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The shock of terrorism came to Dutch society, not in the form of an explosion as was experienced in Madrid or London, but in a single, chilling murder.
The killer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent, a Muslim who had recently embraced a radical version of his faith. Van Gogh, his target, was a man who did not shy away from controversy. He had received death threats before, a result of his writings, and, in particular for a film called Submission, a fictional story of Islam's treatment of women, a film notorious for its images of text from the Qur'an painted on naked female bodies.
Bouyeri was sentenced to life in prison for the murder. The court called the killing a terrorist act. In the courtroom, Bouyeri addressed Anneke Van Gogh, Theo Van Gogh's mother: "I want you to know that I acted out of conviction and not that I took his life because he was Dutch or because I was Moroccan and felt insulted. I acted out of faith. And I made it clear that if it had been my own father, or my little brother, I would have done the same thing…if I were ever released I would do exactly the same…".
The murder of Theo Van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri offers some grim comparisons for the North American experience. Bouyeri was a Dutch citizen, had spent most of his life there, was involved in the local community. He is an educated man who was raised in the Muslim faith, but led a largely secular life until his early 20s.
In 2003, Bouyeri was immersed in the Hofstad Group (Hofstad is the Dutch word for The Hague, where many of its members lived). The AIVD report studied the threat of Islamist terrorism in The Netherlands, from its emergence as Al-Qaeda-driven movement to a grassroots process of radicalization and jihad that builds its support and finds its recruits on the internet. Ruud Peters: "If I look at the Hofstad group, what happened there is Bouyeri, I think he was the one who took the initiative and who had gathered around him a couple of friends from his neighbourhood and they started to recruit on the Internet."
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