For many of the Dutch, the death of the 54 year old Pim Fortuyn, the flamboyant sociology professor turned right-wing politician in 2002 had something of the dreadful impact which September 11 (2001) had on Americans. Dark disorientation fell upon the nation known for its tolerance of almost everything secular, eccentric, and postmodern. Fortuyn was murdered just days before Dutch national elections (where Fortuyn was expected to win and lead one of the largest parties in parliament) by a white 33 year old leftist and animal rights activist, Volkert van der Graaf, who saw in Fortuyn's cry for an end to (especially Islamic) immigration an ominous turn in the direction of right wing oppression, possibly even fascism one day.

Van der Graaf also reportedly didn't like the florid exhibitionism of this politician, a gay man who liked to wear animal furs and do pretty much anything else he liked, and as he liked, with a great deal of prejudice against those who held to other views.

So principle, become fanaticism, turned to blood.

Van der Graaf had downloaded Fortuyn's schedule for May 6 from the internet and shadowed him, finally and mercilessly shooting him five times in the head and chest as the politician left a radio studio where he had just completed an interview.

"Many animal protectors act from the assumption that 'nature is good'," the killer, who received 18 years for the crime, said, "but every dark side of humans can also be found in nature". "Protecting animals is civilizing people," he is reported to have said.

Immigrants, Muslims

Pim Fortuyn, who with his signature bald head, predilection for decadence, and eloquence looked---probably quite consciously--- something like the French postmodernist philosopher, gay theorist, and social critic Michel Foucault (1), had made his jagged and unlikely climb in Dutch politics by playing on Dutch angst regarding immigration. He rocked the modern-day regenten establishment, which, though radically changed, stemmed from Holland's Calvinist "orderly" days, when he called for the repeal of the first article of the constitution which forbids discrimination. In no uncertain terms he declared: "This is a full country. I think 16 million Dutchmen are about enough".

It was such a turn in political climate, which Fortyun helped erupt in Holland, which made others in Europe compare him to the "racist" views of far-right politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen of France, Jörg Haider of Austria, and Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang). Fortuyn rejected such comparisons and preferred to consider his politics more like Silvio Berlusconi's of Italy, and former Dutch Prime Minister Joop den Uyl, a socialist. He considered himself a man of the Enlightenment and simply reasonable, "civilized". For him this necessarily meant that immigration in the Netherlands was plainly out of control and that Holland was in danger of losing its national(ist) character.
 

Denied Racism

But lest anyone take his political views too seriously, it should be noted that Fortyun, despite his call for repeal of the first article of the Dutch constitution, not only denied being racist; to justify his positions he was known to boast that he would and did have sex in back rooms and bath houses with Moroccan and Turkish youth without regard for race or religion (though he denied they were under age, which some dispute).

Appalled the Left

It was such showman-like audacity which infuriated the Left which considered itself the guardians of multiculturalism, after 72 % of all Dutch Jews were deported to Nazi death camps during the Second World War, even if it endeared him to others, making him something of a populist by the time he was killed.

In any case Pim Fortyun was also adamant that Turkey with its 68 million Muslims not be admitted to the European Union. Europe was already becoming Islamic enough for his tastes. The fact that Holland's population in 1999 consisted of 45% peoples of foreign origin (a large part of it the legacy of Dutch colonialism) gave more and more of the Dutch anxious pause. It was projected that if trends continued this would rise to 52% by 2015 (2).

Foreigners in Amsterdam

In Holland, very many Muslim small shop owners and workers (largely Moroccans and Turks) lived in a densely populated low-income part of Amsterdam known as "Dish City" because its residents were in constant touch with the rest of the Islamic world through Dish satellite television. Fortyun resented what he perceived to be this seeming determination of the Islamic immigrants to retain in no small part their distinctive, separate, Islamic identity and refuse assimilation into what he called the "cabaret" of Post-60's European civilization. The site of mosques and women in distinctive Islamic garb was sufficient for him to overlook the fact that not a few Muslims did seem to mix in, some even all the way to unsavory lengths, as witness his allegations about his sexual encounters with those who adopted "screamer" gay---and very dangerous--- lifestyles.

The Morphing into Far-Right Politics

It might be considered odd that a flamboyant, even theatrical, politically liberated gay professor who bizarrely compared sex with strangers in dimly lit backrooms to the churches of his youth "with all those candles," should embrace right-wing politics at all. What is little known, however, perhaps outside of Holland, is that according to Fortyun what turned him in this anti-immigration direction was one transforming incident especially. According to Ian Buruma:

[it]...began only after he moved to Rotterdam in the early 1990's to become a sociology professor. Local immigrant youths smashed the windows of Boundless (a local gay den) and threatened its clientele. Fortuyn suddenly felt vulnerable in a country where he thought he was safe. This had a profound effect on his political thinking. In February 2002, a reporter asked him why he felt so strongly about Islam. "I have no desire," he replied, "to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again. There are many gay high school teachers who are afraid of revealing their identity because of Turkish and Moroccan boys in their classes. I find that scandalous."(3)

So there it was. The drama of the clash of values after all. It was, from the Muslim side, not mere irrational hatred, as some Western politicians would have it, but a reaction to what they believed is pure decadence and decay and a threat to even minimal morals.
 

No Excuse

There is no excuse for what happened to Pim Fortyun. Violence is never an acceptable way to express difference. And, according to Church teaching, a proper police defense against it is to be expected. But there is also no excuse for outrageous provocations against any peoples, especially the denunciation of their sense of religious identity. Pim Fortyun was a master at provocation, at inflammatory oratory. It is ironic, then, that he was murdered not by any Muslim, for many were rightly offended and provoked by his insults and yet they showed proper restraint, even while fearing what his coming to power could mean for them.


Catholic

Fortyun was a Catholic whose open decadence offended all but apostate Catholics (and they are legion today since the 1960's) as well as Muslims. And he paid for it unjustly at the hands of a twisted, sentimental white Left-wing fanatic. Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker and distant relative of the famed artist, Vincent van Gogh, was not so lucky. He was murdered in 2004, also in plain daylight, by an angry Islamic young man who was apparently offended by van Gogh's endless public vitriol and provocations against immigrants, as well as by a serious work, a film, against the treatment of women in some Islamic countries. Doubtless it was van Gogh's habit of inflammatory rhetoric and deeds which colored the reception of that documentary as much as the documentary itself, at least for this young Muslim. Van Gogh's provocations were scarcely likely to open the way for a receptive consideration for genuine dialogue with many Muslims.

Practicality. Time for Moral Inventory

The West, I believe and have written, should get serious about shoring up its borders in Europe in order to (for the most part) keep apart peoples whose world views are so fundamentally different that they are not likely to live peacefully together, hospitality towards the persecuted being a measured exception. Tolerance must be reciprocal or it will not be at all.

The aggression on Iraq in 2003 has made matters immeasurably worse. But it is hardly the fault of the Muslims entirely. Though I am committed to non-violence except in the most exceptional and unambiguously defensive situations---and even then using only such force sufficient to repel the aggression and protect the attacked, per the Catechism of the Catholic Church----even I can sometimes feel the stirrings of visceral wrath when I see open decadence and blasphemy aimed against religion, against our own faith, especially by the decadent media, and by some in the arts. Such stirrings of wrath, however, must be transformed in Christ. Our Lord too knew insult and provocation, and yet said from the Cross, "Father, forgive them".

His way must ever be our way.

Still, Muslims must ask themselves whether certain facts(4) do not make it increasingly difficult---whatever the geopolitics involved--- for those in the West to feel comfortable living with many of their religion.

Moral Inventory

It is time for moral inventory in the West before God punishes us for our apostasy by giving us over to others who know degeneracy when they see it.

Muslims should know it is only apostates from Christ's religion who behave in such decadent ways, and they should not believe the media's distorted lenses, the manipulated magnification which makes it appear the entire West---the people--- subscribe to this swill of decadence. The media serves the Powers which try to manufacture the consent of the people.

We Christians must return Europe to the Faith, to the roots of our sanity---beginning with the European constitution--- lest we suffer the consequences of our own apostasy. For life is a serious matter, not a cabaret.

_________________

End Notes:
(1) Foucalt said in an interview: "I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on. An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean." ---“Essential Works of Foucault”---interview with Paul Rabinow in May 1984, The New Press, 1997.

(2) Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh, Ian Buruma, Penguin Press, NY, 2006 P. 23

(3) ibid. PP 56, 57

(4) Theo van Gogh wrote: "A recent survey revealed that 22% of the Moroccans living in Holland believe that the attack on America was permissible. Every side is reassuring us that these statistics should be seen as quite positive, since that means that three quarters think differently about this.

"I don't want to always be the spoilsport but, still I have a nagging doubt. Even with this politically correct research which was done with blinders, reveals that there are thousands of Moroccan countrymen, who without blinking an eye, are prepared to sacrifice yours and my children for the sake of Allah. ---(Allah Knows Best, by Theo van Gogh; written shortly after 9/11)

NB: Clearly, sober immigration controls for the future in Europe, along with Europeans taking seriously once again their own heritage as well as their obligation to reproduce themselves (breaking with a naive and decadent contraceptive mentality) to preserve that heritage, should not ever mean persecution or harassment of those from other lands who may be living within the borders of the host country. The Golden Rule must be the law of the land in this respect in social matters.

While it must, I believe, mean following common sense and ceasing the flood of uncontrolled immigration where peoples in large part do not think alike and share the same national values, and who are not likely to live together in lasting peace, regardless of the naive and sometimes elitist norms of radical multiculturalism; and while it will mean host countries may have to deport clear troublemakers (those who arouse hatred against their host countries and its traditions, for example) it must never mean wholesale "ethnic cleansing" and other similar unthinkables (those who are truly and notoriously persecuted in their own countries and / or by their own religions should be given at least temporary, measured, asylum in the West as a matter of Christian hospitality).

Nor will it mean that the West can afford to resist a serious and deep critical appraisal of its own decadence or any injustices which historically it may have exacted against others (consider the mixed, complicated legacy of colonialism, etc) in their own name. Jingoism / exaggerated nationalism can never be the answer toward a better, more understanding and humane future; only learning from the past and wisdom. The West must lead, if at all, by example only.---SH