After the assassination of controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh and a backlash against fundamentalist Muslims, the normally tolerant and peaceful country is torn between its history of multiculturalism and a spasm of violence between ethnic groups.
The Netherlands could become a case study in how a liberal democracy adapts to threats from an internal enemy, while maintaining the civil rights of all its citizens, or fails to.
The stakes are very high.
Van Gogh was murdered on Nov. 2 – reportedly by radical Muslims with ties to al-Qaida and a Moroccan terrorist group – for his views that were strongly, and sometimes offensively, critical of Islam and its treatment of women.
After the assassination, Dutch police broke up an alleged terror cell after a shootout on Nov. 10.
Several mosques have been burned in arson attacks in response to the killing.
Underlying the violence is a distrust among some Dutch of the country’s growing immigrant population, particularly young men from Morocco and Turkey. The new arrivals are often blamed for increased crime and for failing to participate fully in Dutch society.
Advocates for the new populations contend that the Netherlands has failed to accept them, relegating them to the lowest rung on the social ladder and pushing them toward extremism.
Every western nation will face the crisis that has boiled up in the Netherlands: How does a free society that values personal liberty and freedom of speech keep dangerous radicals from overwhelming it?
Perhaps the search for answers should begin, of all places, in the American South, where the scourge of the Ku Klux Klan – a homegrown group of extremists and terrorists – was defanged.
Racism, of course, persists. But the use of violence in the United States to impose fear and achieve a political outcome has largely passed.
When most mainstream whites stopped their tacit support of the Klan, leaving the fringe elements on their own, the beast lost much of its power. The Klan still exists and is a problem, but more as an object of ridicule and a nuisance than a force.
So it must be among the Islamic community. When moderates stop tolerating violence in their names, the extremists can’t survive.
That model, however, doesn’t allow the government to sit idly by waiting for others to act. In the South, it took federal authority, strong use of the judiciary and even troops to undermine the Klan’s power. The battle against Islamic extremists will take an even greater commitment.
Free societies struggle with extremism because they don’t punish ideas, even poisonous ones. It’s one of the fundamental flaws facing liberalism: to be tolerant of other cultures and ideas, while at the same trying to defeat an orthodoxy that promotes the subjugation of women, hate and violence. Can a country impose tolerance without becoming intolerant? Are today’s extremists tomorrow’s oppressed minority?
The United States struggles, like the Netherlands, with these same questions. Civil libertarians rightly worry about government abuse through the Patriot Act, extrajudicial imprisonment of both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens, and a White House prone to secrecy and the expansion of its own power.
The struggle against terrorism is also a struggle for the heart and soul of democracy. History will judge us on how we balance tolerance for unpopular ideas with our efforts to fight our enemies, determined to do us harm.
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