Orange Crush

On the other hand, he is happy to inform readers that “perhaps the most impressive young woman I ran across during my time in Holland . . . wore a black chador that left only her round, friendly face, with a touch of lipstick and mascara, open to the eyes of the world.” According to Buruma, this woman, Nora, is in favor of the separation of church and state, against the imposition of sharia law in Holland — this is supposed to be a great achievement, apparently — and “would never even think” of living in a country like Saudi Arabia, even though — as any sane reader will immediately recognize — she chooses to dress as if she were already there.

Though Nora is known for her “big mouth” — she is president of an Islamic students’ union — September 11 predictably left her “speechless.” Or not quite: “She felt that all Muslims were being blamed, especially after the same frightening images were shown over and over on the television news, not only of the smoking towers in Manhattan, but of young Muslims dancing with joy in a small Dutch town called Ede.” Buruma swallows this evasive junk whole.

There’s worse. In Amersfoort, “in the shadow of the Church Tower of Our Lady,” he has tea with Bellari Said, “a small, trim man, born in Morocco,” who works as a psychiatrist. Bellari’s politics “are a mixture of leftist Third Worldism, with a particular animus against Israel and the United States.” He believes that “the West will only be reconciled with the Islamic world once Israel ceases to exist.” (Exeunt Jews.) With a remarkably straight face, Buruma calls this anti-Semitic moonbat “another Moroccan success story.”

Learned and informative as it is, there is something distinctly feeble about this book. It draws to a close with a description of Dutch soccer fans on a train, decked out clownishly in nationalist orange garb, jumping up and down “with a fervor that blurred the borderlines between ecstasy and fury.” Buruma buries his face in a newspaper and tries to pretend he’s not there. “Don’t you love Holland?” one boorish fan bellows at him. (An honest answer might have been “Actually, no, dude. I’m an International Man of History.”) But of this World Cup–style bellicosity, Buruma then goes on to say, “It was a return to an invented country, no more real than a modern Dutch Muslim’s fantasy of the pure world of the Prophet. Both fantasies contain the seeds of destruction.”

Well, yes. But are those “seeds” at quite the same stage of development? (And what are all those Islamist ones doing in a Dutch garden anyway?) The patriotism of the soccer fans, Buruma admits, is largely “a festive holiday from postwar political pieties.” And it is precisely those pieties that Van Gogh, Fortuyn and Hirsi Ali were fighting, and two of the three have already paid with their lives. Buruma knows all this, but he doesn’t quite seem to feel it. Nor does he escape those pieties himself. On November 2, 2004, “the violent fantasies of a Dutch Muslim ended in the murder of a fellow citizen,” he states in the closing paragraph. But was Bouyeri “Dutch” in any meaningful sense? Did he regard Van Gogh as a “fellow citizen” or simply an infidel? At any rate, Buruma’s closing sentence leans less to Van Gogh than to his murderer: “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.”

How about just buying them a plane ticket?

MURDER IN AMSTERDAM: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance | By IAN BURUMA | Penguin Books | 320 pages | $25 hardcover