[aldo_14]

Originally posted by vyper

What makes it crap exactly? I thought he was commenting on muslim society, not islam by itself?

For a Muslim, there isn't any difference IIRC - their society / culture is heavily ingrained with Islam.  I believe one of the main causes of offence was that he said that Islam encouraged violence against women, in particular.

EDIT; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/3975211.stm

[vyper]

Erm...

[kasperl]

Forgot about the censor.

He quit literally and quit often called Muslims goatf[color="white"]u[/color]ckers. (Admins, this is for the purpose of translation, if you don't like me dodging the censor, please remove this.)

[vyper]

[q]I believe one of the main causes of offence was that he said that Islam encouraged violence against women, in particular.[/q]

So did/does Catholocism but you don't see any Priests or choir boys gunning for me for saying it do you?

Being muslim doesn't give someone the right to go out and commit murder if they get offended.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by vyper
[q]I believe one of the main causes of offence was that he said that Islam encouraged violence against women, in particular.[/q]

So did/does Catholocism but you don't see any Priests or choir boys gunning for me for saying it do you?

Being muslim doesn't give someone the right to go out and commit murder if they get offended.

Absolutely bloody not.  There is no excuse atall, anyone who can be offended and kill because of some TV program/film/anything is a complete and utter ****ing moron.

People may have a right to be offended by it, but they have no right to act in a violent or aggressive manner (etc) because of that.  I'm just saying that's why these particular nutjobs were offended so much, that's all - I'm not excusing them.

[kasperl]

FYI: the last true "free speech killing" was Pim Fortuyn. (Bald guy, tall, gay, right-wing politician.) He got shot by an animal rights activist. Let's just say that idiots will be idiots anyway, wheter they believe in Allah or in Panda.

[vyper]

Remind me how this one wasn't about free speech?

[kasperl]

Sorry, I meant the one before this one.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Originally posted by Bobboau
so... I wonder how long it will be before holland joins the 'coalition of the willing'

they are part of the WoT, just like everyone else in Europe.
and they have troops in Iraq, but probably not for much longer (around March or so)

as for the goat-thing. there's muslims calling western cultures a whole lot of worse things, but instead of being pinned to the ground they get "medals".

[redmenace]

interesting news peices
*biased newspaper*

Mini clash of civilizations
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Published November 15, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Netherlands has long been Europe's most permissive society -- everything from window-shopping in Amsterdam for scantily clad hookers (50 to 80 Euros for 15 to 30 minutes) to hashish aroma in marijuana smoke-filled cafes. The government and the sex workers union protect some 30,000 women. The pimps are landlords and the aging prostitutes are quickly replaced with a steady influx from the former Soviet republics and East European countries.
    A Dutch brothel chain is suing the government for failing to green-light the "Yum Yum Caviar Club" at Schiphol Airport "to cater to stressed travelers in transit." The government responded that plans for an airport bordello were on hold pending new building and space in the departure areas.
    It was such Dutch tolerance, pragmatism and guilt about the country's colonial past that allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Muslim Indonesia (a Dutch colony from the 17th century until World War II) to flood into tiny Holland. Today, Muslims are a majority among children under 14 in the Netherlands' four largest cities.
    There are 1 million Muslims (6 percent of the population) now living in Europe's most crowded small country. Some 30,000 new Muslims arrive every year. They tend to live among themselves, with their own schools, mosques and restaurants. Most are horrified by what they view as sacrilegious in their own religion. Their imams speak no Dutch and know nothing of the Netherlands' history and culture.
    Western Europe as a whole gets about half a million new Muslims a year. Most make their way from sub-Sahara Africa and North Africa, illegal immigrants smuggled by boat to Spain and Italy where they are free to travel with impunity to the rest of Europe. Thus, Europe's Muslim population has doubled to 20 million in the last 10 years.
    The anti-Muslim backlash spawned far right-wing parties. Belgium's highest court this week ruled the anti-immigration Flemish Bloc party -- the most popular political force in Dutch-speaking Flanders -- will lose the government subsidies allocated to all parties, and is now forced to disband. It quickly renamed itself the Flemish Interest Party, and toned down its inflammatory rhetoric.
    Europe's largest mosque is in Rotterdam, which is also Europe's busiest port. Half the people there are of foreign origin. Unemployment among the Muslims is high. And the Dutch live-and-let-live permissiveness made this nation, a quarter of it below sea level and protected by 1,500 dikes, ideal breeding grounds for Muslim fundamentalism and the kind of extremism that spawned one of Osama bin Laden's European fan clubs. But for years the government was in denial about Islamist extremism in what is otherwise a well-managed society.
    Dutch Muslims, repelled by the freewheeling lifestyle, sought solace with radical imams in the mosques. There men outnumber women. And women are relegated to a part of the mosque where they can be neither seen nor heard.
    What Dutch filmmaker and columnist Theo Van Gogh saw as the shabby treatment of females throughout the Muslim community led him to produce documentaries that portrayed Muslim men as tormentors of women, especially their wives. One recent scathingly critical Van Gogh film's carried the message that Islam promotes violence against women. Last week, Van Gogh, a grandnephew of the painter, was shot as he cycled to work. He managed to get up and stagger across the street to his building where he collapsed. The assailant followed him and slit his throat before pinning to his chest with a knife a five-page manifesto that called on Muslims to rise against the "infidel enemies" in the West.
    Dutch security authorities launched a nationwide manhunt for the murderer of the popular Van Gogh. A hand grenade injured four policemen as they went after two suspects in a working-class district of The Hague. Air space over the capital was closed for a day as Dutch Special Forces lay siege to a building and the two surrendered after a 14-hour standoff.
    Ten others were arrested, including the prime suspect, a Muhammad Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan, who was charged with murder and suspected links to an al Qaeda group. A two-time visitor to Saudi Arabia, he had doffed Western clothes in favor of Arab dress.
    Both Mr. Bouyeri and his close friend Samir Azzouz, 18, another Dutch Moroccan, moved between five apartments in an Amsterdam suburb favored by Islamist radicals. They were on Dutch intelligence's terrorist watch list as they communicated with like-minded extremist cells throughout Western Europe.
    Last year, Mr. Azzouz was stopped in Ukraine and turned back as he made his way to Chechnya to fight the Russians. Released by the Dutch and then rearrested because bomb-making equipment and detailed maps of public buildings were found with his fingerprints, he is in jail awaiting trial.
    Tit-for-tat terrorism quickly followed Van Gogh's assassination in widely scattered parts of the otherwise peaceful Netherlands. An arson attack against a Muslim school was followed in the same village of Uden by a Muslim attack against a primary school that was set ablaze and completely gutted. Then a small bomb damaged a Muslim school in Eindhoven. A score of mosques and churches were targeted by arson attacks in one week. Two young men were also arrested for putting a video on the Internet that promised 72 virgins in paradise for the "beheading" of Geert Wilders, a popular right-wing politician who decries the dangers of radical Islam.
    Two years ago, Pim Fortuyn, a populist politician who called for a halt to immigration, by simply saying the Netherlands was "full," was similarly gunned down.
    Over the past year, the presence of 1,300 Dutch troops in Iraq triggered repeated threats from Muslim groups. Last summer, a last will and testament was found when an 18-year-old man of Moroccan-born parents was arrested for plotting terrorist attacks in the Netherlands. The list of targets included the Dutch parliament, Schiphol and the nuclear reactor at Borssele. Floor plans of several public buildings were also found. The former student wrote in his will he wants his newborn son to live "in the spirit of jihad."
    Described by a police psychiatrist as "fearless and fatalistic," the student "gradually fell under the spell of ideas about the oppression of Islam." During a court hearing, his family remained seated as all present rose when the judge entered. The mother was covered in a head-to-toe chador in Muslim fundamentalist fashion.
    Islamist extremists even penetrated the Dutch intelligence service with a double agent. One officer was arrested last September. The government hastily drafted a Patriot Act-like law which enables it to strip citizens of their citizenship and deport them if they engage in extremist acts.
    Could the Netherlands be a curtain-raiser for a wider clash of civilizations in the old Continent? Hundreds of thousands of young Muslims in Europe are potential jihadis, according to European intelligence chiefs speaking not for publication. They have been warning their political masters about the tinderboxes that many Muslim communities have become. Jihadi volunteers are known to have left for Iraq from a number of Muslim slums on the outskirts of major European cities.
    Recruitment posters come on regular European and Arabic news programs -- from the Abu Ghraib prison pictures to the battle of Fallujah.
     
    Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

also

Dutch counterterrorism
Published November 15, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the wake of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh's murder by an Islamist extremist, the famously tolerant Netherlands exploded in violence last week with a rash of attacks on mosques and the firebombing of a Muslim school. In all, the Dutch sustained just one victim of Islamist terrorism -- not the nearly 3,000 murders Americans sustained on September 11 -- but that one death pushed the country from an extreme of nonchalance to a reaction unknown in the United States.
    The good news is that the experience seems to be forcing some clear-headed thinking among Dutch elites. Over the weekend, dozens of suspected militants were arrested in a sign the government is finally taking the threat of Islamist terrorism seriously. We hope the rest of Europe is watching.
    Dutch politicians previously known for their dovishness as well as the liberal media are calling for a tightening of the country's laws on security and immigration. The cabinet is considering stripping dual citizens of their Dutch citizenship if they have criminal records. There is talk of bolstering budgets for the security services, too. But most telling is the about-face the murder caused in the country's newspapers and overwhelmingly liberal commentariat. The country's leading newspaper, the Telegraaf, last week made a call for action inconceivable in a pre-van Gogh Netherlands.
    The Telegraaf argued for "a very public crackdown on extremist Muslim fanatics in order to assuage the fear of citizens and to warn the fanatics that they must not cross over the boundaries." The editorial continued: "International cash transfers must be more tightly controlled; magazines and papers which include incitement should be suppressed; unsuitable mosques should be shut down and imams who encourage illegal acts should be thrown out of the country." Extremists with dual nationality "have no business here," the paper argued. "The range of extremists to be kept under surveillance needs to be expanded. If more money is required for all this, then that money must be made available. It is more than worth it for the sake of the citizens' safety."
    The irony of all this is that the United States has been urging the Europeans to take many of those steps for years. For one, the Treasury Department and the CIA have long been urging movement on the international cash transfers question. As terror-financing expert Lee Wolosky told the September 11 commission last year, although cooperation had been improving, "America's closest allies in Europe ... [were] refusing to block bank accounts in some cases." As an example of the prevailing attitude, he pointed to the EU's policy of allowing fund-raising for Hamas' "humanitarian" branches despite common knowledge that such funds were being used to support terrorist activities. That has to stop.
    The attitude of blithe disregard for common sense should change. The Dutch government appears to be moving in the right direction in dealing with this problem. While it does so, it will also need to be be prepared to act forcefully against thugs and vigilantes who target innocent Muslims. Let's hope the rest of Europe is watching, because the Dutch case shows that Islamist terrorism spares not even the most tolerant of countries.

[SadisticSid]

Of course there is no excuse for all this mosque-burning et al either. The majority must show it is better than these murdering radicals by holding themselves back.

[Rictor]

Originally posted by kasperl
FYI: the last true "free speech killing" was Pim Fortuyn. (Bald guy, tall, gay, right-wing politician.) He got shot by an animal rights activist. Let's just say that idiots will be idiots anyway, wheter they believe in Allah or in Panda.

Well, there's a difference. Van Gogh was only making a movie. But if this politician was actually involved in or supported organizations that animal rights activists see as harming animals, thats different than just excersiing free speech. Sure, I don't support violence as a method of solving problems, but with animals they can't really fight back now can they?

wait, did you just say he was gay and a right-winger?
I guess anything is possible in Holland.

[aldo_14]

I was under the impression Fortuyn was attacked because of his anti-immigration stance ahead of any actual animal rights reason.

[Rictor]

*shrugs*

Damned if I know.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Rictor
*shrugs*

Damned if I know.

Well, I had got the impression - prior to his death* - that his party was actually quite racist towards Muslims (based upon Muslim hostility towards homosexuals, which is a fair reason but possibly not worthy of advocating a 'cold war' against a racial/religious group) and immigrants in general.  Um, which makes the posthumous eulogising of him somewhat unsettling to me - albiet I particularly hate the habit the media has for making any celebrity who dies into a saint (for example, Princess Diana, the simpering media-whore turned into 'queen of hearts')

For reference, the killer (Volert Van der Graaf) said it was because he thought Fortuyn presented a danger to minority groups through his views and expressions of them (according to wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkert_van_der_Graaf)

*presumably.  Not much Dutch politics on the BBC normally, but I definately had heard of him previously

[kasperl]

The LPF (Lijst Pim Fortuyn, his political party) was right wing, and very anti immigrant. Volkert van der Graaf is being looked at as a wacko, and not taken truly serious here.

Aldo: You mean the choosing of him as the greatest Dutch of all time? That was a bloody farce, just like a milennium top 1000 hitlist without classical music.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by kasperl
The LPF (Lijst Pim Fortuyn, his political party) was right wing, and very anti immigrant. Volkert van der Graaf is being looked at as a wacko, and not taken truly serious here.

Aldo: You mean the choosing of him as the greatest Dutch of all time? That was a bloody farce, just like a milennium top 1000 hitlist without classical music.

Yep.  And just other things I've heard on the news, and his parties surge in popularity post-assasination.  It seems...off, to me at least.