"As the 10th anniversary drew near, some actors, writers and prominent cultural figures shied away from discussing it."

"One said he worried that his remarks would contribute to the divisions he is trying to transcend. Another declined to comment for fear that he would be exploited by right-wing populists who came to prominence after the murder but are no longer in government. Some were concerned that even the slightest criticism of Mr. van Gogh, who was famous for insulting everyone, would be seen as an apology for his killer and invite attacks from 'friends of Theo,' as his staunchest defenders are known.... Theodor Holman, a journalist and one of Mr. van Gogh’s best friends... argu[es] that fear of causing offense had stifled free speech here. 'Tolerance,' he said, 'has been transformed into cowardice.'"

From "Provocateur’s Death Haunts the Dutch," in the NYT.

"By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime..."

"... of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace."

Instapundit demands the resignation of Barack Obama. (He also quotes a portion of what I said in this post earlier today.)

I read that right after reading this piece in The New Yorker, by Andrew Marantz, analyzing the movie "The Innocence of Muslims."

The video is crude, both aesthetically and ideologically.... Some have compared its director... to Theo van Gogh, the Dutch provocateur who was murdered in retaliation for a short film he made. Van Gogh’s film was bad in many ways, but at least it strove for political and artistic merit....

You see where that's going. A commenter there — Gudmundsdottir — said it well:

I love the continued focus on this idiot as if he has ANYTHING to answer to. He is an American citizen, therefore he has the right to say much worse about "the prophet" Muhammad, "the son of god" Jesus Christ and any other "god" or "prohpet" that he wants to. The American media, predictably, is acting as if this man has something to answer for (or answer to). Good video or not, effective video or not, offensive video or not, untruthful video or not, this man has NOTHING to answer for. Anyone who claims otherwise is an enemy of America, because they are an enemy of the First Amendment (which is what makes America America). This man may have to face civil action from the actors or other participants in the film, but that is a side matter. The film in and of itself is not anything he owes anyone an explanation for.

This is similar to what we were talking about in my 8:55 a.m. post "The Invisible Man." Mark O said:

How is this not an assault on the First Amendment? Who cares how bad the movie was? Do any but the obsessed believe the movie is the reason for the killing? If it is, then so what? Our response should be to champion our freedom, not pander to the mob.

And I said:

If bad movies aren't protected:

1. The vast majority of movies are not protected.

2. The legal authorities will have to distinguish good from bad.

Imagine if you had to make a good movie or a well-written book to have the freedom to disseminate it. What power the critics would have! They could be expert witnesses at our blasphemy trials.

"90% of everything is crud," said Theodore Sturgeon. It's Sturgeon's Law... to which I humbly offer the Althouse Corollary:

If there's a crud exception to freedom, we are only 10% free.

Comedy Central cowers in the face of a murder threat/warning against "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

The NYT reports:

An episode of “South Park” that continued a story line involving the Prophet Muhammad was shown Wednesday night on Comedy Central with audio bleeps and image blocks reading “CENSORED” after a Muslim group warned the show’s creators they could face violence for depicting that holy Islamic prophet. Revolution Muslim, a group based in New York, wrote on its Web site that the “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker “will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh” for an episode shown last week in which a character said to be the Prophet Muhammad was seen wearing a bear costume. Mr. Van Gogh was slain in Amsterdam in 2004 after making a film that discussed the abuse of Muslim women in some Islamic societies.

A new episode of “South Park” on Wednesday night attempted to revisit this character, but with the name and depiction of the character blocked out. It was unclear how much of the bleeping was Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker’s decision. In a message posted on their Web site, SouthParkStudios.com, they wrote that they could not immediately stream the new episode on the site because:

After we delivered the show, and prior to broadcast, Comedy Central placed numerous additional audio bleeps throughout the episode. We do not have network approval to stream our original version of the show.

On Thursday morning, a spokesman for Comedy Central confirmed that the network had added more bleeps to the episode than were in the cut delivered by South Park Studios, and that it was not giving permission for the episode to run on the studio’s Web site.

Did Revolution Muslim truly threaten Stone and Parker or was it merely warning them? That is, were they indicating that they would commit and act of violence or were they only opining based on their prediction of what others, more extreme than they, would do? Revolution Muslim says it's just a warning:

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Younus Abdullah Muhammad, a member of Revolution Muslim, repeated the group’s assertion that the post was a prediction rather than a threat. He said that the post on the group’s blog “was intended in a principle that’s deeply rooted in the Islamic religion, which is called commanding the good and forbidding the evil,” tying the group’s complaints about “South Park” to larger frustrations about U.S. support for Israel and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They have freedom of speech too, so the question is whether it's a true threat.

ADDED: I have no end of respect for Stone and Parker. What brilliant artists! What political heroes!

"Holland was trying to be tolerant for the sake of consensus, but the consensus was empty."

Writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was the subject of a film and of a note pinned to the murdered body of the film's director, Theo Van Gogh.

“The immigrants’ culture was being preserved at the expense of their women and children and to the detriment of the immigrants’ integration into Holland.”...

Death threats have since driven Ms. Hirsi Ali to the United States....

This is a pity. As a politician, she focused Dutch minds on a subject they steadfastly ignored.

Here is her "brave, inspiring and beautifully written" memoir:

Poets for the unmourned dead... with a political agenda.

An Amsterdam project:

Frank Starik leads a group of Amsterdam poets engaged in a highly unusual civic project -- attending the funerals of the city's unmourned dead and remembering them at the graveside with a specially-composed poem.

It spares people the indignity of a funeral without mourners, says Starik, a gaunt figure in a black jacket with an air of the Romantic poet about him.

"I want to give them back a life, a history," he said.

Amsterdam social services bury some 250 people a year, about 15 of whom leave no trace of relatives or friends. In such cases, the poets are called in....

Starik acknowledges there is a political aspect to the work.

"Part of the hidden agenda of this is that we have a very right-wing government, who are against foreigners, Muslims, and who are trying to reconstruct a society we had 50 years ago."

"This is not such a nice, tolerant country any more."

For migrants or asylum-seekers who die alone, the funerals are a chance to give them back their humanity and to consider their individual hopes and experiences in a climate contriving to demonise them and view them as a single mass, Starik says.

Dutch society is still reeling from the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist militant in 2004 which provoked an anti-Muslim backlash.

The murder of anti-immigration populist Pim Fortuyn in 2002 also saw mainstream political parties move to occupy his ground.

So a depressed loner commits commits suicide and a friendless woman succumbs to old age, and you, you sensitive poet, show up to use their funerals as a political platform against the people who are outraged by the murder of Theo van Gogh?

"It's a medieval symbol, a symbol against women."

Says Dutch VP Geert Wilders explaining the criminalization of traditional Islamic dress:

The Dutch government will announce over the next few weeks whether it will make it a crime to wear traditional Islamic dress which covers the face apart from the eyes.

The Dutch parliament has already voted in favour of a proposal to ban the burqa outside the home, and some in the government have thrown their weight behind it....

"We don't want women to be ashamed to show who they are. Even if you have decided yourself to do that, you should not do it in Holland, because we want you to be integrated, assimilated into Dutch society. If people cannot see who you are, or see one inch of your body or your face, I believe this is not the way to integrate into our society."...

Mr Wilders' name was included on a list of "infidels, who deserved to be slaughtered", which was found pinned to the body of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.

Van Gogh was murdered two years ago for making the film about women and Islam called "Submission". It starts with a shot of a woman's face covered by a burqa. Slowly the camera shows that, from the neck downwards, she's naked but for a thin veil.

Mr Wilders has explicitly linked his wish for a burqa ban with terrorism.

"We have problems with a growing minority of Muslims who tend to have sympathy with the Islamo-fascistic concept of radical Islam," says Mr Wilders.

"That's also a reason why everybody should be identifiable when they walk on the street or go to a pub or go into a restaurant or whatsoever."

Mohammed Bouyeri has confessed to killing Theo van Gogh.

BBC reports:

Mohammed Bouyeri, 27, said he acted out of his religious beliefs and that he would do "exactly the same" if he were ever set free.

Prosecutors say Mr Bouyeri killed Mr Van Gogh in a ritualistic murder committed in the name of radical Islam.....

"I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion," he told the court in Amsterdam.

"I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do exactly the same, exactly the same," he added.

Purity! How dismal to fixate on one's own purity! How perverse to imagine that you could advance yourself in God's eyes by purifying yourself through killing someone you've judged impure. How can it never cross your mind that you might have made a mistake in your analysis, and why is it not horrible arrogance to proclaim that you are sure you know what God wants? What makes people think God wants purity, let alone to go on and imagine that a bloody stabbing is a pure thing?

Who's emigrating for political reasons?

The NYT reports on the large number of Dutch citizens who are eager to emigrate:

Many Dutch also seem bewildered that their country, run for decades on a cozy, political consensus, now seems so tense and prickly and bent on confrontation. Those leaving have been mostly lured by large English-speaking nations like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where they say they hope to feel less constricted.

In interviews, emigrants rarely cited a fear of militant Islam as their main reason for packing their bags. But the killing of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a fierce critic of fundamentalist Muslims, seems to have been a catalyst.

"Our Web site got 13,000 hits in the weeks after the van Gogh killing," said Frans Buysse, who runs an agency that handles paperwork for departing Dutch. "That's four times the normal rate."

Mr. van Gogh's killing is the only one the police have attributed to an Islamic militant, but since then they have reported finding death lists by local Islamic militants with the names of six prominent politicians. The effects still reverberate. In a recent opinion poll, 35 percent of the native Dutch questioned had negative views about Islam.

There are no precise figures on the numbers now leaving. But Canadian, Australian and New Zealand diplomats here said that while immigration papers were processed in their home capitals, embassy officials here had been swamped by inquiries in recent months.

One man who is leaving is quoted saying, "I'm a great optimist, but we're now caught in a downward spiral, economically and socially." The article notes that those who are leaving are affluent and successful: "urban professionals, managers, physiotherapists, computer specialists." There is also a lot of talk about the lack of "living space" in the country, and the antipathy toward nonnatives seems generic and not limited to violent factions. This is truly sad and frightening.