Madness in Holland

THE ASSASSINATION last week of the Dutch filmmaker and writer Theo van Gogh was a repulsive crime. But the murder represents more than a garish incident on Amsterdam's police blotter. The Moroccan immigrant suspected of shooting and stabbing the grandson of Vincent van Gogh's brother also slashed at the tapestry of a tolerant society.

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While Dutch investigators pursue leads that appear to connect the captured suspect to Islamist terrorists in Spain and elsewhere, the slaying of van Gogh, who recently made a film decrying the abuse of Muslim women, has left the Netherlands shaken. A shameful succession of retaliatory fires and bombings at mosques and Islamic centers suggests that just below the surface of Holland's open society runs the molten lava of xenophobic intolerance.

The mayor in the town of Eindhoven, where a bomb exploded in a Muslim primary school Monday, gave voice to a sage and exemplary common sense when he reacted by saying: "It is essential that we stick together. One single person who carried out such an idiotic act should not be allowed to affect Dutch society."

Nevertheless, there are all-too-familiar consequences of the anger that the murder of van Gogh has provoked. Surveys show a sharp rise in approval for right-wing politicians who preach the need to cut back on immigration from Morocco and Turkey, the countries from which most of the Muslims in Holland emigrated. One poll indicated that 47 percent of the Dutch feel less tolerant of the Muslims living among them since van Gogh was killed.

This syndrome -- fear of a few violent extremists being transferred to the 1 million Muslims in Holland who are overwhelmingly peaceful -- has a sorrowful history. It marks the recurrence of a fascistic will to play upon the insecurities of a people reputed to be among the most liberal and tolerant in Europe.

As in the past, racists and nationalists are appealing to the most primitive reflex of their own group: fear of the mysterious other. This pattern of anti-immigrant rabble-rousers manipulating anxieties about North African or Turkish communities is being replicated in nearly all the countries of Western Europe. It threatens to reawaken the dormant beast of European authoritarianism.

It will be all the more difficult for the Dutch to cope with the fallout from the van Gogh killing because the five-page letter that the killer left on the victim's chest, pierced by a knife, amounted to an Islamist version of the madness that nearly destroyed Europe in the last century. Political movements that start out by murdering artists and free thinkers have it in them to murder millions.