We will not be able to gauge the full impact of Pim Fortuyn's murder on European politics until we know who killed him, and why. Dutch police have arrested a Dutch-born white male in connection with the crime, but he's not talking. Whoever he turns out to be, the fact that a popular anti-immigration politician was assassinated during a campaign in one of Europe's most civil and tolerant nations is seismic on its own.
Fortuyn's legion of enemies denounced him as a fascist and a racist, partly for his tough-on-crime policies, but mostly for his belief that immigration should stop, and that immigrants â?? particularly Muslims, whose views on women and gays he considered barbaric â?? should be pressed harder to assimilate into Dutch life. Immigration and assimilation of Third World immigrants: These are and will continue to be tremendously important issues for Europe, particularly as its population ages with the native birth rate remaining below replacement level. Whether Fortuyn's murderer turns out to have Islamic connections or is part of the extreme Left, the sobering truth is that Europe â?? democratic, gun-controlling Europe â?? 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.
It is hard to overestimate the psychological impact the killing is having in Holland, a bourgeois and orderly country that prides itself on tolerance.
"We were a quiet, normal country, where we never had any big criminal things happening," says Marnix Kort, 36, of Haarlem. "This changes everything. We have become a banana republic in an instant."
"Things like this don't happen in Holland. It's like the 11th of September for us. Everybody thought this couldn't be, but we see that it is possible. I feel very insecure," said Miriam Jeurissen, 34, who lives in a suburb of Amsterdam.
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