Churches Attacked as Religious Tensions Mount in Netherlands
Two churches in the Netherlands were nearly burned down in the latest series attacks following the murder of a controversial Dutch filmmaker, police said Thursday
Two churches in the Netherlands were nearly burned down in the latest series attacks following the murder of a controversial Dutch filmmaker, police said Thursday. Since filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death by an Islamic extremist on Nov. 2, a total of 18 religiously linked sites have been attacked.
According to the Associated Press, two Molotov cocktails were thrown at a Protestant church in the port city of Rotterdam. While one was apparently thrown through a smashed window, the second hit the sidewalk, police said.
Shortly after, police in the central city of Utrecht were called after a fire broke out at a small church. A window had been smashed, a police statement said. The blaze was easily extinguished.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Meanwhile, in Eindhoven, the same city where a bomb exploded at a Muslim school on Monday, a school classroom was seriously damaged in an overnight fire, police spokesman Pieter van Hoof told AP. Though the school is predominantly Catholic, it is attended by students various religious backgrounds.
In all three attacks, no injuries were reported.
Dutch authorities say the arsonists’ attempts to burn down the Protestant churches are in retaliation to the half-dozen recent attacks on Muslim sites in what they fear are part of reprisals after van Gogh's killing a week ago.
According to the New York Times, anger toward the Netherlands' Muslim community percolated among the crowd that gathered outside van Gogh’s funeral on Tuesday.
Van Gogh, one of the most outspoken critics of fundamentalist Muslims, had publicly and repeatedly used epithets against Muslims, the Times reported. His last film, Submission, criticized the treatment of women under Islam.
For many years, such criticism of Islam and Islamic customs, even among Dutch extremists, was considered taboo, despite deep frustrations that had built up against conservative Islam in the country.
That began to change, however, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, when the Netherlands, like many other countries, began to consider the dangers of political Islam seriously.
Since then an intensified anti-immigration debate has alienated Netherlands’ Moroccan community—to which a majority of the nation’s Muslims belong to—from Dutch society and, many people argue, has also helped fragment the Muslim community.
While only about 20 percent of the Netherlands' estimated 900,000 Muslims practice their religion, according to one government study, officials say as many as 5 percent of Muslims in the country follow a conservative form of Islam.
The Amsterdam Council of Churches published paid notices in some Dutch newspapers pledging solidarity with the Muslim community. But the government's response has been to promise more money for fighting terrorism and stronger immigration laws.
