Murder in Amsterdam (21 page)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes that Cohen is “fighting demons from the past,” that “true Islam” is irreconcilable with a secular, liberal state, that Muslims, unlike Jews in the 1930s, are not hated in Europe today, but that they, the Muslims, hate secular, liberal Europe. The idea that “true Muslims” can be integrated through the mosque, she says, is to make the same naive mistake as the U.S. government, which supported the Taliban against the Soviet Union, only to see the believers bite back and destroy the Twin Towers. A true Muslim, she argues, believes that a conspiracy of Jews is running the world; a true Muslim thinks democracy is sinful, and that only God's laws must be obeyed; a true Muslim, in short, is
the enemy of all freedom-loving heirs of the Enlightenment, and the fact that Cohen fails to see this shows how blinded he is by those historic demons that once threatened the life of his mother.

If all true Muslims were political revolutionaries, Ayaan Hirsi Ali would doubtless be right. But since this is not the case, even among orthodox Muslims, Cohen deserves the benefit of the doubt. If Islam as such were a threat to democracy, then all Muslims are threats. It is precisely to avoid this notion of Kulturkampf, or “clash of civilizations,” that Cohen wants to reach an accommodation with the Muslims in his city. It is easy, as Hirsi Ali does, to find hateful examples on websites and in radical sermons of violent anti-Semitism and loathing of Western civilization. And it's true that discrimination of Muslim women by their own fathers and brothers causes much suffering, but it is hard to see how an official attack on the Muslim faith would help to solve this problem. The revolutionaries are no longer open to compromise, and apart from giving protection to young women who are subject to male violence, there is little the government can do to change the habits of conservative patriarchs. Attacking religion cannot be the answer, for the real threat to a mixed society will come when the mainstream of non-revolutionary Muslims has lost all hope of feeling at home.

4.

A
hmed Aboutaleb was born in the Rif mountains of Morocco in 1961, as the son of a village imam. In 1976 his mother took him and his brothers to the Netherlands. After learning Dutch and completing his education in telecommunications, he worked as a radio reporter, and later as chairman of Forum, the multicultural organization. He is
a member of the Social Democrats. His current job, Amsterdam councillor, came as a surprise. In 2002, his predecessor, Rob Oudkerk, also a Social Democrat, made a serious error. At the end of a public meeting, thinking the microphone was switched off, Oudkerk, whose grandfather served on the Jewish Council under Nazi occupation, leaned over to Job Cohen and whispered something about “those fucking Moroccans” (
kutmarokkanen
). In 2004, he was succeeded by Ahmed Aboutaleb.

Aboutaleb, whose portfolio includes youth affairs, education, integration, and urban policy, has been called worse things than a fucking Moroccan. Once, in a television talk show, he was accused by a history teacher of Moroccan descent of being an NSBer, a Nazi collaborator. It was a very strange thing for one Berber to say to another, even if “NSBer” has become a generic term of abuse. Perhaps the use of this historical parallel was a sign, on the side of the accuser, of integration into Dutch society. Aboutaleb did not see it that way and threatened to sue.

What does it mean, anyway, for a highly respected Amsterdam councillor to be a “collaborator”? Collaborator with what? A trawl through Dutch websites of various political shades reveals how Aboutaleb gets it from all sides. The history teacher mentioned above, named Abdelhakim Chouaati, writes for elqalem.nl, a website for young Moroccans which pays respectful attention to all kinds of anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories. In the chatrooms of elqalem.nl, Aboutaleb is frequently called a traitor, a kiss-ass, a “subsidy whore,” or a Bounty, after a famous coconut-filled chocolate bar—brown on the outside, white on the inside.

Mohammed Bouyeri, in his death threat to Aboutaleb, addressed him as a heretic, or
zindiq,
which makes him an enemy of Islam destined for execution. Aboutaleb's sin, for Mohammed, and for Abdelhakim too, is precisely his success as a Dutch citizen. To take part in government, to promote integration, to speak out against the violent prejudices of religious zealots, is enough to make him a heretic, an enemy, a traitor. But, then, trawling a little farther through the byways of cyberspace, I found a Dutch neo-Nazi website,
Stormfront.org
, which denounces Aboutaleb as a slave to the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, led by “the arch Zionist Cohen.” These are the rancid margins, of course, where Islamist extremists and white supremacists find one another in a peculiar meeting of minds. But even in the mainstream of society, the Amsterdam councillor often cuts a lonely figure.

When twenty thousand people gathered on Dam Square on the day of Van Gogh's murder to demonstrate their anger, Aboutaleb was one of only a handful of Muslims. This was a disappointment to him. “Even though they might have found Van Gogh an asshole,” he says, “they should have been there to defend the rule of law.” He could barely contain
his own rage. In a speech to fellow Muslims, delivered in an Amsterdam mosque (Aboutaleb is a pious man), he said that tolerance was not a one-way street. Amsterdam was a city of freedom and diversity, and “those who can't share those values had better draw their own conclusions and leave.”
²
This robust attitude was much applauded among the “natives,” but did nothing to burnish his reputation among the immigrants.

He was everywhere in those volatile and dangerous days after the murder, trying to douse the flames of hatred and fear—in mosques, youth centers, schools. Muslims, he pleaded with the believers, “must not allow their faith to be hijacked by fanatics.” But he felt abandoned by the politicians, including the prime minister. “So often,” he lamented, “I stood alone in those halls. Where were all the ministers and cabinet secretaries?”
³

Trying to build bridges can be a bitter task. By trying to accommodate disparate communities with very different demands, an official like Aboutaleb risks losing sympathy on all sides. The same man who pleaded, against all the trends of modern society, for separate swimming lessons for girls and boys, also told Muslims who couldn't abide the open society to pack their bags and leave. He even tried to plug young Muslims into the Dutch collective memory. On May 4, 2003, the national day of remembrance, Moroccan kids had
outraged the natives by playing soccer with wreaths laid in honor to the war dead. So on the fourth of May 2005, Aboutaleb took a group of schoolchildren to Auschwitz.

I first saw Aboutaleb at my usual café on the Nieuwmarkt. He was reading the papers, surrounded by bodyguards. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he needed full-time protection. I made an appointment to see him at the city hall, in the middle of the former
jodenhoek
. A neat, compact figure in steel-rimmed spectacles, Aboutaleb spoke about religion in the brisk and measured manner of a man who has answered the same questions many times. Religion, to him, is a private affair, in which the state has no business interfering, or the other way round. Nor is he keen on political parties organized on the basis of faith or ethnicity. The main problem, he continued, was “the matter of priorities, the fact that many Muslims find the law less important than an insult to the Prophet.”

But, he said, there were generational distinctions. The first generation is barely literate. For them “religion is a matter of hearsay couched in cultural patterns. They pray five times a day, they wear beards. Jihad, for them, is not so much armed struggle as simply being a pious Muslim.” The young have a different handicap, he explained. “They must consume religion in a strange language. The Koran is a complicated text, difficult to interpret, both in sociological and linguistic terms. So it makes me laugh when a kid like
Mohammed B. thinks he can derive enough knowledge from the Koran in English and Dutch to think it is his duty to gun a person down.”

Even though religion is his own business, Aboutaleb sees no reason why he shouldn't be openly critical of it. What prompted the history teacher's particular ire was a famous episode involving Aboutaleb and a book compiled in the thirteenth century. One day, in the radical Tawheed Mosque, where Mohammed Bouyeri used to pray, a book was spotted, entitled
Fatwas on Women,
by the Sunni scholar Ibn Taymiyah (1263–1328). The book, sold at the mosque, included decrees about the duty of men to beat their women with rods if they should be caught telling a lie. But this was not the worst. It also contained a passage about homosexuals who should be dropped to their deaths from five-story towers. Aboutaleb wrote a letter to the mosque warning that such inflammatory material was “contrary to the letter and spirit of the law.” The mosque protested that there was nothing wrong with the book, but it was withdrawn nonetheless.

Ahmed Aboutaleb is tired of the Tawheed Mosque and its zealots. He is angry at the ignorant and violent youths who, in the name of Allah and his Prophet, make it so much harder for peaceful Muslims to become accepted citizens in a European democracy, and to feel at home there, without drawing undue attention to themselves, like the Jews who came before them. And so, Ahmed Aboutaleb, councillor,
bridge builder, and good Muslim, is called a Bounty, a
zindiq,
and a traitor, who deserves nothing less than death.

5.

T
he day I went to see the history teacher Abdelhakim Chouaati in Rotterdam was the occasion for a major postwar national ritual: Holland was playing Germany in a soccer match. These games are often more than games. Especially when a World or European Cup is contested, they are a ceremonial reenactment of World War II. Germany
must be defeated. No doubt the Poles feel the same way, and even the English, although they never suffered under German occupation. This is partly a result of changing political mores. Open displays of patriotism have become a taboo in post–World War II Europe, except on the soccer field. It is as if there, and only there, all the forbidden tribal sentiments are allowed to be vented in massive displays of flag waving, anthem singing, and primitive warrior worship. When Holland plays Germany, thousands of men, women, and children don their royalist orange uniforms to do battle with the traditional foe, the enemy whose very existence allows the Dutch to adopt a self-regarding national identity: the liberal, open, tolerant, free-spirited Dutch, versus the mechanical, disciplined, authoritarian Teutons. When Holland beat Germany in the European Cup finals in 1988, more people came out to celebrate in the streets of Amsterdam than on the day of liberation in 1945.

Abdelhakim, sitting in a café near the central railway station, gazed at the supporters in their orange suits, orange scarves, and orange hats, sometimes adorned with plastic replicas of clogs, or windmills, or great yellow cheeses, with an air of supreme indifference, like a bored Western tourist watching an interminable display of folk dancing in some Third World country. The orange men, almost all white, and many on the wrong side of thirty, danced jigs on the station square while breaking into snatches of the national anthem,
or an old children's song celebrating Dutch valor in the face of seventeenth-century Spanish rule.

Since national history has been more or less wiped off the Dutch history curriculum, many children would not know much, if anything, about the war of independence against the Spanish crown. Songs celebrating it are now as quaint as those clogs and windmills, sported as national badges on top of the supporters' hats, clichés of a legendary past, recycled for soccer matches and the tourist trade. They certainly hold no attraction for Abdelhakim.

But I was curious to know what he, as a teacher of the subject, made of Dutch history. So I asked him about his education in a small Calvinist town near Rotterdam, where his father had found work in a steel factory. Abdelhakim, a slim man in his twenties, looked at me askance, past his aquiline nose, a look that reminded me of radical Maoists or Trotskyists in my student days, arrogant and defensive at the same time. It was a look that said: All people who haven't seen the light are idiots, barely worth speaking to, but idiots are dangerous, so one has to be vigilant, and be prepared to combat idiocy at every turn.