THE LEFT GETS A SCALP: I haven't yet written on the assassination of maverick Dutch politician
Pim Fortuyn, in large part because I never heard of him until a couple of months ago. From what I've been reading, though, I agree with Mickey Kaus that his murder is far, far more important than the mainstream U.S. papers seem to believe.
There's plenty of good stuff written about Fortuyn: Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds have plenty of items, as does - believe it or not - former MTV VJ Adam Curry, now living in Amsterdam (I think I remember his hair.) Rod Dreher also has an excellent piece on the ramifications of the killing.
One historical parallel has jumped out at me from the beginning, and not just because everything on this blog revolves around Israel: the 1995 murder of Yitzchak Rabin. I was in Israel at the time and remember the atmosphere well: Rabin's political opponents constantly delegitimized him and his positions, and either called him "traitor" or winked at those who did. Rabbis in yeshivot (including, allegedly, one in the yeshiva I was attending at the time, though I didn't know him) endorsed willful misinterpretations of old Jewish law to deem Rabin worthy of death (thus showing the greatest possible disrespect for the system to which their lives were supposedly devoted), and then were shocked, shocked when Yigal Amir took them seriously.
On the Continent, the political and media establishment desperately tried to shoehorn him into the same group as Le Pen and Haider, thus deeming him unworthy of debate. (This post is a good summary of the de-legitimizing that Fortuyn was subjected to.) The U.S. media has generally followed this pattern, for various reasons.
It appears that someone took that rhetoric seriously. I'm surprised that no one else has drawn the Rabin parallel.
Now, I don't want to go overboard in blaming the European politicians and media; the main person to blame is obviously the killer, and I don't want to diminish his responsibility in any way. But you'd think that some reassessment would be in order, and that overheated rhetoric would be toned down. Will it happen? I don't think so either.