Killing fuels Dutch clash of cultures

UDEN, Netherlands -- They had gathered for prayers at a mosque on the final night of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan when someone shouted, ''Fire at the school!"

The community of devout Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in this town south of Amsterdam rushed to Bedir Islamic Elementary School as flames lit up the sky.

Among them was Emine Altun, 32, who stood shivering as the school that taught 120 children, including her two boys, was gutted in less than an hour on Nov. 9.

Scrawled in white spray paint were the initials of the hate group known as White Power.

''We could only cry," Altun said.

The attack was among the spate of bombings, fires, and vandalism at more than 20 mosques and Islamic schools and organizations in the bitter, violent atmosphere that has erupted after the Nov. 2 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a suspected Islamic extremist. Several Protestant churches also have been attacked in a spiral of revenge.

The tumult of the past two weeks has jolted the Netherlands, long synonymous with tolerance and modern, secular values. Famous for its orderly bicycle lanes and its open society in which prostitution and cannabis are legal, and as home to the seat of international law in The Hague, the country has been transformed into a cultural battlefield.

Headlines around the world have trumpeted van Gogh's killing and the wave of violence as a clash of civilizations -- Islam vs. the West. But political scientists and religious scholars say they see it more specifically as the opening of a direct conflict between a fiery Islamic fundamentalist movement rooted in a disenfranchised Muslim immigrant community and a strident secular fundamentalism that is increasingly intolerant of any religious expression.

Van Gogh was attacked on a crowded street in Amsterdam while riding his bicycle to work. He was shot eight times and stabbed, and his throat was slit.

A note was left on his chest, allegedly by his suspected killer, a second-generation Moroccan with Dutch citizenship who police say was involved in a militant Islamic cell. According to authorities, Mohammed Bouyeri, 26, who was arrested shortly after the killing, said in the note that van Gogh was killed for insulting the prophet Mohammed and all Muslims.

The films of van Gogh, a great-grandnephew of painter Vincent van Gogh, were marked by insults of Islam and Muslims.

In a recent documentary titled ''Submission," van Gogh cast a harsh eye on the role of women in Islam. It was seen as a crass attack and blasphemy of Islam by Islamic extremists as well as those in the established, moderate Muslim community in the Netherlands.

The spot where van Gogh was slain has become a makeshift shrine, attracting a mountain of flowers and notes. One note read: ''Down with Allah, God, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Long live Theo!"

That sentiment percolates on talk radio and television news shows that have boiled over with discussion of van Gogh's killing.

The Netherlands has 16 million people, including 1 million Muslims mostly from Turkey and Morocco. By many accounts, the country has mishandled immigration policy, failing to integrate newly arrived Muslim citizens and even second-generation citizens, into its society. Critics of government policies say, for example, that it erred with a well-intentioned but flawed approach to education that permitted religiously funded schools, isolating Arab speakers from the mainstream population and feeding on discontent and joblessness in the immigrant Muslim community.

Jean Tillie, director of immigrant and ethnic studies at the University of Amsterdam, said: ''Policies aimed at helping integration actually caused isolation. Radicalization took place in the isolation. And as the isolation grew, radicalization grew."

Even before the recent violence, anti-immigration politicians, most notably Pim Fortuyn, who campaigned for Parliament on a platform that ''Holland Is Full," have been wildly successful. When Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002 by a radical environmentalist, those who opposed immigration felt their voice was silenced and the resulting resentment divided the country.

Bouyeri, the suspect in van Gogh's killing, was born a Dutch citizen to Moroccan parents and came of age in this isolation in West Amsterdam. The area is lined with storefront mosques, halal butcher shops, teahouses, and nondescript apartment blocks.

Haci Karacer, director of a West Amsterdam community organization known as Islamic Vision,' which seeks to help immigrants preserve their religion, said, ''In the Netherlands and all over Europe, there is no culture for Islam to take root in."

''Mohammed Bouyeri is an example of what can happen in this fragmented and rootless Islam," Karacer said.

''He was isolated and he was searching and he was angry, and there are Islamic militant groups that look to recruit young men like him," he said, adding that such groups appeal to men with an information technology background, like that of Bouyeri, through websites. ''On these sites there is a very black-and-white view of Islam. Either you are a Muslim, or not. Either you are with jihad, or not," Karacer said.

Bouyeri bought into the mindset, according to dozens of messages he posted on several militant Islamic websites and in a community newspaper in the months before the attack. Authorities say he called for jihad against Europeans and Americans.

Dutch media reports linked him to several Islamic militants who have been arrested in Europe, including two suspects allegedly involved in a plot to carry out a terrorist attack in June at the Euro 2004 soccer match in Portugal. They were arrested in a car registered to Bouyeri.

Ahmed Larouz, 36, a community activist in West Amsterdam, came with his parents from Morocco at age 18 and founded a consultancy company. He said he struggles to deal with the anger among young Moroccans.

He said the immigrant population is young, with more than 60 percent under 23, and unemployment runs close to 40 percent in many areas. ''Anger and despair is great," he said.

Van Gogh's attacks on Islam heightened that anger, Larouz and others say. Consistently on radio and television, the filmmaker had disparaged Muslims and described Islam as ''garbage."

''From the perspective of our community, when a Muslim cleric called homosexuality a sin or spoke out against gay marriage, he was taken to court and sued and condemned by the government," Larouz said. ''But when van Gogh said these hateful things, he was defended for his right to freedom of speech. That . . . double standard fueled even more anger."

In The Hague last week, more than 200 police, including snipers and counterterrorism forces in Kevlar vests and balaclavas, raided a neighborhood of suspected Islamic militants, as the government seeks to confront what it fears is a nest of ''sleeper cells."

During the 12-hour siege, three officers were wounded by a hand grenade. Two suspects were arrested and charged under counterterror laws for inciting jihad.

Police have warned Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen, a Jewish leader of a left-leaning coalition government who led the campaign for Amsterdam to become the first city in the world to recognize gay marriage, that he is considered a target of assassination by Islamic militants, information presumably yielded through raids and more than a dozen arrests in the past two weeks.

For Cohen, the saddest part of what has transpired this month is the damage to the image of a city and a country that has carefully and determinedly built a reputation for tolerance, peace, and justice. ''I don't think this is a failure of government," he said. ''It is an international phenomenon, an Islamic militancy taking root in Europe through the Internet, and we need to be very vigilant about it."

But he added: ''If we are going to get back to who we are, to restore our identity, then what we need to do is be very intolerant to those who are intolerant."

Globe correspondent Carla Sapsford contributed to this report.