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Ian Buruma

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“Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theaters, and places of entertainment. The French scholar Olivier Roy is right: Islam is now a European religion. How Europeans, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, cope with this is the question that will decide our future. And what better place to watch the drama unfold than the Netherlands, where freedom came from a revolt against Catholic Spain, where ideals of tolerance and diversity became a badge of national honor, and where political Islam struck its first blow against a man whose deepest conviction was that freedom of speech included the freedom to insult.”

FreedomEuropeIslamToleranceMulticulturalismDutchNetherlands
Book:Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
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“And yet to reach for examples from the Holocaust, or the Jewish diaspora, has become a natural reflex when the question of ethnic or religious minorities comes up. It is a moral yardstick, yet at the same time an evasion. To be reminded of past crimes, of negligence or complicity, is never a bad thing. But it can confuse the issues at hand, or worse, bring all discussion to a halt by tarring opponents with the brush of mass murder.”

MoralityMinoritiesHolocaustJewish HistoryHolocaust Literature
Book:Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
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“Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China's man-made famines or the Soviet gulag solely by invoking the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point. Messianic violence can attach itself to any creed.”

ReligionFaithIslamRevolutionaryKarl MarxMaoism
Book:Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
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