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He appeared as an expert witness at the trial of Mohammed Bouyeri, a member of the Hofstad Network, a radical Islamist organization, who murdered writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh on November 2, 2004.
Linden MacIntyre: WHAT WAS IT THAT TURNED MOHAMED BOUYERI INTO A KILLER?
Rudd Peters: Well, that's very difficult because we don't know how the last transition from being an extremist to being a murderer went about. That's very much psychological. But we can trace the way he became radicalized to more extreme Islam. He was the son of a Moroccan migrant. Went through the Dutch educational system, secondary school, one year of professional college where he dropped out at a certain moment.
And from his personal history we know that there were three things that triggered him, as it were, on the radical path. One thing was that he was in prison for some violence. He was involved with the police and he was put in prison for a couple of months and afterwards he said that's when I started to read the Koran seriously.
The second thing is the death of his mother, which destabilized him mentally, as it were, and he became searching for the meaning of life. And the third thing is that he was involved in all kind of project for Moroccan youth in the quarter where he lived and he tried to get government help, government support, financial support, etc. but all his plans were turned down in the end. So that gave him a kind of grudge against the Dutch system.
Linden MacIntyre: AND WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE PROCESS OF INTELLECTUALIZING THAT LEADS THEM INTO THIS VERY TRICKY AREA?
Rudd Peters: Well, there is, let us say, So they want to go back to Islam and they want to have their own Islam, a kind of universal pure Islam.
And the other factor is they want to take distance from their parents whom they, on the one hand, of course, they have affection for their parents, but on the other hand they see them as losers. They came here. They always served and groveled for the Dutch and were not well rewarded and they don't have any social position, etc.
They had some idea about Islam; they wanted to talk about Islam. And then they met this Syrian priest, I would say priest, but preacher….I think he was in the army. He was an engineer but he had studied the ideas of the founding fathers of Islamic radicalism. So he organized a house to use it for meetings with these guys, also with other groups where he familiarized them with the ideas of Syde Qutb and Maldudi. So he gave them the basic ideas and I think, in that way he put them on the rails.
You can reconstruct it from the writings and the things that I found on their computers are that you find a number of documents that have been used for schooling. So they are Koranic verses around a certain theme and they must have been used for discussion and etc. And then that was I think the last document I found was by the end of 2003.
And I think from that moment, he continued on the rails by himself. Or not really by himself but he went to the Internet. He knew the sites. He knew the ideas to look for and that's how he collected a number of documents, quite a number of documents. And he didn't know enough Arabic so he collected English documents, which he started to translate into Dutch in order to give it to his – the other members of the group. I think they talked about grievances against Dutch society etc.
It all fitted in the whole picture. And then they came up with all kinds of apocalyptic ideas even. He describes the result. He says, Muslims will come to the centre of the Dutch government and they'll turn the whole of Parliament into a Sharia court and things like that. I mean totally unrealistic.
Linden MacIntyre: SO YOU'RE DESCRIBING, I SUPPOSE FOR LACK OF A BETTER PHRASE, CUT-AND-PASTE KIND OF INTERNET SEARCHING PROCESS WHEREBY THEY LEGITIMIZE A LOT OF STRANGE THOUGHTS IN THEIR OWN MIND.
So at a certain stage, it was a late stage – that was about let's say a couple of months before the murder of Van Gogh, I think they started to talk about – well no – it must be. They started to talk about violent actions. If you look at the Koran you can find all kinds of quotations say about belief, etc. No mention of that. They stuck to these ideas of the Sharia, that they were bound to the laws of the land. And what they started to do is finding reasons to attack individual Dutch like Van Gogh, either for insulting the prophet or for apostasy and – or for being like the Amsterdam alderman, Abu Talib, for not being a good Muslim or an apostate or whatever.
And they found text, fatwahs, on the Internet which they could apply to that situation and to find them busy with that. So they were preparing violent actions, but as it were, within the framework of the Sharia as they perceived it and not by going back directly to the Koran.
There's a war going on between United States, the West, and Israel
against Islam. The Dutch government have decided to aid – to come
to the aid of the Americans and the Israelis. Dutch government has been
elected democratically; therefore the whole population is guilty so we
have a justification to attack the whole Dutch population.
At that time he was still working from this youth centre in, in his neighborhood. He worked as a kind of – as an assistance manager. And he refused, for instance, to buy alcoholic drinks. He said, well someone else should do it. He refused to organize certain meetings and parties where men and women would mingle. And he was attacked for it but he could write and he wrote letters about that in the local bulletin.
And then about – in October of that year, 2003, you find a global rejection of let's say democracy, rule of law, the rule – as he called the rule of humans by humans. Well we have to – we only can accept the rule of God over us. And all systems of government that are based on the rule of government of human beings over human beings are wrong and are against Islam.
Rudd Peters: No, no, certainly not, no. I think there are a number of factors that could point them in the same direction. One is the feeling of exclusion in society. They feel discriminated. Whether that is justified or not I'm not to judge but they feel it, these groups. Difficult to get jobs, etc.
The other thing is their difference – their differences in international politics with the politics of Canada and Holland, England. The support of our countries for the Americans in Iraq and in Afghanistan and the support for Israeli politics is very badly seen. And they perceive a kind of cosmic struggle between the West and Islam.
And when the country you live in supports the wrong side I think you feel justified in doing something. I think both reasons are quite important. And then – and then that's the matter of opportunity if you look at from the criminal point of view, of the motive and the opportunity.
Linden MacIntyre: HOW BIG A PROBLEM IS IT IN A GENERAL WAY, THIS NOTION THAT YOUNG PEOPLE WILL START FROM NOTHING AND BECOME SOMETHING. I MEAN FROM A SECURITY POINT OF VIEW THAT HAS TO BE A MAJOR CHALLENGE.
Rudd Peters: It is. And it's recognized of course by
the Dutch security service. But the people I talk to, I know a couple of
people who deal with Islamic groups of course and, well, many of them say
that the present debate in Holland on Islam which is very Islamophobe and
anti-Islamic is considered to be a very high security risk because that
excludes these groups – second
generation, third generation of migrants from Dutch society. Their perception
of the problem is that it's home grown.
They're self-burners
as they call them, I think. And the main cause for that is the fact that
Dutch society or Dutch debate, Dutch politics, does not have inclusive
view of Muslims and they tend to set Muslims and Islam apart from Dutch
society.
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