HOWZAT

This startling fact helped make the brief political career of Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay, flamboyant former Marxist professor turned magazine columnist. He founded his Leefbaar Rotterdam party — "Liveable Rotterdam" — on an anti-multicultural, law-and-order, stop-immigration platform.

Fortuyn was hard to pin down as a racist, let alone fascist. He was socially liberal, opposed the death penalty, and supported human rights and nondiscrimination. Members of ethnic minorities joined the party. A young, black businessman was No 2 on his national election list. He was often described as a "Dutch Le Pen", as Wilders is now, but both comparisons are facile, and Fortuyn himself said he would not vote for the Frenchman.

He broke the paralysis that political correctness had brought to immigration. "I'm saying we've got big problems in our cities," he said. "It's not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate."

He wanted immigration stopped. "Holland is full," he said, and the Dutch were losing control of their own country. He didn't want to return those already legally in the country, but insisted that they learn to adapt to western culture, and not vice versa. He was also critical of Islam as a "backward culture" that discriminated against women. The enthusiasm of some Dutch Muslims for the New York massacre made his claims hard to dismiss as the ranting of a bigot.

His party, from a near-standing start, came to power in the Rotterdam local elections in March 2002. He was on track for a breakthrough in the May 2002 general elections when he was shot dead.

It was the first political assassination in Holland since the 17th century. The impact was deep and palpable. Free speech has a particular resonance in the country, perhaps as a result of wartime occupation. Fortuyn had already been branded a fascist for questioning the status quo on immigration. Now his views had got him killed, by a white, Dutch animal-rights activist. Several of his ideas — compulsory assimilation programmes for newcomers and those with poor Dutch on social-security benefit, and tighter rules on immigrants bringing in spouses from abroad — were to be adopted in any event.

A third shock came with the murder in November of Theo van Gogh, the film director, columnist and provocateur. He had made a short film, Submission, on the rape and humiliation of women in Islam. It was studiously offensive — he had spun a career out of reckless insults — and featured verses of the Koran written on the thinly veiled body of an abused Muslim woman.

He made the film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a petite Somali refugee who is a Liberal MP in the Dutch parliament. Herself a Muslim, she is an outspoken critic of Islam, speaking of genital mutilation, arranged marriages and the turning of women into "baby machines".

Van Gogh was offered, but refused, protection. He was shot as he cycled through Amsterdam. His murderer then half-butchered him, slitting his throat with a knife, which he then used to pin a letter to the dead man's chest. This claimed that the Dutch were under Jewish control, and called for a jihad against Hirsi Ali, the United States, the Netherlands, Europe and all infidels.

The murder forced another highly sensitive issue — religion — into the mix. The Dutch were brought face to face with the disturbing fact that a full-blown jihadist group had grown up in their midst, and that it was locally born and recruited. It was, they say, their own 9/11. Van Gogh's alleged assassin, Mohammed B, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan, spoke and wrote excellent Dutch. The farewell letter found on him when he was arrested was written in rhyming couplets, in the style that Dutch families send to one another each Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) Day, December 5. He had studied at a well-regarded lyceum before dropping out of a technical institute.

He then started spending time at the Al-Tawhid mosque in Amsterdam. At some stage he joined a militant Islamic group, the Hofstad group, named after the Hague, where it was based. It was led by Redouan al-Issa, alias Abu Khaled, a Syrian-born geologist turned spiritual leader. Mohammed B's friends included Samir Azzouz, an 18-year-old radical later arrested for plotting to bomb Schiphol airport and the Dutch parliament.

Slums and poverty played no part in Mohammed B's background. He grew up in pleasant, low-rise housing in west Amsterdam, graffiti-free, with open spaces and playgrounds. When arrested, he was living in good council housing. The street has small, modern houses, with well-tended gardens, the hedges trimmed, and a heron often standing on a rooftop. Lace curtains mark the Dutch houses; satellite dishes are the ubiquitous indicator of immigrants.