Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the “strange death” of Europe

Welcome to Douglas Murray's Things Worth Remembering column, where he highlights great speeches from famous speakers that we should take to heart. Scroll down to listen to Douglas read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 2006 statement about leaving the Netherlands.

Twenty years ago, as the world focused on an election in America, something that was in many ways even more important was happening in Amsterdam.

On November 2, 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the city center in the morning as he rode his bicycle to work. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, then 26, explained in a note stabbed in the stomach by van Gogh that van Gogh's film Template was guilty of “blasphemy” – he criticized Islam’s treatment of women – and he threatened that van Gogh’s colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jews and other infidels would suffer a similar end.

Van Gogh's murder came two years after the murder of gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, who was shot nine days before a general election that the party he led was likely to win. His killer, Volkert van der Graaf, said he killed Fortuyn, who had called Islam “backward” and advocated an end to immigration, as a favor to the Netherlands' Muslim community.

Until then the country was relatively peaceful. But the murders, which followed each other so quickly and were so barbaric in nature, deeply shocked the Dutch.

On Thursday evening, just two days after another American election, scenes of Jews being attacked and beaten on the streets of Amsterdam began appearing on our social media feeds – with most legacy media taking its time before reporting on the violence .

It was a reminder that, despite all the early warning signs, the Dutch have done little to solve their problems.

In fact, as I described in my 2017 book The strange death of Europe: Immigration, identity, Islamthey actually turned against the people who identified these problems – especially Ayaan Hirsi Ali.