Jewish name and there are many Cohens in the U.S. as well,” or “Cohen is partly responsible for the reason Van Gogh was murdered.”

  FRITS ABRAHAMS, COLUMNIST FOR NRC HANDELSBLAD, OCTOBER 10, 2005

  Dear Mr. Cohen,

  You made a great and fundamental mistake when you stated that Muslim minorities in the Netherlands could be integrated through their religion. Since your Cleveringa Lecture in 2002 more and more people have pointed out your error, yet you stick to your mistaken view.

  AYAAN HIRSI ALI, OPEN LETTER TO JOB COHEN, MARCH 8, 2004

  The annual Cleveringa Lecture, delivered at Leiden University on the twenty-sixth of November, is named after a brave man who never raised his voice or gave deliberate offense. He was a hero because he was decent, and said the right thing at a time when decency could have severe consequences.

  The exclusion of one section of Dutch citizens under German occupation began in 1940 when civil servants were ordered to sign forms declaring whether they were “Aryans” or Jews. Most people did, often without quite realizing the implications. Then, soon after, the Germans announced that Jews would be removed from public office. At Leiden University, three distinguished academics, Meijers, David, and Gans, were dismissed. Professor Eduard Meijers was one of the most famous legal scholars of his generation, responsible for the modern civil code.

  These measures were accepted, more or less grudgingly, by most Dutch authorities, but not by the dean of the law faculty in Leyden, Professor Rudolph Cleveringa. On November 26, 1940, he decided to speak in protest to the faculty and students. He chose the time normally reserved for Meijers’s lectures, and began by reading aloud, verbatim, the letter ordering his colleague’s dismissal. The cold pen-pusher’s language was incriminating enough. Instead of addressing the obscenity of political racism directly, Cleveringa went on to praise his colleague as “a man of light” whom “a power that can rest on nothing but itself” was casting aside. Then he spoke the famous words which still resonate: “It is this Dutchman, this noble and true son of our people, this human being, this father for his students, this scholar, whom the hostile alien that rules over us today is ‘dismissing from his job.’ ”

  Job Cohen, in his Cleveringa Lecture of 2002, continued the story: “In the great auditorium on that memorable November morning in 1940 sat a young Jewish law student. Cleveringa’s words were like balsam to her doubting soul. She had the feeling, at that moment, that ‘our soundless thoughts and moods were being transmitted through one and all in a way that everyone could precisely recognize.’ And especially that one feeling, more powerful than all others: ‘I belong!’ ”

  Cleveringa knew what he was doing. He had already packed his bags. The following day the students went on strike in protest against the dismissals, and Cleveringa was arrested. The student mentioned by Cohen was his own mother. Speaking for her, and for himself, a liberal, assimilated Jew, Cohen hailed the tolerance of Dutch society, and the way people of all races and creeds had found a home there. But then, the shock of 9/11, the murder of Pim Fortuyn, and the “hardening” of attitudes toward immigrants had changed the social climate. He wondered: “Do ‘they’ still belong as much as they did before 11 September 2001? Many Dutch citizens of foreign origin must have thought to themselves in the last few years: Is this really Holland? Do I still belong? Am I not a stranger in my own country?”

  Drawing the link between his own mother’s experience as a Jew under Nazi occupation and Muslim immigrants today was bound to disturb people. How could the two be equated? Wasn’t this an example of the sentimental use of Holocaust memories where they didn’t apply? I actually think not. Cohen wasn’t talking about genocide, but about belonging. There
was no question, of course, that Cohen’s mother, and Professor Meijers, felt that they belonged. Many young Muslims born and bred in Europe feel that they don’t. The question is why.

  There was much in Cohen’s lecture about the rule of law, about norms and values, the erosion of organized faith, the problems of multiculturalism and global capitalism, but he kept returning to that basic question: how to make people feel at home in a modern, secular, liberal society in which many customs and values, and indeed collective memories, clash with their own? Cohen’s answer is that this shouldn’t matter, as long as people do not break the law. It is, in any case, not as clear as it was in Huizinga’s day what it is to be Dutch (or French, or German). Quoting Geert Mak, Cohen suggested that “a new adhesive” was needed to “glue society together.” Without making it entirely clear what this glue should be, Cohen stressed the importance of mutual respect. This means, in his view, that we should tolerate opinions and habits even if we do not share them, or even approve of them. We tolerate the fact that women are not allowed to become members of an ultra-Calvinist political party. Just so, we have to “tolerate certain groups of orthodox Muslims who consciously discriminate against their women.”

  Cohen went further. Why not revive the Dutch idea of the pillar? Dutch citizens used to organize their lives through their religious affiliations. Perhaps Muslims should be encouraged to do the same. Then he spoke the sentence that most upset his critics: “The easiest way to integrate these new immigrants might be through their faith. For that is just about the only anchor they have when they enter Dutch society in the twenty-first century.” This was seen as rank appeasement; a reason for Theo van Gogh to compare Cohen to a Nazi collaborator.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes that Cohen is “fighting demons from the past,” that “true Islam” is irreconcilable with a secular, liberal state, that Muslims, unlike Jews in the 1930s, are not hated in Europe today, but that they, the Muslims, hate secular, liberal Europe. The idea that “true Muslims” can be integrated through the mosque, she says, is to make the same naive mistake as the U.S. government, which supported the Taliban against the Soviet Union, only to see the believers bite back and destroy the Twin Towers. A true Muslim, she argues, believes that a conspiracy of Jews is running the world; a true Muslim thinks democracy is sinful, and that only God’s laws must be obeyed; a true Muslim, in short, is the enemy of all freedom-loving heirs of the Enlightenment, and the fact that Cohen fails to see this shows how blinded he is by those historic demons that once threatened the life of his mother.

  If all true Muslims were political revolutionaries, Ayaan Hirsi Ali would doubtless be right. But since this is not the case, even among orthodox Muslims, Cohen deserves the benefit of the doubt. If Islam as such were a threat to democracy, then all Muslims are threats. It is precisely to avoid this notion of Kulturkampf, or “clash of civilizations,” that Cohen wants to reach an accommodation with the Muslims in his city. It is easy, as Hirsi Ali does, to find hateful examples on websites and in radical sermons of violent anti-Semitism and loathing of Western civilization. And it’s true that discrimination of Muslim women by their own fathers and brothers causes much suffering, but it is hard to see how an official attack on the Muslim faith would help to solve this problem. The revolutionaries are no longer open to compromise, and apart from giving protection to young women who are subject to male violence, there is little the government can do to change the habits of conservative patriarchs. Attacking religion cannot be the answer, for the real threat to a mixed society will come when the mainstream of non-revolutionary Muslims has lost all hope of feeling at home.

  4.

  On average, Moroccan youths have 30% less chance of finding apprentice jobs than their autochthonous contemporaries. In the building trade their chances are actually three times less. There is a strong demand only in the bar and restaurant business. This is the conclusion of a research project by Utrecht University, commissioned by the Green/Left Party.

  VOLKSKRANT, AUGUST 27, 2005

  On July 5 councillor Ahmed Aboutaleb spoke with Islamic schools in Amsterdam because of a recent municipal report which showed that a disproportionate number of Muslim, and particularly Moroccan, youths had turned against Western society…. Aboutaleb mentioned that “the pupils feel disadvantaged. Teachers try to give their own opinions instead of stimulating a dialogue.”

  COLUMN IN HET PAROOL, JULY 30, 2005

  Ahmed Aboutaleb was born in the Rif mountains of Morocco in 1961, as the son of a village imam. In 1976 his mother took him and his brothers to the Netherlands. After learning Dutch and completing his education in telecommunications, he worked as a radio reporter, and later as chairman of Forum, the multicultural organization. He is a member of the Social Democrats. His current job, Amsterdam councillor, came as a surprise. In 2002, his predecessor, Rob Oudkerk, also a Social Democrat, made a serious error. At the end of a public meeting, thinking the microphone was switched off, Oudkerk, whose grandfather served on the Jewish Council under Nazi occupation, leaned over to Job Cohen and whispered something about “those fucking Moroccans” (kutmarokkanen). In 2004, he was succeeded by Ahmed Aboutaleb.

  Aboutaleb, whose portfolio includes youth affairs, education, integration, and urban policy, has been called worse things than a fucking Moroccan. Once, in a television talk show, he was accused by a history teacher of Moroccan descent of being an NSBer, a Nazi collaborator. It was a very strange thing for one Berber to say to another, even if “NSBer” has become a generic term of abuse. Perhaps the use of this historical parallel was a sign, on the side of the accuser, of integration into Dutch society. Aboutaleb did not see it that way and threatened to sue.

  What does it mean, anyway, for a highly respected Amsterdam councillor to be a “collaborator”? Collaborator with what? A trawl through Dutch websites of various political shades reveals how Aboutaleb gets it from all sides. The history teacher mentioned above, named Abdelhakim Chouaati, writes for elqalem.nl, a website for young Moroccans which pays respectful attention to all kinds of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In the chatrooms of elqalem.nl, Aboutaleb is frequently called a traitor, a kiss-ass, a “subsidy whore,” or a Bounty, after a famous coconut-filled chocolate bar—brown on the outside, white on the inside.

  Mohammed Bouyeri, in his death threat to Aboutaleb, addressed him as a heretic, or zindiq, which makes him an enemy of Islam destined for execution. Aboutaleb’s sin, for Mohammed, and for Abdelhakim too, is precisely his success as a Dutch citizen. To take part in government, to promote integration, to speak out against the violent prejudices of religious zealots, is enough to make him a heretic, an enemy, a traitor. But, then, trawling a little farther through the byways of cyberspace, I found a Dutch neo-Nazi website, Stormfront.org, which denounces Aboutaleb as a slave to the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, led by “the arch Zionist Cohen.” These are the rancid margins, of course, where Islamist extremists and white supremacists find one another in a peculiar meeting of minds. But even in the mainstream of society, the Amsterdam councillor often cuts a lonely figure.

  When twenty thousand people gathered on Dam Square on the day of Van Gogh’s murder to demonstrate their anger, Aboutaleb was one of only a handful of Muslims. This was a disappointment to him. “Even though they might have found Van Gogh an asshole,” he says, “they should have been there to defend the rule of law.” He could barely contain his own rage. In a speech to fellow Muslims, delivered in an Amsterdam mosque (Aboutaleb is a pious man), he said that tolerance was not a one-way street. Amsterdam was a city of freedom and diversity, and “those who can’t share those values had better draw their own conclusions and leave.”2 This robust attitude was much applauded among the “natives,” but did nothing to burnish his reputation among the immigrants.

  He was everywhere in those volatile and dangerous days after the murder, trying to douse the flames of hatred and fear—in mosques, youth centers, schools. Muslims, he pleaded with the believers, “must not allow their faith to be
hijacked by fanatics.” But he felt abandoned by the politicians, including the prime minister. “So often,” he lamented, “I stood alone in those halls. Where were all the ministers and cabinet secretaries?”3

  Trying to build bridges can be a bitter task. By trying to accommodate disparate communities with very different demands, an official like Aboutaleb risks losing sympathy on all sides. The same man who pleaded, against all the trends of modern society, for separate swimming lessons for girls and boys, also told Muslims who couldn’t abide the open society to pack their bags and leave. He even tried to plug young Muslims into the Dutch collective memory. On May 4, 2003, the national day of remembrance, Moroccan kids had outraged the natives by playing soccer with wreaths laid in honor to the war dead. So on the fourth of May 2005, Aboutaleb took a group of schoolchildren to Auschwitz.

  I first saw Aboutaleb at my usual café on the Nieuwmarkt. He was reading the papers, surrounded by bodyguards. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he needed full-time protection. I made an appointment to see him at the city hall, in the middle of the former jodenhoek. A neat, compact figure in steel-rimmed spectacles, Aboutaleb spoke about religion in the brisk and measured manner of a man who has answered the same questions many times. Religion, to him, is a private affair, in which the state has no business interfering, or the other way round. Nor is he keen on political parties organized on the basis of faith or ethnicity. The main problem, he continued, was “the matter of priorities, the fact that many Muslims find the law less important than an insult to the Prophet.”

  But, he said, there were generational distinctions. The first generation is barely literate. For them “religion is a matter of hearsay couched in cultural patterns. They pray five times a day, they wear beards. Jihad, for them, is not so much armed struggle as simply being a pious Muslim.” The young have a different handicap, he explained. “They must consume religion in a strange language. The Koran is a complicated text, difficult to interpret, both in sociological and linguistic terms. So it makes me laugh when a kid like Mohammed B. thinks he can derive enough knowledge from the Koran in English and Dutch to think it is his duty to gun a person down.”