One of those who continued to speak out in the vacuum left by Fortuyn was the filmmaker Theo van Gogh. As well as being friends, the two had appeared on television together many times, not least on van Gogh’s show ‘A Pleasant Conversation’, at the end of which the presenter would hand his guest a cactus. After Fortuyn’s murder van Gogh worked on a film about the murder and also continued to write books and articles. His 2003 book Allah weet het Beter (Allah Knows Best) included a cover image of van Gogh wearing a Muslim head-robe and staring out as a mimic of the fundamentalists of Islam.

In television appearances and public debates van Gogh took on the most outspoken Islamists in the Netherlands, including on one occasion the Hezbollah-trained extremist Dyab Abou Jahjah, who he described as ‘the pimp of the prophet’. After that event (which stopped when Jahjah refused to be on a stage with van Gogh) Jahjah’s retinue were heard saying, ‘We’ll get that fat pig and cut him open.’7 Around this time, at public events, including book-signings for Allah Knows Best, van Gogh started to become nervous for his own security. Then in 2004 he made a short film called Submission about the mistreatment of women within Islam. The script was written by a young Somali immigrant to the Netherlands, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and around the time that the film was screened on Dutch television at the end of August the threat to the film’s makers grew. Van Gogh refused to accept the security that was offered. It was his view, according to those closest to him, that any Islamist assassins would be unlikely to target ‘the village idiot’.8

Village idiot or not, an assassin did catch up with him as he cycled to work in Amsterdam on the morning of 2 November 2004. Mohammed Bouyeri shot van Gogh, slit his throat and stabbed him in the chest. In his dying moments van Gogh said to Bouyeri, ‘Can’t we talk about this?’ The knife stuck into van Gogh’s body included a threat to the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was immediately spirited out of the country by the Dutch security service, while a number of other Dutch critics of Islam, including the Iranian-born academic Afshin Ellian, were also put under police protection. For a period even the most careful critics of elements of Islam – like the Dutch academic Paul Cliteur – silenced themselves. Politicians, academics, journalists and others had learnt the tough lesson that criticising Islam, in the manner in which Dutch society was able to criticise every other religion, was at the very least something that changed your life and was also – unless you had police protection – likely to be deadly. The country that in the past had fostered religious doubt and produced rationalist thinkers like Spinoza, was now very anxious on the subject of religion.