Excerpt:

"There will be no mercy" said a document that the killer had
held over van Gogh's chest before skewering it there with a
final knife blow to his heart.

By then van Gogh, 47, had been shot several times and was
seen by one witness on his knees, pleading with his assailant,
"Don't do it ... we can still talk about it."

The response was a knife to the throat. The killer sawed
through the neck and spinal column, almost to the point of
decapitating him.




The London Times
November 7, 2004

Jihad wrecks Dutch race harmony

By Matthew Campbell

When Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, collected his post from the
letterbox on Wednesday he got an unpleasant surprise. Among the bills
and junk mail was a letter addressing him as "ugly dog". It told him
he would soon be beheaded.

It was an unnerving way to start the day. Only 24 hours earlier Theo
van Gogh, the film maker who had often criticised radical Muslims, had
been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and
then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of a
slaughterhouse worker.

Now other people were being targeted, too, as evidence emerged of a
"brigade" of Dutch jihadists preparing to murder "the enemies of
Islam" in a terror campaign that would be easier to carry out than the
bombing of trains or heavily guarded government buildings.

"Do not think you are safe," said the letter to Wilders, who had been
planning to set up a party to help to tackle the "Islamic problem" in
Holland, "because we will catch you and cut off your ugly head."

He was not the only one to be threatened. "There will be no mercy"
said a document that the killer had held over van Gogh's chest before
skewering it there with a final knife blow to his heart.

By then van Gogh, 47, had been shot several times and was seen by one
witness on his knees, pleading with his assailant, "Don't do it ... we
can still talk about it."

The response was a knife to the throat. The killer sawed through the
neck and spinal column, almost to the point of decapitating him.

Wilders has been taken into protective police custody along with Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, a liberal MP of Somali origin who also appeared on the
list. Her offence was to call herself an ex-Muslim and jointly to
produce with van Gogh a film about the Islamic oppression of women.

The Dutch are not alone in their worries. All over Europe media
pundits, entertainers and politicians are forced to ponder the
chilling possibility that cross-border co-operation among closely
connected jihad cells might mean that they, too, were threatened by
the new terror.

For some Dutch officials it was evidence of a social experiment gone
horribly wrong. "We were naive in thinking people would exist in
society together," said Rita Verdonk, the immigration and integration
minister whose name also appears on the death list.

She added that Moroccan immigrants "have never learnt about Dutch
values", despite efforts to train them to respect the country's mores.

It is hardly surprising. Many of Holland's one million Muslims
consider the Dutch government to be depraved in its acceptance of
"abominations" such as drugs, prostitution and gay marriage. They want
nothing to do with it.

At the same time, Dutch tolerance no longer extends so readily these
days to immigration and religious diversity. In graffiti scrawled on
walls all over the city, the message is seen repeatedly, "Go home if
you don't like it".

That was what Ahmed Aboutaleb, the Muslim deputy mayor of Amsterdam,
would tell them when he was invited to talk to Muslim groups -- and it
was enough to get his name put on the hit list as well.

Also named was Job Cohen, the mayor. Then a newspaper received a
telephone call in heavily accented Dutch adding the name of Frits
Barend, a television chat show host, to the list.

The day would come, said the note found on van Gogh's body, when
"hair-raising screams will be squeezed from the lungs of the
non-believers -- the sword will be lifted against them". Enough to
give pause to anybody thinking of having a poke at an imam. Free
speech itself seemed to be under assault.

"Democracy is threatened," said Hein Donner, the justice minister, who
was horrified to learn from investigators that nine other people had
been arrested as well as the killer and were suspected of being part
of what one official called a "brigade of Islamic martyrs" preparing
to slit the throats of critics.

Tensions rose. Shouting matches erupted between Moroccans and Dutch
people at the scene of van Gogh's killing where well-wishers left a
carpet of flowers and handwritten notes, some of them angrily calling
for more control on radical Muslims.

At one point a car filled with dark-skinned young men pulled up
alongside the shrine. The windows came down to the sound of blaring
Arab music and whoops of delight from the passengers. Dutch men paying
their respects to van Gogh, a grandson of the famous artist's brother,
yelled at them to move on.

The killer, who the police referred to only as "Mohammed B", attended
the Al Tawheed mosque, considered a hotbed of radicalism. Its imam
refers to Christians and Jews as "kindling for hell fire" and says
homosexuals should be thrown off tall buildings, preferably head
first.

The killer had also befriended Samir Azzouz, an internationally
connected "holy warrior" accused of planning to blow up, among other
targets, Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. They stayed at a string of
addresses together, watching "jihad movies", investigators said.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1347473_2,00.html

From the secular lemmings it will be more like: "Don't you know that