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14.11.04

Too much tolerance in Holland?

TIME magazine seems to suggest so.
  • Immediately after the Nov. 2 murder of firebrand filmmaker Theo van Gogh, 47 — whose recent work included a controversial attack on Muslim violence against women — a Dutch Muslim man with alleged ties to a terrorist gang was arrested for the crime. That touched off a violent anti-Muslim backlash, which has forced some Dutch citizens to question the limits of free speech, others to ask whether the country's age-old reputation for tolerance is a thing of the past, and still others to wonder whether their grand experiment in integration has ignited an all-out clash of civilizations. "We have allowed a climate to develop in which everything is tolerated," says Geert Wilders, a right-wing member of parliament who has received death threats from radical Muslims. "There is way too much political correctness in the Netherlands — and now we're paying for it."