Putting the fear of God into Holland
By Brian Moynahan

The Dutch have rejected liberalism in response to Islamic immigration. Some say they are now too hardline. So what can the rest of Europe learn from their crisis?

Not long ago, Holland prided itself as being the most tolerant and welcoming country in Europe for immigrants and asylum seekers. It had the credentials to prove it. So many have settled there, ethnic "minorities" are often in a majority. In the great Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague, the newcomers already outnumber the native Dutch among under-20-year-olds. They will soon be an absolute majority.

Although the slump that followed the 1973 oil shock removed the urgent need to recruit labour, the Dutch accepted that the "guest workers" in the country could remain. The policy was to create a multicultural society in which cultural and ethnic differences were accepted and appreciated.
Some immigrants came from former Dutch colonies. The two largest groups, however, Turkish and Moroccan, had no historic links with the Netherlands. The Dutch nonetheless accepted the reunification of families, and the practice of marrying partners from the country of origin, even though these can have an eight- or tenfold multiplier effect on overall numbers. Asylum seekers then arrived, in numbers that escalated from 3,500 in 1985 to over 43,000 in 2000.

The figures were pro rata among the highest in the EU. Illegals came, too, mainly after 1990, with estimates running from 100,000 to 200,000. The Dutch supplied funding for mosques, religious schools, language courses and housing. They passed special legislation so Moroccans could have dual nationality, as Moroccan nationality is inalienable under Moroccan law. Political correctness, of the sort that produced Harry Enfield's famously relaxed Amsterdam policemen, reigned. Issues felt at street level — immigration, crime, culture, national identity — were seldom discussed by the political elite

No longer. A sea change has taken place. It was evident after the death last month of a young Dutch Moroccan, identified only as Ali El B. Several hundred Moroccans congregated on the street where a driver had run him over, reversing into him after he had stolen her bag. They had made a shrine on the pavement, with flowers and candles, and there was talk of racism and murder. The crowd set off on a march to pay their respects at a mosque not far away. The boys were in a long gaggle at the front. The girls, neater, were in disciplined ranks at the rear. Some had Moroccan flags draped over their shoulders. They chanted in Arabic for a while, and passers-by looked and scurried on.

The mosque was on the ground floor in a row of old gabled houses, some converted into offices, that looked out over a broad waterway. A racing skiff, a pair, was splashing through the wavelets thrown up by a blustery gale. Television cameramen darted round the crowd as it milled outside the mosque. An elderly Dutchman looked down from his flat at the sea of hoods and scarves and red-and-green flags, with an utterly forlorn expression.

Nobody doubts that Ali El B would once have become a martyred innocent. Now, attempts to portray him like that were sat on fast and hard. The fiercest comment came from Geert Wilders. The hard line this right-wing MP takes on immigrants and terrorists has made him the fastest-rising star in the political firmament.

It has also brought threats of beheading from radical Islamists, so he is now shackled to six bodyguards and has secure lodgings on army bases. "All Moroccan troublemakers should be expelled," Wilders says. "The government wants to expel terrorists. The same process should be used for street terrorists like Ali El B. Detain them, de-naturalise them and deport them." Wilders is a firebrand. Rita Verdonk is the minister for immigration and integration, and a mainstream Conservative. She, too, is implacable. "If the boy hadn't stolen the bag," she says, "he'd be riding around on his scooter today."

But the real pointer to how far Holland has shifted comes from Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam. Cohen is Labour, from the party that personified political correctness and the more-the-merrier, they-can-do-no-wrong approach to immigrants. "We have to admit," the mayor says, "that this was not a sweet and blameless youth, to put it mildly."

The consensus has shifted across the board. In a country that can still seem a parody of itself — a magistrate ruled recently that an armed robber was entitled to a tax rebate on the cost of his gun as a tool of his trade — even the leader of the Green party has called for it to be illegal for Muslims to import spouses through arranged marriages. Integrated teams, drawn from the police, social welfare and housing offices, are used to locate and arrest illegals. Social welfare knows who is drawing benefit, housing offices have addresses, and police check for criminal records. The number of asylum seekers has been slashed from 43,000 to 10,000 a year, nine-tenths of whom have their applications rejected.

Multiculturalism is damned. A recent poll found 80% in favour of stronger measures to get immigrants to integrate — and 40% said they "hoped" Muslims "no longer feel at home here"

How did this happen? The first open shift came in 2001, with 9/11. Frits Bolkestein, the leader of the VVD Conservative Liberals, had struck a chord in the 1990s with his insistence that immigrants conform to western culture, but immigration issues were largely the preserve of "racists" and "crypto-Nazis" on the political margins. Then came reports that the atrocities in New York and Washington had been greeted with cheers in parts of Rotterdam. Forum, the Dutch institute for multicultural development, commissioned an opinion poll of Dutch Muslims. It showed that 48% had "complete understanding" and 27% "some understanding" of the attacks. Overall, only 62% disapproved. Wim Kok, the then prime minister, expressed his shock. The poll was said to be "unbalanced".

Another was held. This found that, although only a small number of Turkish and Surinamese Muslims supported the attacks, 26% of ethnic Moroccans approved of them.

This startling fact helped make the brief political career of Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay, flamboyant former Marxist professor turned magazine columnist. He founded his Leefbaar Rotterdam party — "Liveable Rotterdam" — on an anti-multicultural, law-and-order, stop-immigration platform.

Fortuyn was hard to pin down as a racist, let alone fascist. He was socially liberal, opposed the death penalty, and supported human rights and nondiscrimination. Members of ethnic minorities joined the party. A young, black businessman was No 2 on his national election list. He was often described as a "Dutch Le Pen", as Wilders is now, but both comparisons are facile, and Fortuyn himself said he would not vote for the Frenchman.

He broke the paralysis that political correctness had brought to immigration. "I'm saying we've got big problems in our cities," he said. "It's not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate."

He wanted immigration stopped. "Holland is full," he said, and the Dutch were losing control of their own country. He didn't want to return those already legally in the country, but insisted that they learn to adapt to western culture, and not vice versa. He was also critical of Islam as a "backward culture" that discriminated against women. The enthusiasm of some Dutch Muslims for the New York massacre made his claims hard to dismiss as the ranting of a bigot.

His party, from a near-standing start, came to power in the Rotterdam local elections in March 2002. He was on track for a breakthrough in the May 2002 general elections when he was shot dead.

It was the first political assassination in Holland since the 17th century. The impact was deep and palpable. Free speech has a particular resonance in the country, perhaps as a result of wartime occupation. Fortuyn had already been branded a fascist for questioning the status quo on immigration. Now his views had got him killed, by a white, Dutch animal-rights activist. Several of his ideas — compulsory assimilation programmes for newcomers and those with poor Dutch on social-security benefit, and tighter rules on immigrants bringing in spouses from abroad — were to be adopted in any event.

A third shock came with the murder in November of Theo van Gogh, the film director, columnist and provocateur. He had made a short film, Submission, on the rape and humiliation of women in Islam. It was studiously offensive — he had spun a career out of reckless insults — and featured verses of the Koran written on the thinly veiled body of an abused Muslim woman.

He made the film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a petite Somali refugee who is a Liberal MP in the Dutch parliament. Herself a Muslim, she is an outspoken critic of Islam, speaking of genital mutilation, arranged marriages and the turning of women into "baby machines".

Van Gogh was offered, but refused, protection. He was shot as he cycled through Amsterdam. His murderer then half-butchered him, slitting his throat with a knife, which he then used to pin a letter to the dead man's chest. This claimed that the Dutch were under Jewish control, and called for a jihad against Hirsi Ali, the United States, the Netherlands, Europe and all infidels.

The murder forced another highly sensitive issue — religion — into the mix. The Dutch were brought face to face with the disturbing fact that a full-blown jihadist group had grown up in their midst, and that it was locally born and recruited. It was, they say, their own 9/11. Van Gogh's alleged assassin, Mohammed B, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan, spoke and wrote excellent Dutch. The farewell letter found on him when he was arrested was written in rhyming couplets, in the style that Dutch families send to one another each Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) Day, December 5. He had studied at a well-regarded lyceum before dropping out of a technical institute.

He then started spending time at the Al-Tawhid mosque in Amsterdam. At some stage he joined a militant Islamic group, the Hofstad group, named after the Hague, where it was based. It was led by Redouan al-Issa, alias Abu Khaled, a Syrian-born geologist turned spiritual leader. Mohammed B's friends included Samir Azzouz, an 18-year-old radical later arrested for plotting to bomb Schiphol airport and the Dutch parliament.

Slums and poverty played no part in Mohammed B's background. He grew up in pleasant, low-rise housing in west Amsterdam, graffiti-free, with open spaces and playgrounds. When arrested, he was living in good council housing. The street has small, modern houses, with well-tended gardens, the hedges trimmed, and a heron often standing on a rooftop. Lace curtains mark the Dutch houses; satellite dishes are the ubiquitous indicator of immigrants.

Whether Mohammed B is guilty of this crime or not, the mechanics of how young men such as him are drawn into these groups are well known. "The breeding grounds are websites, prisons and the mosques," says a security expert. The preacher Abu Khaled, suspected of radicalising Mohammed B, was active in mosques in Germany and various parts of Holland. Websites make it possible for extremists to recruit from afar. The young who become interested talk to each other on chat rooms.

The British would-be shoe bomber, Richard Reid, is one of those converted in prison.

The "why?" is more complex. Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Dutch Moroccan on the Amsterdam council, is one of several leading politicians — with Wilders ("it's like being caught in a bad B-movie"), Cohen the mayor, and Verdonk, the immigration minister — who have had to live with bodyguards after assassination threats since the van Gogh murder.

He says that imams with a political agenda and money from the Middle East are active. "Some come from sects that are banned in Egypt," he says, "but the border here is open to money and influence from abroad." The liberal approach includes the police, he notes, who deal with troublemakers with a softness that astonishes their Moroccan counterparts.

He says, too, that the debate on Islam causes tensions. "Muslims are not used to focusing on sensitive issues within their own religion," he says. "They are very rural populations here. They see the debate as an attack on their personal identity."

A reaction is seen. "Muslims now have a big urge, a big need to show their Muslim identity — to show it obviously, even," says Karim Traida, a stylish Algerian film director with a nomination for a Golden Globe. "So there is the risk of a clash. The clash is already in the mind. Muslims fear that, if they open up, they'll wind up like the Christians — very decadent. So when Islam looks at Christian history, it's worried by what goes with liberalism. They think of the decadence of European society."

Islam in Europe, he adds, "has no roots yet. It's unstable, a new phenomenon, and the mosques want to stay secret. Parents are afraid that their children will go into decadent Dutch society, so they bring them back to Islam".

There is a generational problem. "The confrontation with these boys is because they grew up here," says Ahmed Marcouch, gesturing at El B's friends at the mosque, where he is a senior official. "In the Seventies, the newcomers didn't speak Dutch, so they were more subdued. This generation have more strains on them. There's a clash between the culture they have at home and the one at school and on the street."

Age, of course, is a factor. "The young are open to everything," says Uzeyir Kabaktepe, the vice president of the Turkish Milli Gorus mosque in Amsterdam. "If you give them pure Koran, they become extremist. All doors close for them. 'Everything else is black,' they think, 'but I'm white and I'm going to paradise.' Those who see black and white think they are angels, they think they are flying. If a Dutchman speaks to them on the street, they think 'he's a Zionist' or 'he's a Satan'. We give the Koran, not pure, but with explanations. We make them debate with each other. We show them that some of the dark ones, the infidels, are religious people too."

The Moroccans, he says, are different. "They brought their ideas to Europe with them, and they don't budge," he claims. "Democracy for Arabs is Satanic, it's from the West, against God's word. Idiot imams came who said the Dutch and everything to do with them — schools, society — are devils. They said: get a second wife, from abroad, so the devils pay the social money for them. The Middle East plays a big role for the Arabs, it goes into the second and third generation. A child of 10 gets pictures on the internet of Americans in Iraq, mosques burnt down, prisoners. They say, why am I here? As a young Muslim? The internet can do big damage."

Safiyeh M, a Dutch Moroccan divorcee with two children, says there is "one little group that won't adapt. It's always 'damn Dutch, damn Jews, damn infidels'. They can't do anything in Morocco. They'd get squashed. So they try it here". She carefully checks the websites that her 14-year-old son looks at. "I panicked when I found he'd been on a site that Mohammed B used," she says. "Fortunately it was a big entry portal and he was just using it to talk to friends in Morocco." Like many in the second generation, she thinks that new arrivals are keeping tensions high. "All these 150 nationalities in Amsterdam," she says. "It's ridiculous. There are too many immigrants."

The media comes in for blame. "They only pick out the things they want, like the man with four wives," says Imam Jatala, at a Pakistani mosque in Rotterdam. "You can have four girlfriends here, but not wives. Prejudice is the biggest problem. A Christian says something about homosexuals, and that's okay. It's only wrong when Muslims say it."

The debate can be highly sensitive. Ethnic minorities account for 40% of social-security recipients, with a rate six times higher than for the native Dutch. They have a high unemployment rate, and they make up a large majority of the prison population. This is seen as undermining the accepted wisdom that immigrants are vital to the economy.

It includes marriage patterns. Three-quarters of young Muslims, including those who are Dutch born, marry a partner from their country of origin. "It's often a cash transaction," Wilders claims. "Two-thirds of them divorce after three years — the minimum period for the spouse to get the right of residence."

This, and family reunification, means that numbers are constantly increasing, some complain, because the marriage pool extends abroad. Neither Turks nor Moroccans arrive with any understanding of Dutch. This means that the second generation problem — since one parent continues to be a newcomer — is made semi-permanent, compounding the problems of integration.

There is criticism that the Dutch remain liberal where it suits them — society permits euthanasia, same-sex marriage, the use of recreational drugs, prostitution, adoption by homosexual couples — and that it is post-PC only on immigration. Draconian solutions — preventive arrest, deportation where possible — are bandied about for radical Islamists.

"We have been tolerant to the nontolerant, and we got intolerance back," Wilders says. If the law, EU or Dutch, inhibits security, the law must be changed. "I'm a law-maker as an MP," he says. "I accept nothing that stands against us winning. If necessary, we should change the constitution and European treaties."

Hirsi Ali is unrepentant on the cultural gap.

"I take back nothing," she said on a brief return from hiding to parliament. "The essentials of Islam are not compatible with liberal democracy. In the Koran and the Hadith, it says that woman is below man, that nonbelievers have to die, and that people who renounce Islam have to die immediately." She was scathing with suggestions that her stridency was to blame for the threats. "Moderate politicians like Cohen and Aboutaleb are on the Islamists' death lists," she said. "It doesn't matter what tone you take."

All agree, however, in the new climate in Holland, that open debate is essential. "Hiding is not a good strategy," Aboutaleb says. Traida puts it more bluntly: "I say — say it, now, before the explosion."

Attitudes have hardened elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, Edmund Stoiber, the Bavarian prime minister, has said that there was no place for "preachers of hate" and oppressors of women. Immigrants must accept German values. "To those who don't accept this," he added, "all we can say is, 'You picked the wrong country.'" Traditional small "l" liberals have changed. Helmut Schmidt, the highly regarded former chancellor, has even said that the decision to invite guest workers to Germany in the 1960s was a mistake. German TV has broadcast a secret recording of an imam in a German mosque telling his worshippers that Germans would "burn in hell" because they are unbelievers.

In France, which has 5m Muslims, the highest number in Europe, the government has changed laws that inhibit its policy of zero tolerance to radical Islam. When the courts overturned a decision to expel an Algerian cleric who had preached the stoning of women, the law was amended and he was on the next aircraft out.

Denmark introduced new citizenship rules last year. These delay refugees' eligibility for permanent residence permits from three years to seven years. Spouses who come from abroad are deported if they divorce within seven years. The pair must also be judged to have ties with Denmark exceeding those to any other country.

These changes can have a direct effect on other countries, Britain included. When the Danes cut back hard on immigrants and asylum seekers — the number of asylum seekers fell from 14,347 in 1993 to 3,500 in 2003 — "pass the parcel" complaints came from Sweden and Norway. Somalis, for example, who say they feel bullied by the Dutch "forced assimilation" policy, have been leaving Rotterdam and Tilburg in numbers and resettling in Leicester and Birmingham.

In Britain, immigration policy is a mess. That, at least, is how the public sees it. In a poll this month, 77% disagreed that the government had the situation under control, 75% said there were too many immigrants, and 74% did not think the government was "open and honest". It is not surprising that there is confusion.

One headline this month said that Tony Blair was "to set tough new tests for migrants"; a week later, Charles Clarke, the home secretary, said that "we want more migration, more people coming to study, to work, to look for refuge".

Public cynicism on figures seems well founded. The Home Office puts the number of Somali "principal applicants" at 18,050 in the three years to 2003, making them the largest national group applying for asylum. The figure applies to the individual making the application, usually the head of the family.

It gives little indication of the real numbers of Somalis entering Britain.

Not giving totals and age groups breeds speculation. If the average Somali woman has 6.9 children, and the British 1.66, which they do, does that not mean that the wives of the 18,000 applicants will produce 124,000 children? And if gross domestic product per capita in Somalia is $500 (£265), and in Britain $27,700 (£14,700), which they are, isn't the whole of Somalia going to arrive at Dover? Neither scenario is remotely likely, but lack of openness makes for dark interpretations.

And what of the EU? "Migration has to be managed at a European level," Aboutaleb says. "But there is no common sense on asylum or illegals," he adds. Because EU passports are recognised throughout the union, the action of one country in accepting — or refusing — migrants affects others.

Aboutaleb cites Spain as an example. In 2000, it had an amnesty of 250,000 sin papeles (illegals). This month, at a time of increasing controls elsewhere, it announced another amnesty. "Spain has perhaps a million illegals, in agriculture and construction," Aboutaleb says. "The moment they get an EU passport, they can move all over Europe."

Fears that other countries would be affected have been confirmed. Within a few days, 10,000 illegals from other countries who hoped to benefit from the amnesty, many with false papers showing Spanish addresses, were turned back by Spanish border police.

EU unity stoops to farce at Oresund, where post-PC Denmark faces still-PC Sweden across a "love bridge". Couples who do not meet Denmark's strict residence requirements live in Sweden, and cross the bridge each day to work and catch up with friends. And where the British government claims its hands are tied by laws and treaties, Bertel Haarder, the Danish minister for refugees, immigrants and integration, says his government is on track to drastically limit the number of immigrants "without having infringed upon international conventions".

Yet the EU pursues its own agenda. Vladimir Spidla, the labour and social affairs commissioner in Brussels, claimed this month that rising age levels mean that Europe "needs to accept large numbers of economic migrants. Naturally, if you only look at the next two weeks, things look different. But in the EU we have to work on the long term and we definitely need immigration".

That may make him at one with Charles Clarke. But it puts him at loggerheads with large numbers of Germans, Dutch, Danes, French, and, according to this month's opinion poll, British.

Opacity is an EU hallmark. Its Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia commissioned a report to analyse who was behind a wave of anti-Semitic attacks in 2002. When it found that most of the perpetrators were young Muslims of Arab descent, and "were only seldom from the extreme-right milieu", its methodology was questioned and it was shelved. Not much stomach for debate there.

The Dutch may be drawing the wrong conclusions, but they are surely right to be asking the questions. Western Europe is undergoing the largest population shift since the 7th and 8th centuries. This is happening just as the advent of a federal Europe, and the decline of traditional faith, are already straining its old identity.

Is the EU part of the problem, or should it impose a solution? Some say that it is undermining the validity of the nation state, without creating a coherent alternative. The EU is fine for the elimination of customs barriers, but can it cope with more? "Europe has no cultural or political identity," argues Shmuel Trigano, a professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre. "Nor does it have common values.

Its capital in Brussels is only an administrative and bureaucratic centre." The crisis in European identity, he has written, is likely to have "unforeseen and profound consequences".

Confusion abounds on issues with historic implications. The European Commission recently recommended that talks for Turkish membership of the EU should go ahead. Yet Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the chief architect of the proposed EU constitution, opposed this on the precise grounds that it was "incompatible with European culture, which is Christian".

Or was Christian. Europeans have largely opted out of Christendom at the time of both a new federalism and a Muslim challenge. The number of French who say they attend church regularly has shrunk to 7.7%. Though 90% of Italians call themselves Catholic, fewer than 30% go to Mass. In Spain, only 14% of young Spaniards are churchgoers, a 50% decline in less than four years. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, has said that Christianity in Britain is "almost vanquished".

Cardinal Adrianis Simonis of Utrecht believes that the "spiritual vacuity" of Dutch society has left the Netherlands open to an Islamic cultural takeover. "Today we have discovered that we are disarmed in the face of the Islamic danger," he said recently. He linked this to "the spectacle of extreme moral decadence and spiritual decline" that Europe offered to young people.

"Political leaders ask whether the Muslims will accept our values," he said. "I ask, 'What values are those? Gay marriage? Euthanasia?'" The cardinal said that the time when Christians "would fight and die for their faith" were long past, but he hoped "tragic acts" like the van Gogh murder "will force us to recover our identity".

The Vatican has spoken of an "inquisition" taking place against religiosity in Europe. In Spain, José Zapatero's socialist party is engaged in a running battle with the Church. He has made religious education optional, and eased divorce laws, and loosened limits on abortion. A law allowing same-sex marriages and adoptions by gay parents is scheduled to be passed this spring.

The Pope has accused the Spanish government of promoting "scorn and ignorance" towards religion, and added that its "permissive morality" would damage the "imprint of Catholic faith in Spanish culture and restrict religious liberty". There is an irony to this. Zapatero owed much of his unexpected poll victory to the Moroccan bombers who killed 190 people on Madrid trains last March. Electors rounded on the Conservative government for mishandling the atrocity.

The bombers claimed their handiwork was revenge, not only for Spanish troops in Iraq, but also for the loss of Al-Andalus (Andalusia) five centuries ago. Zapatero duly withdrew the troops, and granted privileges to Spain's new mosques.

Is Europe giving way to blackmail? The question was raised in Germany last month by an article in Die Welt, the country's most heavyweight paper, by Mathias Dúpfner, head of the big Axel Springer publishing group. He titled it Europe — Thy Name Is Cowardice. He said that a crusade is under way "by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against our free, open western societies" that is set upon the "utter destruction" of western civilisation. This enemy, he said, was spurred on by "tolerance" and "accommodation", which were taken as signs of weakness. Europe's supine response, he said, was on a par with the appeasement of Hitler.