Dutch-born writer Ian Buruma writes about the issues stemming from the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. On the basis of his previous writings, I would have expected his account to be a compelling one. This reviewer of his book, however, gives a fairly harsh assessment. (Via Arts & Letters Daily).

Readers of Murder in Amsterdam are likely to close the book with a heavy heart. One reason is that the problem it addresses, the emergence of militant Islam as a divisive political/religious force in the West, is not going to go away soon. Another is that, though full of learning and skilled if tepid reporting, Buruma’s book often feels muddled, ungenerous and confusing. There is plenty of scholarship on display, but no compelling point of view.

There is, however, an off-putting strain of snobbery. Buruma, an Asia specialist and the author of Inventing Japan, Anglomania and, most recently, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, grew up in Holland but left it as a young man in the 1970s. Now a New Yorker, he clearly feels he’s gone on to bigger and better things. He rarely misses a chance to take a swipe at some aspect of Dutch life, whether it's the "dank and gray" area of the Hague he was raised in or the "arrogance" of the great national soccer teams of the 1970s and ’80s.

Van Gogh's murder followed the assassination two years earlier of Pim Fortuyn, Holland's flamboyantly gay, and very popular, anti-immigration politician who had also railed against the Islamicization of the Netherlands. Fortuyn was killed not by a Muslim, but by a white, left-wing vegan "activist", who didn't like the fact that the flashy politician wore fur collars and criticized immigrants. "The sobering truth," wrote Rod Dreher in National Review shortly after Fortuyn’s death, "is that Europe - democratic, gun-controlling Europe - is a place where questioning the immigration status quo will not only get you branded a fascist by the news media, it will get you shot dead."

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