By Stryker McGuire
Newsweek International
Nov. 22 issue - What's wrong with this picture? The airspace over the city is declared off-limits to all unauthorized aircraft. Some 200 police, including rooftop snipers and antiterror forces in balaclavas(ski mask) and bulletproof armor, descend on a neighborhood near the main train station. At one house, three officers are wounded by a hurled grenade. After a 14-hour siege, assault teams arrest two suspects and charge them under antiterrorism laws. "We cannot let ourselves be blinded by people who seek to drag us into a spiral of violence," the prime minister tells a shaken nation.
So what's wrong? The city is The Hague, and the country is the Netherlands?famed for tidy bicycle lanes, a well-mannered citizenry and the court where Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for war crimes. "The International City of Peace," as The Hague styles itself...
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Enter van Gogh's accused killer. Bouyeri was a member of what's called the "one point five" generation: born in the Netherlands, but of Moroccan-born parents....
The same may be true of other Muslim "lost boys" who have been linked to Bouyeri since his arrest. According to reports in the Netherlands, some of the other young suspects arrested have links to the terror group Takfir wal Hijra. The group's alleged leader, Mohammed Achraf, who has been held in a Swiss prison since August, telephoned Bouyeri in September at his home in Amsterdam, according to Dutch intelligence. Spanish police believe Achraf is linked to a plot to bomb a Madrid court building.
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In Holland, the short-term response to van Gogh's murder and its aftermath will be tougher immigration policies, coupled with measures to encourage integration and assimilation. Already the Dutch Parliament has voted to shut down Muslim radio stations and Web sites. But it's an open question whether such steps will contain the damage or spread it.
The problem for the Netherlands, and Europe, is that issues of religion and immigration have become explosively conflated with terrorism. Three days after the van Gogh killing, Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Gerrit Zalm said, "We are declaring war" to "make radical Islamic movements disappear from the Netherlands."
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Dutch police, however, are no longer erring on the side of caution. Last week's 14-hour siege in The Hague yielded a personal phone book containing the name of Abdeladim Akouad, who is being held in Spain in connection with the 2003 Casablanca suicide bombings that killed 45 people. With police combing the country and dozens of suspects of all sorts being paraded into Dutch jails, the Netherlands is re-examining much more than its ethnic mix. "We must ask ourselves if we have not been naive over the past few years?ask ourselves if we have not for so long agreed to take in anybody [as immigrants]," said Dutch Justice Minister Rita Verdonk last week. "We Dutch are easy prey," says Jon Wolter Wabeke, a senior judge in Amsterdam. "We're vulnerable because we're a soft, tolerant society."
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