On 2 November 2004, at about 8.45 am, one ‘angry Muslim’ called Mohammed Bouyeri killed film director and journalist Theo van Gogh in the Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam. On Van Gogh's body, Bouyeri left a five-page written message that has become known as the ‘Open Letter to Hirshi Ali’. The letter, written almost two months before the murder, predicted the death of Hirsi Ali (b. 1969), at the time a Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party (vvd). She was also the auctor intellectualis of the short film Submission (2004), directed by Van Gogh. The ‘Open Letter to Hirshi Ali’ is an intriguing source for ‘Muslim antisemitism’ in the early twenty-first century. Like Bouyeri's numerous other writings, the letter is eclectic and idiosyncratic, a mix of religious and secular references to ideas from both the political left and right. The letter referred to the Quran, to earlier writings by Quran scholars and to internet texts by American antisemites. It was both an explanation and a prediction, a declaration of war and a profession of faith all rolled into one. In this chapter, the three themes of the letter – the multicultural society, the Jewish conspiracy and Muslim eschatology – will be used to describe a historical process through which Muslim antisemitism, via a political mobilisation of enduring anti-Jewish representations, became connected with the identity politics and the self of young immigrants in the Netherlands (as introduced in chapter 14). Especially male adolescents experienced their hyphenated identity (Moroccan-Dutch) as a stigma. Global Islamism offered an escape route. By emphasising the Muslim identity, the hyphenated identity was dissolved. Our point of departure here is that the changing function and meaning of concepts such as ‘Muslims’ and ‘Islam’ should be taken into account in the analysis of expressions of Muslim antisemitism in the early twenty-first century, such as Bouyeri's letter. In general, it is striking how little, until the attacks in Brussels and Paris in 2014 and 2015, the antisemitism of jihadist Muslims has been taken seriously or registered as a crucial ingredient of their ideology.

Bouyeri's antisemitic letter

Bouyeri's letter reproached Hirsi Ali for a number of things – especially for her attacks, as a lapsed Muslim, on Islam.