George W. Bush was re-elected. Also on this date in 2004, Theo van Gogh was murdered--by Dutch/Moroccan jihadist Mohammed Bouyeri--while riding his bicycle to work.
Long a critic of radical Islam, van Gogh directed the film Submission Part 1 that was universally denounced by Dutch Muslims. In the film, a Muslim woman, with Qu'ranic verses scrawled on her body, discusses the physical and sexual abuse she's endured from Muslim males.
That was too much for Bouyeri.
From a November 16 Daniel Pipes column:
The presumed murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, 26, a Dutch-born dual Moroccan-Dutch citizen, left a five-page note in both Arabic and Dutch attached to Van Gogh's body with a knife. In it he threatened jihad against the West in general, ("I surely know that you, Oh Europe, will be destroyed"), and specifically against five prominent Dutch political figures.
Police investigators quickly realized that the assassin was an Islamist whom they knew well and had been following until just two weeks earlier; they also placed him in the "Hofstadgroep" network and charged him and six of his associates with "conspiracy with a terrorist intent." The authorities additionally asserted that these had possible connections to the Takfir wa'l-Hijra and Al Qaeda terrorist groups.
That a non-Muslim critic of Islam was ritually murdered for artistically expressing his views was something without precedent, not just in Holland but anywhere in the West. Dutch revulsion at the deed shook the deep complacency of what is perhaps the world's most tolerant society. The immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, one of the five persons threatened, publicly rued the country's having long ignored the presence of radical Islam. "For too long we have said we had a multicultural society and everyone would simply find each other. We were too naive in thinking people would exist in society together."
The Dutch understand.
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