Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma

Author:Ian Buruma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

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The phrase “radical losers” was coined by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in a brilliant essay in Der Spiegel, November 2005.

FIVE

Submission

Fuck Hirsi Ali Somali

Just two months in Holland, and already so knowing

Cancer whore, shit stain, I’ll smash your face …

Et cetera. This is only the beginning of a rap number by a three-man hip-hop band named DHC, living in The Hague (“The Hague is my terrain”). The lyrics, originally written in Dutch, get more graphic (“I cut you up in two”). Imagery of the circumcision Ayaan Hirsi Ali suffered as a child is repeated as a ghastly refrain. The rap was supposedly meant for the group’s private pleasure, but quickly got spread around the Internet, was picked up by a television news program, and became a scandal. Hirsi Ali sued. The band was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 150 hours of community work. The three men are of Moroccan origin.

No one who has seen or heard Ayaan Hirsi Ali can be indifferent to her. To some she is a heroine, standing up against the forces of darkness, battling for free speech and enlightened values. Men are charmed by her extraordinary beauty. Her slender, dark elegance and shy smile give her a chic vulnerability that looks very fine on the cover of magazines. Theo van Gogh’s typical response, after his first meeting with her, was that he’d “love to fuck her.”1 Which may be why women sometimes distrust her. Others, women and men, actively loathe her. This loathing is harder to place. The haters are sometimes old progressives, who see her as a right-wing troublemaker in the multicultural garden. Some hate her for being a black woman who became too prominent—an alien who needed to be cut down to size. More often the haters are fellow immigrants, usually Muslims. Hirsi Ali’s hostile views on Islam would account for this, but there is something else, a deeper resentment, revealed in the rap number, which is both oddly Dutch and also typical of a particular kind of immigrant’s rage. Hirsi Ali doesn’t act “normal.” She puts on airs after “just two months in Holland.” She “prances around” like an autochtoon (nativeborn person).

A Dutch hip-hop label owner said in defense of the rappers that Ayaan Hirsi Ali “has offended many people deeply with her statements. Why should she be able to get away with that, just because she studied and learned to neatly package her statements, whereas DHC cannot, because they are rough street kids who do so in their own language?”

In fact, Hirsi Ali never threatened anyone, but this argument illustrates the kind of resentment she provokes among many immigrants. The resentment goes something like this: She has studied, she can speak eloquently, even though she has only been in Holland for a short time. She thinks she’s better than us, who were born here. Her statements are neatly packaged. She pretends to be Dutch, an indigenous clone.

DHC said they had never meant to hurt her physically. Their abuse was just words. If they had wanted to kill her, they said, they surely wouldn’t have advertised their intentions.

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