Forbes

Can Liberal Democracies Triumph Over Islamic Extremism?

Abigail R. Esman, 08.05.10, 12:20 PM ET

The following is adapted from Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West by Abigail R. Esman Praeger Security International (2010).


On the morning of January 17, 2005, I received an e-mail with the following subject line: "The Next Victim?" and a link to a conversation on a Web board about the latest art scandal in the Netherlands: an exhibition of cartoon-like paintings by Rachid Ben Ali, a Moroccan-born Dutch artist, that included images of what seemed to be a Muslim cleric either, as it were, eating shit or speaking it. The phrase "next victim" referred to the murder of another artist, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had been slaughtered two months earlier by a Muslim extremist angered by a film Van Gogh had made about the abuse of Muslim women. The question of the day was, of course, whether Ali would be the next target of a Muslim extremist killing, or whether this was harmless enough that it wouldn't really matter.

There was a time, not long ago at all, when "the next Van Gogh" was a phrase used to describe an up-and-coming Dutch artist, when wondering who the next Van Gogh would be was about hoping that, in the meager pickings of the Dutch art scene, someone would emerge of international quality and capture the imaginations of the world.

But when Theo van Gogh was shot twenty times by a jihadist, his body stabbed, and his throat slashed open, the phrase gained a whole new meaning.

In the United States, it was Election Day when Theo van Gogh was murdered--the day when the country would choose either to keep in office the man who had sworn to fight Islamic extremism and oppression by spreading democracy across the Muslim world, or to be rid of him. What no one realized was that even before the polls had opened, whether George W. Bush won the election that day or not, that morning on the streets of Amsterdam, democracy had already lost.

I moved to Amsterdam from New York City because of the canals, because the streets were laid out in a plan that made it difficult to get lost, because you could see time move with the clouds across the sky, so real, so there, you thought maybe you could touch it, and if you could touch it, maybe even hold it still. I moved to Amsterdam because, in some ways, time there always had held still.

It was summer when I first visited, one of the rare summers when the air is actually hot, and the sun on the canals so bright that the reflections of windows in the water sting your eyes, and the ducks clamor joyously until late into the night because it doesn't get dark until nearly midnight and the entire city--de gehele stad--is out on café terraces, or on chairs dragged out to the sidewalk from living rooms, drinking Grolsch and jenever and laughing loud enough to be heard in third-floor apartments, if anyone were home to hear them, which, mostly, they are not. It was the summer before the crash of '89, when everyone was buying art and whoever didn't paint or sculpt had a gallery and traveled country to country, art fair to art fair, buying one another's goods and selling them again. Roy Lichtenstein and Jerry Garcia and Michael Jackson all were still alive. Answering machines were just coming into the market in Holland, and only the coolest people had them. Dallas reruns played nightly on TV. At the jazz clubs on the Leidsedwarsstraat, Hans and Candy Dulfer played the saxophone; and in the United States, Ronald Reagan was still the president, and in Berlin, the wall still stood immobile, we thought then, impenetrable, in place.

The other Van Gogh was in the news that summer, with a celebration being planned for 1990 to mark the hundredth anniversary of (of all things) his death. The man charged with organizing it all--from concerts of specially-commissioned symphonies to the launching of a new Van Gogh perfume--took me to lunch at the Amstel Hotel, the most impressive--and expensive--spot in town. He told me about the Van Gogh project. He told me about his own art collection and invited me to visit his home outside of Amsterdam to see it. He told me that the Dutch had an expression he held dear: vrijheid, blijheid. It means, he told me, "freedom is happiness."

I decided I was coming here to live.


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Radical State is, in part, the story of how Holland lost that freedom and that happiness to the terrors of jihad. In tracing the events of the fifteen years from 1989, when fireworks celebrated the life and the achievements of Vincent van Gogh, to 2004, when the artist's great-grand nephew was slaughtered in the street and plans were made to kill the writer of his film, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, amidst the fireworks of New Year's Eve (so the gunshots would not be heard), this book paints a portrait of a thriving democratic nation and the forces that threaten to bring about its demise. It is about a transition in culture from the celebrations of the art of one Van Gogh to the death caused by the art of the other. And in that moment, vrijheid ended in the Netherlands: for not only was Theo van Gogh killed for his embrace of the principle of free speech, but in the aftermath of the killing, laws began to change. National IDs became mandatory for the first time since the German occupation. The Parliament debated house arrests for people suspected, but not convicted, of ties to Muslim extremist groups. The integration minister proposed a ban on all languages but Dutch, not only in businesses and schools, but also on the streets. The Arab European League, comprised of political hopefuls aiming to introduce sharia law to the Dutch system, announced plans for candidates to run in the next parliamentary elections--this when radical Islam smolders and flames among Dutch Muslim youth and Muslims are expected to become the majority population in the Netherlands within the next ten to fifteen years. So concerned are Dutch natives now about the radicalization of Muslims here that they have placed support behind any politician willing to crack down on immigrants and Islam, even knowing that such politicians are equally opposed to many of Holland's most proud traditions: welfare, for instance, or subsidies for the arts. So dramatic has the change, in fact, become, that in June, 2005, Filip de Winter, one of Europe's most extreme-right political leaders, declared the Netherlands "the model country for conservatives and the far-right."

And so the question Radical State raises--and explores--is in fact a very basic one: Who is really winning here: Democracy--or Jihad?

Why does this matter?

It matters because, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report, Europe hosts some 15-20 million Muslim immigrants and their descendants, and they are radicalizing at an alarming rate. The children of immigrants, born on European soil, are eligible for visa-free travel into the United States--this, while bin Laden, the report states, "has outsourced planning for the next spectacular attack on the United States to an ‘external planning' node. Chances are it is based in Europe and will deploy European citizens." Moreover, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, "There is good reason for thinking…that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe... Many Europeans assert that the American melting pot cannot be transported to European soil. Identity there remains rooted in blood, soil, and ancient shared memory. This may be true, but if so, democracy in Europe will be in big trouble in the future as Muslims become an ever larger percentage of the population. And since Europe is today one of main battlegrounds of the war on terrorism, this reality will matter for the rest of us as well."

And it matters, too, because Holland is not the only one: America, Canada, England, Germany, and France all wrestle with similar dilemmas, from the creation of the USA Patriot Act to the banning of headscarves in France and the possible official introduction of sharia law in Canada and the United Kingdom. Indeed, some warn that lack of assimilation by Muslims in America--and incidents like the "Virginia Jihad" and Washington sniper cases--may be making the United States vulnerable to its own brand of home-grown Islamic terrorism. It matters because throughout history, Holland has been a bellwether for socio-political change worldwide, from being among the first European countries to accept and integrate the Jews as early as the 17th century to legalizing marijuana, gay marriage, and euthanasia in the 20th. It matters because, in the words of England's former Home Minister, Mike O'Brien, multiculturalism--the social fabric that holds America and most Western societies together--has become, in many ways, "an excuse for moral blindness."

But most of all, it matters because America's war on terrorism is not just America's war, but a world war; and it is not just a war against terrorism; it is a war for freedom. It is not just about spreading what we have to places that don't have it; it's about merely keeping it alive at all.

And it matters for other reasons. It matters because, before it collapsed, Holland's brand of democracy was possibly the most-admired (and certainly the most liberal) of them all. And yet, as the Dutch grow more restrictive in their policies, recruits for Islamic jihad there increase, leaving us with the critical dilemma: if tolerance allowed extremism to rise in the first place, and intolerance is causing it to spread, what is the solution?

Holland is not the only example of the clash between democracy and Islam in the West, but it has been the most dramatic one. As David Rieff wrote when describing Euro-Muslim alienation in the New York Times Magazine, 2 the "eclipse" of the "multicultural fantasy in Europe can be seen most poignantly in Holland, that most self-defined liberal of all European countries." By understanding what the country was--in all its strengths and in the weaknesses that made it fall--we can not only keep democracy safe in the West; we can make it better.


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Radical State chronicles the nearly two decades of my life in the Netherlands, incorporating people, places, and reflections on events, both personal and public. Dutch history, at times, occasionally also plays a part in order to provide a comprehensive vision of the cultural foundations that led to the current situation. Further, I have occasionally drawn parallels where possible with American culture, noting global highlights of the times to lend a further sense of atmosphere and place.

However, the years since 2001 form the emphasis of the book, focusing on the rising conflict between Western and Muslim cultures. The disclosure of extremist groups, of domestic violence, and even of honor killings in Dutch-Muslim families, has forced powerful changes in the Dutch--and consequently, to some extent, Euro-American--understanding of Islam as it is often practiced within democratic society. And in Holland, perhaps more than in any other Western country, that "clash of civilizations" has reached a point some believe to be insurmountable.

Through narrative, analysis, and portraits, I have tried to elucidate the struggle between those who seek to Islamize Dutch culture, and those who will do whatever necessary--including compromising democracy--to preserve it. Ultimately, Radical State champions the idea of a supportive, secularized, Enlightenment ideal as it chronicles the rise and fall of a free democracy in a clarion call to America.

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