Bravo, Mr. Afshin Ellian

Mr. Afshin Ellian, a refugee from Iran and currently a university professor of law in Leiden, has condemned Mr. Donner's attempt to reinstitute the ban on religious insults: 'What Mr. Donner is actually saying to Muslim fundamentalists is: you have a point when you are killing people. (...) Donner should have said: keep your hands off our writers and thinkers, we will defend our freedom. Donner should make terrorists fear him, rather than writers and thinkers.' Ellian also agreed with immigration secretary Mrs. Verdonk, who yesterday said that Muslims generally have a lower level of tolerance towards criticism. 'If you look at the list of people who've been killed in the Muslim world you can say that the level of tolerance is very low. Muslims who can't deal with the fact that people are debating their religion, should adapt to the Dutch justice system and the Dutch level of tolerance. And not the other way around.'

An interesting bit of trivia: it turns out that a certain Jan Donner created the law against religious insults. Jan Donner is the grandfather of Piet-Hein Donner, the current minister of Justice, who wants to revitalize the law.

15:39

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'How enlightenment dies'

Read this article at NRO. Money quote:

A few days ago, a local artist reacted to the news of Van Gogh's killing by painting a mural that included the words "Gij zult niet doden" ("Thou Shalt Not Kill"). Fair comment, you might think. Apparently not. The head of a nearby mosque complained. The police showed up and city workers sandblasted the inconvenient text into oblivion. Rotterdam's mayor has since apologized, but the damage had already been done.

"Thou Shalt Not Kill." Erased, obliterated, unacceptable. Much like Theo van Gogh.

12:25

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AIVD mole used steganography to distribute information

Steganography is a way of hiding information in a seemingly normal picture, which can then be included to distribute secrets through a seemingly normal website. The Moroccan mole that had managed to infiltrate the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD and probably tipped off the terrorist Hofstad Group apparently used this technology to distribute information stolen from the AIVD. GeenStijl has an extensive debate on this subject, including links to the relevant software tools for amateur spooks who want to do a bit of digging themselves.

11:52

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Updates on attempts of censorship by Mr. Donner

(Click here first if you don't know what this is about.)

• Shock blog GeenStijl reminds us that this is the same Mr. Donner who last year tried to censor political satire. I probably repressed that.

• Elsevier News Weekly, the largest weekly in the Netherlands (and one of my largest outlets), will speak out against Donner's plans later on the day. They call it a submission to Mohammed Bouyeri's actions. They also point out the injustice of giving religious people special status under the law, which I've done here as well.

• Chairman Tonca of the Contact Group Muslims and Government (Contactorgaan Moslims en Overheid) thinks that Muslims can take a religious insult as well as anyone. After which he immediately debunks himself: 'A Christian isn't happy either when Jesus or Maria is insulted.' Well, probably not. But the point is what should be done with those insulted feelings. Dutch authors like W.F. Hermans, Gerard Reve and Maarten 't Hart have been criticizing Christianity since the 1950's. Although offended Catholics tried to sue the crap out of Hermans in 1951, he won. Tonca then goes on to endorse Donner's proposal. I think being willing to turn the clock back more than half a century does qualify as overly sensitive.

Update 11.39:
• Police have removed fliers stating that 'Mohammed was a pedophile'. The flier was probably referring to the religious founder of Islam rather than to the Van Gogh murderer. According to the police, there were two other fliers as well, with texts like 'How many will have to come, how many will have to go' (a reference to this song and 'When a Muslim says something, it's his faith, when a white man says something, it's racism'. The article suggest, but does not explicitly say so, that these versions were removed as well. If so, this story reminisces of the ridiculous actions by Rotterdam mayor Ivo Opstelten, who ordered a mural stating 'Thou shalt not kill' removed because it would offend Muslims. Read more about that here and here.

Update 12.56:
• According to this Telegraaf roundup, the last time anyone was fined for religious insults, was in 1965. Student magazine Propria Cures then published a so-called 'Jesus issue', which was deemed offensive, although it's unclear why (the Telegraaf article doesn't say). In 1966, famous Dutch literary writer Gerard Reve was sued under the same law, but got off the hook, even though he had represented (the Christian) God as a donkey he had sex with. In other words, we're having a debate about the past here. In 1995, Theo van Gogh was sued for calling Jesus a 'rotten fish from Nazareth'. First, the Dutch courts cleared Van Gogh, then the European Court of Human Rights.

To all Muslims who have told me in the past few weeks that your religion is the only one being insulted and that Van Gogh only targeted you, can you please reread the previous paragraph?

11:06

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D66 party wants to rid Dutch law of censorship articles

I've posted my opinion about the Dutch laws against religious insults here. It shouldn't surprise anyone therefore that I'm quite happy with the position of centrist party D66, who want to remove these articles from the law books. Too bad that the PvdA, the Dutch labour party, actually agrees with Mr. Piet-Hein Donner of Justice and his party, the Christian-right CDA. They want to start enforcing these arcane articles again, thus giving in to the murderous blackmail of Van Gogh murderer Mohammed Bouyeri.

10:17

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'Threats to daily Metro were ignored'

According to editor Jan Dijkgraaf, radical Islamists made threats to his (free) daily newspaper long before the Van Gogh murder. However, police in Amsterdam dismissed the threats, several of which call for either the killing of Metro staff or the torching of the Metro building.

A free copy of today's Metro, which contains several of the threatening emails, can be downloaded here. Boris Dittrich, leader of the centrist D66 party, has called for a new investigation. It seems that Mr. Donner, the responsible secretary for the Justice department, is more concerned with curbing our freedom of speech these days.

I'm flying out to Ireland tonight, but if any foreign media want to help get this story out, please contact me directly through email.

10:07

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