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By now, almost every country in Western Europe has had its own shocking encounter with the radical Islamists in its midst, its “own 9/11.” For Holland, the event came on November 2, 2004, the day a Dutch-Moroccan by the name of Mohammed Bouyeri shot the iconoclastic documentary filmmaker Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street, nearly cut off his head with a machete, and then calmly plunged a knife into the still-warm body, attaching a note that promised a similar fate for other “unbelievers.” The crime—the murder of a secular, rationalistic, cheerfully decadent Westerner at the hands of a death-worshipping, homegrown Islamic extremist—struck many observers as an ominous allegory of the threat facing the whole of Western Europe.

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