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Christian-Muslim violence explodes in — the Netherlands?!
The nation that has long prided itself on being the most tolerant in the world is now home to the world's most recent outbreak of religious violence. At least five Protestant churches and nine mosques throughout the country have been attacked since filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed, apparently by a Muslim extremist. Muslim schools have also been targeted, apparently by anti-immigrant racist groups ("White power" was scrawled near one school).

Van Gogh's death was apparently in retaliation for his short film Submission, which portrays Islam as a misogynist religion that supports rape and abuse. The film recently aired on Dutch television, infuriating many Muslims in the country. Van Gogh wasn't simply anti-Muslim, but Islam became a dominant target after the murder of politician Pim Fortuyn. Still, he frequently attacked religion in general and Christianity in specific. Thus, while news reports indicate that the Dutch churches were probably attacked by retaliating Muslims, and at least one Islamic group promised reprisals for the mosque attacks, there's also the possibility that they were attacked by the same terrorists who targeted the mosques and schools. No arrests have been reported in the church arson attacks.

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, an evangelical Protestant, blames Muslims and non-Muslims. "Extremism is reaching the roots of our democracy," the Associated Press reports him telling Parliament yesterday. "We cannot let ourselves be blinded by people who seek to drag us into a spiral of violence. It is the joint task of Muslims and non-Muslims to warn young people against radicalization. Together we need to work toward a peaceful society. … We have to utterly reject this violence altogether, because we're being un-Dutch."

"The violence, the aggression must stop. And that goes for people who get the idea that they should damage Muslim mosques or schools, too," said Jan-Gerd Heetderks, dean of the Netherlands' Protestant churches, according to another Associated Press report.

American killed in Ivory Coast apparently not a missionary
News agencies reporting on the recent violence in Ivory Coast have repeatedly said that the American killed by the West African country's warplanes last weekend was an American missionary. The source is U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Ergibe Boyd, who made the guess based on the absence of U.S. military and diplomatic presence in the country. An article in The Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York, however, suggests that Boyd was mistaken. Robert Carsky (photo) was a soil scientist and crop researcher affiliated with WARDA, a rice production agency. There's no reference to religion in the Post-Standard story.

Specter may be off the hook
Just a guess, but the uproar from conservative groups over Sen. Arlen Specter's chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee may be over. He's backed way, way down, and appears in today's Wall Street Journal op-ed pages promising to support pro-life judges.

But now comes what may be a bigger battle: replacing Attorney General John Ashcroft with current White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who has been widely criticized by religious conservatives in the past. Focus on the Family has actively opposed Gonzales in the past, when his name was bandied about as a possible Supreme Court justice. "We are absolutely opposed to Alberto Gonzales," Tom Minnery, Focus's vice president for public policy, told the Los Angeles Times last year. "He is soft on the constitutional issues we care most about."

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November (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48