Holland Wrestles with Immigration

...Attacking religion cannot be the answer...

...Such a question might at first seem na?ve or offensive to Americans— I certainly felt that way when I arrived in Amsterdam in September and heard people debating how to “manage the Muslims” here...

...For anyone unfamiliar with the Dutch crisis that followed Van Gogh’s murder—mass demonstrations, burned mosques, Hirsi Ali forced into hiding—both books are useful primers...

...The story is not over,” he writes in his final paragraph...

...In a postscript, Buruma updates us on the latest news about Hirsi Ali, who was under twenty-four-hour police protection for about two and a half years in Holland...

...It was not a good start for the new age of multiculturalism,” Buruma decides...

...Nina Siegal is living in Amsterdam this year under the auspices of a U.S...

...But where Ali may be overly prescriptive, Buruma fails to offer useful alternatives...

...Ali herself was the target of the letter Bouyeri stabbed into Van Gogh’s chest...

...She acknowledges that she seeks a platform for her ideas, wherever she can get it, rather than a party affiliation...

...There was something unhinged about the Netherlands in the winter of 2004, and I wanted to understand it better,” Buruma writes in his opening chapter...

...She was evicted from her flat in The Hague after her neighbors complained to the court that her presence was putting them in danger...

...He considers Holland’s history with its Jewish population—71 percent of whom ended up in Nazi death camps, the highest percentage in all of Europe outside Poland...

...Bouyeri himself was born in Holland and barely spoke enough Berber to communicate in his father’s native Moroccan village...

...His killer, the Muslim extremist Mohammed Bouyeri, calmly followed Van Gogh to where he’d fallen on the tram tracks, and, ignoring his pleas to “talk about this,” cut Van Gogh’s throat with a machete and planted the knife in his chest...

...That, too, seems bizarre...

...Muslims in Europe, she believes, should not be allowed to promulgate backward ideas, and they should be barred from barbaric religious practices, notably female excision and “honor killings” of disobedient daughters or wives...

...But her perspective is more understandable in the context of her own personal history...

...The issue is now on the European Union’s agenda...

...Buruma’s most interesting interactions are with people like Farhane elHamchaoui, a Moroccan-Dutch actor who grew up in Holland and lost his way until he began working for Theo van Gogh, or Abdelhakim Chouaati, a first-generation Dutch Muslim who considers himself a fundamentalist but teaches Dutch history for a living...

...The implication, of course, is that these Dutch soccer nationalists are no different from the cloistered Islamists whose identity is also defined by clan thinking...

...How Europeans, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, cope with this is the question that will decide our future...

...Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing...

...This does have a dramatic ring to it, but it doesn’t really move the discussion forward...

...Her observations about the struggles of other poor immigrants, which she learns about as a translator, offer a rare glimpse into a world of suffering most of us never see...

...By Nina Siegal On November 2, 2004, Dutch filmmaker and public provocateur Theo van Gogh was gunned down on his bicycle in Amsterdam...

...In a pilot project conducted between October 2004 and May 2005, the police found that eleven Muslim girls were killed by their own families in just two small police regions, she says...

...For Hirsi Ali, there’s more at stake than just the fate of the European Union...

...It’s a meandering journey that begins with the story of the Moluccans, Indonesian soldiers who’d fought against their own people in that country’s battle for independence, and who were placed in former Nazi concentration camps after the war by the Dutch government...

...It’s a long and sometimes trying slog to get through the early chapters, perhaps because of the monotony of Hirsi Ali’s early life as a devout Muslim...

...She helps save members of her clan from a refugee camp on the Somalia/Kenya border...

...Unfortunately, that opportunistic decision seems to mean she is willing to look like a stooge for rightwing anti-Islamists...

...There are moments reading this middle section of the book when one wants to cheer out loud...

...Today, she works for the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C...

...He suggests that the shame associated with this fact may be part of the reason that Holland is loath to involve itself with its Muslims...

...The book becomes riveting when, in 1990, she and her sister leave Mogadishu (where they returned to try and find work after graduating from secretarial school in Kenya) just before civil war breaks out...

...Wolfgang Schaeuble, the interior minister of Germany, the temporary holder of the rotating EU presidency, in January called for a EU-wide discussion about the integration of Muslims...

...Both books ask: What, if anything, should the Dutch government do to deal with these newcomers, many of whom fail to integrate well with mainstream Dutch society, and some of whom actively promote physical violence against unbelievers, or infidels, like Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali...

...Van Gogh’s murder is a microcosm of what we’ve seen in New York on 9/11 and in Spain, Bali, and London...

...After 9/11, she writes, “I could no longer avoid seeing the totalitarianism, the pure moral framework that is Islam...

...her early adolescence in Saudi Arabia, where she and her mother weren’t allowed to leave the house unaccompanied by a man, even though no man lived with them...

...The murder, which shocked Europe and reverberated throughout the world, is described, more or less this way, in the introduction to two new nonfiction books that question the limits of laissez-faire multiculturalism in the Netherlands, a country that has prided itself on its religious, social, and political tolerance...

...She began her professional life in Holland working for the Wiardi Beckman Institute, a social-democrat think tank linked to the leftwing Labor Party, but when she ran for office she joined the Liberal Party, which is not liberal in the American sense of the word—pro-business, fiscally conservative, anti-immigrant, though socially progressive...

...Buruma is right, of course, and it’s nice to hear someone’s sensible perspective in the midst of this charged debate...

...Each one also sets out the terms of the current debate in Holland over what is perceived by many as a Muslim invasion...

...What happened in this small corner of northwestern Europe could happen anywhere, as long as young men and women feel that death is their only way home...

...Hirsi Ali becomes a radical, a revolutionary...

...Instead, he rather feebly concludes his interviews by reflecting on a group of Dutch soccer fans on a train to Rotterdam stadium, dressed in the national color, orange, and singing patriotic songs...

...After reading these two books, particularly Hirsi Ali’s passionate memoir, I’m less sure about the role Western democracies ought to play in protecting themselves against the fraction of Muslims who would engage in such violence...

...It must, she argues, be challenged and contained, and Westernized societies must lead this process...

...Her first novel, “A Little Trouble with the Facts,” is forthcoming from HarperCollins...

...Buruma is probably in a better position than almost anyone to insightfully sum up the full range of conflicting ideology, but he doesn’t...

...Bouyeri then scribbled a note on a piece of paper and, using a smaller knife he’d pulled from his bag, pinned it to Van Gogh’s body...

...Hirsi Ali has moved to the United States (her Dutch immigration status is still unresolved), and Buruma writes, “My country seems smaller without her...

...And that, also, may be too facile...

...And this depends on another choice: whether to accept an orthodox Muslim as a fellow free citizen of a European country...

...The autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, tackles the same subject from a personal perspective...

...Within ten years, according to Buruma, more than half of Amsterdam’s population will be of foreign origin, the majority of them Muslim...

...her teenage years in Kenya, where she was required to do household chores for as many as forty people or else be savagely beaten...

...Buruma sees the crisis in Holland, which has one of the largest Muslim populations in Western Europe (6 percent, second only to France, according to the BBC), as a lesson for the continent: “Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites,” he writes...

...What follows is a series of interviews with Holland’s leading intellectuals, including recent immigrants, first-generation Dutch, and several people with hyphenated nationalities (Moroccan-Dutch, TurkishDutch, etc...

...I wanted . . . to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem...

...Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed,” she writes...

...Her autobiography is an important document that progressives should read and wrestle with, even if they find some of her ideas unpalatable...

...She disappears to Holland and applies (under false pretenses) for political asylum, manages to attain citizenship, get work as a SomaliDutch translator, and attend college...

...Then Rita Verdonk, Holland’s minister for immigration and integration, attempted to rescind Ali’s Dutch citizenship because she’d lied on her immigration forms, a fact that Hirsi Ali herself has admitted publicly time and again...

...Hirsi Ali views multiculturalism as a weak intermediary stance put forward by “well-meaning” but misinformed liberals who are “kidding themselves” about Islam...

...The stakes, of course, are higher than just the security of a few public figures in a tiny European nation...

...Here, too, she paints with an overly broad brush, as there are multiple interpretations of the Muslim faith and varieties of ways to practice it...

...A communityoriented kid, he became disenchanted after a few personal setbacks and then fell under the influence of a small jihadist group that got its ideas off the Internet...

...Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance seeks to explore the roots of the tragedy by considering the immigration question in contemporary Holland...

...We are still left to wonder: How should Western societies act so as to minimize the threat of Islamic fundamentalist violence, without trampling on the religious and civil liberties of their people...

...Ultimately, Buruma writes, “messianic violence can attach itself to any creed,” and that’s a needed, nuanced antidote to Hirsi Ali’s sweeping indictments...

...These are young men caught between cultures, who could easily become Mohammed Bouyeris if pushed in the wrong direction, he asserts...

...Hirsi Ali, Bouyeri wrote, would be next...

...Like many radicals, her ideas were not easily categorized by party affiliations...

...He explains why, as a journalist and teacher based in the U.S., he returns to his native country to write this book...

...The first third of Hirsi Ali’s autobiography gives a grim picture of a brutal childhood as a Muslim girl in Africa and the Middle East: a graphic description of her female circumcision at age five under the instruction of her grandmother in Somalia...

...His book is more of a casual consideration of the sociopolitical climate that may or may not have contributed to Van Gogh’s murder...

...Hirsi Ali’s ideas may not be easy to take, but she is a courageous public intellectual who faces grave threats to her life for speaking out about what she believes...

...In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam...

...It regulates every detail of life and subjugates free will...

...The choice among Muslim immigrants to join a murderous cause, he cautions, “depends partly on the way they are treated by the country in which they are born...

...But this is the setup for what comes next: spiritual enlightenment and sexual liberation, as Hirsi Ali questions everything she was taught, and slowly tests the limits of her faith...

...Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Free Press...

...Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch parliamentarian, helped Van Gogh make the controversial film about Islam (Submission) that led to his death...

...Then Hirsi Ali begins her own escape, from an arranged marriage to a wealthy Canadian-Somali...

...The Muslim faith itself, she says, “spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war...

...Looking at the same set of data, Buruma ultimately decides, “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,” he writes...

...Her most persuasive argument comes when, as a member of parliament, she convinces the Dutch government to track the number of murders in Holland that could be categorized as honor killings...

...It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community...

...The Quran mandates these punishments (against women...

...But it’s the struggle for self-determination, the effort to find her own moral compass, that makes the second half of this story a thrilling read...

...368 pages...

...The writing is simple but affecting...

...Finishing Infidel, I couldn’t help but agree...

...But having lived for several months in this progressive country, where violence is anything but a cultural norm, I can understand better how the public slaughter of Van Gogh—who saw himself as no more threatening than the “village idiot”—could send ripples of reactionary terror through the populace...