The on-line edition of Newsweek has an excellent article this week about violence in what is supposed to be the world's most peaceful city, The Hague, and the killing of Theo Van Gogh in Holland on November 2nd.

Although it's much to long for me to post in entirety, here are some excerpts from this insightful and frightening piece.

The tumult began on Nov. 2 with the gory killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose documentary "Submission" was an attack on Islamic treatment of Muslim women. His alleged assailant, a Muslim who considered van Gogh's film blasphemy, fired half a dozen bullets into his body, slit his throat and, with a knife, pinned to van Gogh's chest a note proclaiming jihad against Holland, Europe and the United States.

The police quickly arrested a suspect—a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri—and scooped up seven other young Muslims, charging them under antiterror laws. Within days an escalating spiral of violence engulfed the country. A Moroccan immigrant was killed in the town of Breda. Attacks on mosques and Muslim schools brought retaliatory attacks on Protestant churches. Mean-while, antiterror police launched a series of raids, including the one in The Hague, which police said they traced to a separate plot to kill the woman who wrote the script for "Submission," Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

...

French political scientist Catherine de Wenden believes the Netherlands erred first and foremost by failing to integrate its immigrant population, which is predominantly Muslim from Turkey and Morocco. By funding religious schools that isolated many migrant children from mainstream Dutch life and by not doing enough to encourage immigrants to learn Dutch, even as job prospects were diminishing, the government created ghettoes of discontent, especially among those who came from outside Europe. University of Amsterdam anthropologist Thijl Sunier says immigrants to Holland—and even their second- and third-generation descendants—are treated like "foreign guests." They are "visiting an island," Sunier says, and, unlike immigrants in, say, Britain, most of them live outside the greater society.

I hate how the French feel they can weigh in on things that they themselves are guilty of.

The problem for the Netherlands, and Europe, is that issues of religion and immigration have become explosively conflated with terrorism. Three days after the van Gogh killing, Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Gerrit Zalm said, "We are declaring war" to "make radical Islamic movements disappear from the Netherlands." The fanatical blow of an assassin against a filmmaker on a busy Amsterdam street thus, rightly or wrongly, becomes part of a chain stretching from the World Trade Center and Bali through the Madrid train bombings to Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. "Of course we have to take measures against violent and aggressive behavior," says Amsterdam city official Ahmed Aboutaleb. "But let's not let these measures get out of hand."