Holland The First to Wake Up?

Mona Charen has a good column on the van Gogh slaying in Holland.

excerpt:

The bullets did not kill van Gogh. He survived long enough to stagger toward his office and plead with his attacker not to kill him -- just as Nick Berg, Margaret Hassan, Kenneth Bigley and countless others pleaded with their murderers. But the killer, a Moroccan/Dutch jihadist who reportedly converted to radical Islam after Sept. 11, 2001, pulled out a long knife and methodically slit the throat of the 47-year-old van Gogh. He then withdrew a lengthy manifesto from his pocket used the bloody knife to impale it on the chest of the filmmaker.

The letter is a screed of terrific savagery, written partly in quite conversational Dutch and part in Arabic. Much of the vitriol is aimed at Hirsi Ali -- a Dutch member of parliament of Somali birth who has renounced Islam and had helped van Gogh to make a film, " Submission," that unveiled the abuse many Muslim women silently endure.

"There will come a day," declares the threat letter, "when one soul will not be able to help another soul. A day of horrible tortures and painful tribulations which will go together with the terrible cries being pressed out of the lungs of the unjust. Cries, Mrs. Hirsi Ali, which will cause chills to run up someone's spine, and cause the hair on their head to stand straight up. ... Hair-raising screams will be squeezed from the lungs of the non-believers."

Later the letter warns: "I surely know that you, O America, will be destroyed. I surely know that you, O Europe, will be destroyed. I surely know that you, O Holland, will be destroyed."

The response of the editorial board of The New York Times reveals why Western civilization is imperiled. "Urgent efforts are needed to better manage the cultural tensions perilously close to the surface of Dutch public life," intoned the Times. "The problem is not Muslim immigration, but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society. One very real danger is that the public trauma over the van Gogh murder may lead to a clamor for anti-Muslim policies that could victimize thousands of innocent refugees and immigrants."

Right. The problem is not a murderous, totalitarian religious ideology bent on domination of any society with which it comes into contact (just ask the Sudanese Christians, the Israeli Jews or the Hindu Indians), rather it is the Western world's lack of "diversity." Good Lord, where are these people's brains?

The article goes on to note that public opinion in Holland might be starting to turn away from the multiculti group hug ideology that is killing the West.