Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold, symbolic colours, and dramatic, impulsive and highly expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Only one of his paintings was known by name to have been sold during his lifetime. Van Gogh became famous after his suicide, aged 37, which followed years of poverty and mental illness.
Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn, known as Pim Fortuyn, was a Dutch politician, author, civil servant, businessman, sociologist and academic who founded the party Pim Fortuyn List in 2002.
The Pim Fortuyn List was a political party in the Netherlands named after its eponymous founder Pim Fortuyn, a former university professor and political columnist. The party was considered populist, right-wing populist and nationalist as well as adhering to its own distinct ideology of Fortuynism according to some commentators.
The culture of the Netherlands is diverse, reflecting regional differences as well as the foreign influences built up by centuries of the Dutch people's mercantile and explorative spirit. The Netherlands and its people have long played an important role as centre of cultural liberalism and tolerance. The Dutch Golden Age is popularly regarded as its zenith.
Islam is the second largest religion in the Netherlands, after Christianity, and is practised by 5% of the population according to 2018 estimates. The majority of Muslims in the Netherlands belong to the Sunni denomination. Many reside in the country's four major cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. Hirsi Ali has founded an organisation for the defense of women's rights, the AHA Foundation. She works for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the American Enterprise Institute, and was a senior fellow at the Future of Democracy Project at Harvard Kennedy School. She currently hosts The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast and is a columnist for UnHerd, a British online magazine.
Theodoor van Gogh was a Dutch film director. He directed Submission: Part 1, a short film written by Somali writer and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which criticised the treatment of women in Islam in strong terms. On 2 November 2004, he was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist who objected to the film's message. The last film Van Gogh had completed before his murder, 06/05, was a fictional exploration of the assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. It was released posthumously in December 2004, a month after Van Gogh's death, and two years after Fortuyn's death.
Mohammed Bouyeri is a Moroccan-Dutch convicted terrorist serving a life sentence without parole in the prison of Nieuw Vosseveld (Vught) for the assassination of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. A member of the Hofstad Network, he was incarcerated in 2004.
Submission is a 2004 English-language Dutch short drama film produced and directed by Theo van Gogh, and written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali ; it was shown on NPO 3, a Dutch public broadcasting network, on 29 August 2004. The film's title is one of the possible translations of the Arabic word "Islam". A Muslim extremist reacted to the film by assassinating Van Gogh.
The Hofstad Network was an Islamist terror group composed mostly of Dutch citizens. The terror group was composed mainly of young men between the ages of 18 and 32. The name "Hofstad" was originally the codename the Dutch secret service AIVD used for the network and leaked to the media. The name likely refers to the nickname of the city of The Hague, where some of the suspected terrorists lived. The network was active throughout the 2000s.
Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who has led the Party for Freedom (PVV) since he founded it in 2006. He is also the party's leader in the House of Representatives, having held a parliamentary seat since 1998. In the 2010 formation of the First Rutte cabinet, a minority government of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)—which he left in 2004—and Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), Wilders actively participated in the negotiations, resulting in a "tolerance agreement" between the PVV and these parties. He withdrew his party's parliamentary support in 2012, citing disagreements with the cabinet over proposed budget cuts. Wilders is best known for his criticism of Islam and the European Union (EU); his views have made him a controversial figure in the Netherlands and abroad. Since 2004, he has been protected at all times by armed police.
Ian Buruma is a Dutch writer and editor who lives and works in the United States. In 2017, he became editor of The New York Review of Books, but left the position in September 2018.
Marius Job Cohen is a retired Dutch politician and jurist who served as Mayor of Amsterdam from 2001 to 2010 and Leader of the Labour Party (PvdA) from 2010 to 2012.
Religion in the Netherlands was historically dominated by Christianity between the 10th and 20th centuries. In the late 19th century, roughly 60% of the population was Calvinist and 35% was Catholic. Since then, there has been a significant decline in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, with Protestantism declining to such a degree that Catholicism became the foremost form of the Christian religion. The majority of the Dutch population is secular. A relatively sizable Muslim minority also exists.
Eén NL is a Dutch political party founded in September 2006. It took part in the 2006 Dutch election under the leadership of Marco Pastors and Joost Eerdmans, but a dismal election result leaves the political future of the party quite uncertain. The party is seen as one of the political heirs of the late Pim Fortuyn.
Hans Eduard Marie Teeuwen is a Dutch comedian, musician, actor and occasional filmmaker. His work has been described as absurdist, apolitical and confrontational.
Multiculturalism in the Netherlands began with major increases in immigration during the 1950s and 1960s. As a consequence, an official national policy of multiculturalism was adopted in the early 1980s. This policy subsequently gave way to more assimilationist policies in the 1990s and post-electoral surveys uniformly showed from 1994 onwards that a majority preferred that immigrants assimilated rather than retained the culture of their country of origin. Even though the general acceptance of immigrants increased, opinion polls from the early 1980s and after showed that many were critical of immigration. Following the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh the political debate on the role of multiculturalism in the Netherlands reached new heights.
The trial of Geert Wilders, a member of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands, took place in the Netherlands in 2010 and 2011. Wilders was accused of criminally insulting religious and ethnic groups and inciting hatred and discrimination. He was found not guilty in June 2011.
Ebru Umar is a Dutch columnist of Turkish descent. Under the influence of Theo van Gogh, she gave up a career in management and became a columnist, first for van Gogh's website and, after he was assassinated, as his successor as a regular columnist of Metro. She writes for a number of Dutch magazines and has published four books, often on the topics of feminism and criticism of Islam.
Simon Cottee is an academic who works as a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Kent, and is a regular contributor to The Atlantic. He previously worked at Bangor University and the University of the West Indies' Trinidad campus. He is the author of The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam, which the publishers claim is "the first major study of apostasy from Islam in the Western secular context". In a review published in New Humanist, Alom Shaha wrote that the book "brings sensitivity and empathy to an intensely polarised debate". Nick Cohen, writing in The Spectator, argues that Cottee "shows how elements in the left and academia are happy to denounce Muslims who exercise their freedom to abandon their religion as 'native informers' who have gone over to the side of western imperialism". Cottee is also editor, with Thomas Cushman, of Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left. Cottee's published research also includes journal articles on topics including the murder of Theo van Gogh and the motivations of terrorists. He has argued that gang culture offers a way of understanding the appeal of ISIS . Cottee also argues that the group's propaganda videos have a "pornographic quality".
