AS YE SOW:

Literalism Killed Van Gogh (Leon de Winter, November 5, 2004 Wall Street Journa)

It was only two years ago that an animal-rights extremist assassinated the populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, explaining later in court that he did so, in part, to stop Fortuyn from using Muslim immigrants as "scapegoats." Now the Netherlands is once again in shock. Last Tuesday, the filmmaker and newspaper columnist Theo van Gogh -- a distant descendant of the artist Vincent -- was murdered, allegedly by a Muslim immigrant (now in police custody). The next day the police arrested eight Islamic radicals in connection with the slaying. The Netherlands prides itself on being a liberal and tolerant country. What is going on?

Like Mr. Fortuyn, whom he admired, Mr. Van Gogh was a radical libertarian, a champion of free speech who refused to be constrained by taboos or social codes. I know from personal experience what it felt like to be the target of his invective.

Mr. Van Gogh's pen could be vulgar and radical, and he managed to offend me more than once. In 1984, after I directed a feature film called "Frontiers," about a Dutch journalist who goes abroad to interview a terrorist and discovers his own violent side, Mr. Van Gogh accused me of "selling out my Jewish identity," although there was not a single Jewish character in the picture. Writing elsewhere about Jewish writers or filmmakers, he made Holocaust-tinged jokes like: "Hey, it smells like caramel today -- well then, they must be burning the diabetic Jews." Such attacks went on for almost 20 years. (Mr. Van Gogh was 47 when he died.)

To be clear: Mr. Van Gogh did not limit himself to Jewish topics. He attacked Christian values and symbols as well. Theodor Holman, another Dutch columnist, once wrote that "every Christian is a criminal," and a storm of controversy broke out. Mr. Van Gogh came to his defense by writing that people offended by those words were only "the fan club of that rotting fish in Nazareth." After viewing Mel Gibson's recent film, Mr. Van Gogh remarked in the daily Metro: "I just went to see 'The Passion of the Christ,' a film as bad as an LSD trip which shows once again that also in the sewers of Christianity collective daftness just leads to mud."

After the death of Mr. Fortuyn, who warned that Holland's open culture would clash with its growing Muslim community, Mr. Van Gogh turned his attention to Islam, spewing invective in his columns and earning many enemies. Many people went out of their way to avoid him, including me.

Even so, Mr. Van Gogh remained a member of the artistic establishment.

And he looked around him and wondered how the climate of hate had arisen.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 15, 2004 7:25 PM