In The Mail

Chris Ashley wrote me an awfully civil response to the column on van Gogh's murder:

Hi Dan!

Good piece this morning. It always does my heart good to see people writing robustly in defense of freedom and decency. I'd just like to clarify a couple of things for my part:

First, my column said in so many words that Van Gogh wasn't "asking for it" or any such thing. If you believe there's another meaning hiding behind my explicit words ("None of that is to say Van Gogh was asking for his brutal murder at the hands of an accused terrorist"), that's one thing. I'm a lit major; ideological critique is fair play. But if the author's intention matters to you, I'm not sure how I could have made mine plainer.

Second, I don't hesitate at all to equate knife and camera when both are tools of hatred. As you may know, Van Gogh treated "goat fucker" as a synonym for "Muslim" in his newspaper columns. That sort of thing, by my lights, crosses the line from "coarse and insensitive" into "hateful". That doesn't justify killing him, but the abuse of women in Muslim households, although a terrible crime, doesn't justify his sort of categorical hatred of Muslims and immigrants either. (Full disclosure: underlying my logic here is Jesus's teaching that murder and hateful insult are morally equivalent. If I'm odious here, it's mostly on his account, although I'll accept my share of the blame too.) The issue isn't that liberal and jihadist values are in any sense equivalent, but that hatred can grow in any soil and ought be named as such even when it grows from your own. Ever read "The Satanic Verses"? The late material on persecution of immigrants in England carries a similar thematic punch, I think. And it would apply to Holland too: Hirsi Ali's party, the PvdA, has taken an increasingly anti-immigration line since Fortuyn came on the scene.

I do love the taste of robust debate. Thanks for throwing your bit in.

--Chris

He's so nice about everything that I almost feel guilty for arguing with him. I'm also grateful to him for letting me know that I was not misattributing to him an assertion of moral equivalence between van Gogh's camera and Bouyeri's knife. I'm hardly an expert on Christianity, but I must say that if the doctrine Chris cites is central to the religion, then Christianity is positively immoral.

His point about stating explicitly in his column that van Gogh "wasn't asking for it" is stickier for me, but as I said to him, I can't even begin to make sense of his "flamebait" remark except as a way of assigning some of the responsibility for van Gogh's death to van Gogh. In a subsequent e-mail, Chris tried to get me to understand his point:

I'm not clear on how the common law treats this, but my impression is that even the most inflammatory of speech (you know, fightin' words) on a dead person's part isn't taken to mitigate the killer's responsibility. In Internet terms, the blame in a case like this is usually assessed using Godwin's Law. The troll might have started it, but whoever brings up the Nazis first is the one who killed the discussion and lost the argument.

I think there are two separate issues to parse out here. One is whether Bouyeri had any moral justification for taking van Gogh's life, and I'm satisfied that Chris does not think so. The other issue is the nature of van Gogh's role in the causal chain leading up to his death. On this count, I think Chris has it exactly wrong. Firstly, it's not the "goat fucker" remark that brought about the end of van Gogh's life. It was his association with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and specifically his production of a film on Muslim oppression of women. That's not an opinion; it's a fact proven by the contents of the letter Bouyeri stuck into van Gogh's corpse. So Chris's reference to the term "flamebait" still seems unintelligible to me unless it means that in some sense broader than a strictly ethical one, van Gogh is partly to blame for the murder. And that logic, it seems to me, is roughly akin to telling a rape victim she oughtn't to have dressed so provocatively.

UPDATE: Since I told Chris this privately, I may as well let it out of the bag that I consulted a source he didn't, namely this article in Salon. I'm pretty sure our dispute goes deeper than holding differing views of the events because we looked at different reports---his stated Christian belief in the moral equivalence of "murder and hateful insult" is an unbridgeable gap between us---but it's certainly possible that this dissonance played a role in our opposing interpretations of van Gogh's killing.