Abigail R. Esman - Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West

This book is gratefully and humbly dedicated to those who have sacrificed their lives so that the rest of us might freely speak.

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On the morning of January 17, 2005, I received an e-mail with the following subject line: "The Next Victim?" and a link to a conversation on a Webboard about the latest art scandal in the Netherlands: an exhibition of cartoon-like paintings by Rachid Ben Ali, a Moroccan-born Dutch artist, that included images of what seemed to be a Muslim cleric either, as it were, eating shit or speaking it. The phrase "next victim" referred to the murder of another artist, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had been slaughtered two months earlier by a Muslim extremist angered by a film Van Gogh had made about the abuse of Muslim women. The question of the day was, of course, whether Ali would be the next target of a Muslim extremist killing, or whether this was harmless enough that it wouldn't really matter.

There was a time, not long ago at all, when "the next Van Gogh" was a phrase used to describe an up-and-coming Dutch artist, when wondering who the next Van Gogh would be was about hoping that, in the meager pickings of the Dutch art scene, someone would emerge of international quality and capture the imaginations of the world.

But when Theo van Gogh was shot twenty times by a jihadist, his body stabbed, and his throat slashed open, the phrase gained a whole new meaning.

In the United States, it was Election Day when Theo van Gogh was murdered-the day when the country would choose either to keep in office the man who had sworn to fight Islamic extremism and oppression by spreading democracy across the Muslim world, or to be rid of him. What no one realized was that even before the polls had opened, whether George W. Bush won the election that day or not, that morning on the streets of Amsterdam, democracy had already lost.

I moved to Amsterdam from New York City because of the canals, because the streets were laid out in a plan that made it difficult to get lost, because you could see time move with the clouds across the sky, so real, so there, you thought maybe you could touch it, and if you could touch it, maybe even hold it still. I moved to Amsterdam because, in some ways, time there always had held still.

It was summer when I first visited, one of the rare summers when the air is actually hot, and the sun on the canals so bright that the reflections of windows in the water sting your eyes, and the ducks clamor joyously until late into the night because it doesn't get dark until nearly midnight and the entire city-de gehele stad-is out on cafe terraces, or on chairs dragged out to the sidewalk from living rooms, drinking Grolsch and jenever and laughing loud enough to be heard in third-floor apartments, if anyone were home to hear them, which, mostly, they are not. It was the summer before the crash of '89, when everyone was buying art and whoever didn't paint or sculpt had a gallery and traveled country to country, art fair to art fair, buying one another's goods and selling them again. Roy Lichtenstein and Jerry Garcia and Michael Jackson all were still alive. Answering machines were just coming into the market in Holland, and only the coolest people had them. Dallas reruns played nightly on TV. At the jazz clubs on the Leidsedwarsstraat, Hans and Candy Dulfer played the saxophone; and in the United States, Ronald Reagan was still the president, and in Berlin, the wall still stood immobile, we thought then, impenetrable, in place.

The other Van Gogh was in the news that summer, with a celebration being planned for 1990 to mark the hundredth anniversary of (of all things) his death. The man charged with organizing it all-from concerts of specially-commissioned symphonies to the launching of a new Van Gogh perfume-took me to lunch at the Amstel Hotel, the most impressive-and expensive-spot in town. He told me about the Van Gogh project. He told me about his own art collection and invited me to visit his home outside of Amsterdam to see it. He told me that the Dutch had an expression he held dear: vrijheid, blijheid. It means, he told me, "freedom is happiness."

I decided I was coming here to live.

Radical State is, in part, the story of how Holland lost that freedom and that happiness to the terrors of jihad. In tracing the events of the fifteen years from 1989, when fireworks celebrated the life and the achievements of Vincent van Gogh, to 2004, when the artist's greatgrand nephew was slaughtered in the street and plans were made to kill the writer of his film, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, amidst the fireworks of New Year's Eve (so the gunshots would not be heard), this book paints a portrait of a thriving democratic nation and the forces that threaten to bring about its demise. It is about a transition in culture from the celebrations of the art of one Van Gogh to the death caused by the art of the other. And in that moment, vrijheid ended in the Netherlands: for not only was Theo van Gogh killed for his embrace of the principle of free speech, but in the aftermath of the killing, laws began to change. National IDs became mandatory for the first time since the German occupation. The Parliament debated house arrests for people suspected, but not convicted, of ties to Muslim extremist groups. The integration minister proposed a ban on all languages but Dutch, not only in businesses and schools, but also on the streets. The Arab European League, comprised of political hopefuls aiming to introduce sharia law to the Dutch system, announced plans for candidates to run in the next parliamentary elections-this when radical Islam smolders and flames among Dutch Muslim youth and Muslims are expected to become the majority population in the Netherlands within the next ten to fifteen years. So concerned are Dutch natives now about the radicalization of Muslims here that they have placed support behind any politician willing to crack down on immigrants and Islam, even knowing that such politicians are equally opposed to many of Holland's most proud traditions: welfare, for instance, or subsidies for the arts. So dramatic has the change, in fact, become, that in June, 2005, Filip de Winter, one of Europe's most extreme-right political leaders, declared the Netherlands "the model country for conservatives and the far-right."