Here we go again. Socialist Worker's take on the murder of Theo van Gogh:

The murder of Theo van Gogh follows the murder of Pim Fortuyn, a right wing politician admired by van Gogh, in 2002.

Part of the reason for these killings is that the perpetrators feel there is no viable alternative in this racist climate.

It is no surprise that some individuals are pulled towards desperate acts.

(via Harry's Place.)

Anthony Browne has a more reasoned analysis in a superb piece in the Spectator:

...[T]he Left in the Netherlands has seen that there is a clash between liberal democracy and cultural relativism; that some cultures are simply not compatible with Western traditions of freedom and tolerance; and that the old distinction between evil right-wingers and cuddly left-wingers no longer makes sense. It is one thing to turn a Christian church into a mosque, quite another to get radical Islam to accept liberal democracy. Outside the Netherlands, however, the Left has yet to learn these lessons.

Van Gogh himself was a child of the Left. He did not discriminate when he decided whom to offend. He had deeply upset Christian and Jewish groups, who made written complaints about him. His mistake, however, was to offend Muslim sensibilities.

...True to his polemicist style, van Gogh said lots of objectionable things about Muslims, such as calling extremists ‘goatfuckers’. But that doesn’t excuse the Guardian pigeonholing him as a ‘loudmouth racist’ as a way of avoiding thinking about the complexities of the issue. He was a lifelong socialist, from a leading left-wing family. A journalist friend of his told me at his funeral: ‘He was left-wing, but he had his eyes open. He started seeing these dark developments in society, and surprised himself by having right-wing thoughts.’ A staunch Dutch feminist who knew him told me that his work standing up for women oppressed by religion had inspired her to dedicate her life to it.

Van Gogh was a friend of Pim Fortuyn, the populist politician murdered two years ago for offences against Islam. The hate-mongering Left demonised Fortuyn as a far-right racist, but he was no such thing. On the contrary, he was a flamboyant left-wing homosexual sociology professor who firmly opposed racism and had many black followers. But he started campaigning against Muslim immigration and denounced Islam as ‘backwards’ when homosexual teachers were sacked in the Netherlands because Muslim parents didn’t want their children taught by gays. He was outraged that decades of campaigning for gay rights was going backwards, and that everyone was too frightened to speak out.

What angered them all — van Gogh, Hirsi Ali and Fortuyn — is the way the intolerant left-wing hegemony of political correctness was strangling free speech and democracy — not just causing the problems in the first place, but trying to destroy those who discuss them.

...Democracy too is under attack, with Belgium’s largest political party, the Vlaams Blok, banned last week. Attracting a quarter of the vote in the Flemish region, the anti-immigration separatist party was disbanded because it fell foul of anti-racism laws; unable to beat it in public debate or at the polls, its left-wing opponents killed it in the supreme court. In western Europe in the 21st century, the Left is getting courts to ban political parties because they are too popular.

Repellent though much of Vlaams Blok is, the bigger threat is from courts banning democracy. Democracy works because it is a valve for people’s concerns. What do the Belgian elite want the Flemish to do — overthrow the state in violent revolution? The racist British National party is also repellent, but it is a legally constituted democratic party. The government’s response to the BNP winning a few council seats is to ban all civil servants from being members, and many in the Labour party want to ban it outright.

By curbing free speech and political parties, and demonising those who fight for gay rights and against domestic violence, the Left is telling the world that multiculturalism is incompatible with liberal democracy. The Left’s loss of faith in liberal democracy is a result of its naive belief in human nature. The creators of multicultural societies believe they can abolish tribal feelings of belonging based on shared values, history and culture. Just as communism could only be upheld by totalitarianism, so multiculturalism is being upheld by curbs on free speech and democracy. The lesson of the Netherlands is that there is only so much you can do to change human nature, and the more you shut off the valves of debate and democracy, the more human nature — in all its ugliness — will assert itself, often violently.