Word: vans
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...When maverick politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, the Dutch were relieved that his murderer turned out to be a radical white vegan from the small town of Harderwijk. Like Van Gogh, Fortuyn was critical of Islam - he called it a "backward culture" and demanded that immigrants assimilate into Dutch society - and many people feared his killing was the first salvo in the country's own culture war. But that battle may have finally begun with Van Gogh's murder, allegedly carried out by a Dutch-Moroccan, 26, who is being referred to in the media as Mohammed...
...Van Gogh, a great-grandnephew of the artist Vincent van Gogh, had just finished a film about Fortuyn when he was murdered. Amsterdam's public prosecutor says Mohammed B. shot Van Gogh as he cycled to his studio, then slit his throat and impaled a five-page letter to his body with a knife. The act was apparently in retaliation for Van Gogh's film Submission, a graphic look at abused Muslim women that was broadcast on Dutch television in August. Calling Van Gogh's murder part of a wider terrorist plot, the prosecutor's office arrested five men - four...
...death of his mother two years ago. Though he initially sought to fit into Dutch culture, he may have faced the same dilemma as other young Dutch Muslims, caught between their parents' old Islamic ways and an unaccepting modern Dutch society. "They're living between two different worlds," says Van Houcke. "They can feel in 1,001 ways that we consider them lower than us." Driven by economics as well as culture, the conflict between well-off native Dutch and poorer Muslim immigrants has simmered for about five years, says Dutch professor Maurits Berger. There is "fear and suspicion that...
...People like the 135 kg, chain-smoking Van Gogh could make that difficult. Always a provocateur, he had taken verbal swipes at virtually every Dutch minority. Three cases had been brought against him for slurs against Muslims and Jews; he was convicted of anti-Semitism in 1990, attacked Catholics in his spare time, and routinely referred to Muslims with an unpublishable epithet. Wilders, now under police protection, defends him. "Van Gogh was provocative, but in a democracy you fight words with words, not bullets," he says...
...Van Gogh was reviled by many of the country's nearly 1 million Muslims, who comprise about 6% of its population. "It's increasingly less pleasant for Muslims in the Netherlands," says Driss El Boujoufi, deputy chairman of the Union of Moroccan Mosque Organizations. "Society is becoming more divisive...