How a convicted terrorist got cancelled
It wasn't for the terrorism
Last week, Soumaya Sahla, a convicted-terrorist-turned-radicalization-expert, was expelled from her political party, accused of stealing 85,000 euros from her mentor, a former party leader.
Well, what in the hell is going on here?
A deep dive into this scandal took me all the way from the “multicultural debate” about Dutch society in the 1990’s, to one of the Netherland’s most heinous assassinations, to how the public conversation has shifted—from how immigrants should be integrated into Dutch society, to how to prevent them from coming at all.
So here’s the story of how a convicted terrorist rose from a stint in the highest-security prison the Netherlands to political prominence, and the odd confluence of circumstances that lead to her cancellation just last week.
The Conviction
In 2005, Sahla was arrested at Lelylaan Station with her then-husband, who had a loaded Agram 2000, a “baby Uzi,” equipped with a silencer, in his backpack.
In tapped phone conversations with her sister, a pharmacist in the Hague, Sahla tried to the obtain the home addresses of several politicians—which she figured would be stored on the pharmacy computer.
She served three years in prison for membership of a terrorist organization and a weapons charge.
Sahla maintains that she did know know her husband had a gun when they were arrested, and that she wanted the home addresses simply to write politicians letters. “Am I a Muslim terrorist? Absolutely not,” she said in January 2023.
“It is difficult to determine whether Soumaya Sahla was as innocent and passive at the time as she says,” according to the AD.
The Hofstad Group
Dutch society was reeling from Islamic terrorism at the time of Sahla’s arrest. She was convicted for being a member of the Hofstad Group, an Islamist terror network which claimed responsibility for the gruesome murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004.
Van Gogh, “an outspoken and often offensive critic of Islam,” directed Submission: Part 1, a short film written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali—one of the politicians whose addresses Sahla tried to get off her pharmacist sister. The film criticized the treatment of women in Islamic society, and showed a woman with text from the Quran painted on her naked body. It infuriated many Dutch Muslims.
Mohammed Bouyeri, a member of the Hofstad Group, shot Van Gogh eight times, cut his throat, and pinned a death threat against Hirsi Ali to Van Gogh’s body.
This assassination created a national trauma, and “catalysed a steady erosion of the Dutch tradition of moderation and self-censorship on race and religion,” according to the Guardian.
Political ascent
And then there was quite a turn of events. In prison Sahla studied political science, became a “democrat and a liberal,” and after her release developed an impressive resume. She spoke at NATO, got a degree from Leiden University, met personally with prime minister Mark Rutte, and even had dinner with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She developed this level political profile thanks to her mentor, the powerful former People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) leader Frits Bolkestein. This is a big deal—the VVD is also Rutte’s party, and has run the country for the last thirteen years.
Bolkestein and Sahla met in 2011. The same year she became an advisor to the VVD, and later the party chair on terrorism and radicalization.
Via HP/De Tijd:
When Sahla speaks to [Bolkestein] after a public meeting, he is impressed by her. Bolkestein thinks she is smart and articulate and wants to help her return to society after her stay in prison. Bolkestein therefore provides Sahla with access to his impressive political network.
Bolkestein’s protection of her kept her in the party, despite the inevitable controversy she raised. In 2022, the NRC suggested that the VVD were stuck with her:
And suppose they want to get rid of her, what will Frits Bolkestein (88) do, who has protected her for years? He is seen as a prominent member who deserves respect, but he no longer has much influence. Yet it would hurt if Bolkestein, party leader between 1990 and 1998, were to cancel his membership.
The “multicultural debate”
Isn’t that odd? Surely there were hordes of bright young beautiful female aspiring politicians who would have given anything to be taken under Bolkestein’s wing at the time. Why would he take a chance on a convicted terrorist? His name and reputation were on the line too.
It could have been that Bolkestein and Sahla were having an affair, as Geert Wilders shiftily suggested in the Telegraaf. Or that Bolkestein saw Sahla as a daughter, as she told HP/De Tijd.
But as it turns out, Bolkestein was “one of the most influential people in the debate on multicultural society in the past 20 years.” His “claim to fame,” according to historian Maarten van Rossem, was a 1991 essay published in the Volkskrant, where he argued against the then-official state policy of cultural “integration while retaining one's own identity.”
He believed that immigrants who maintained their Islamic identity would not integrate, and in the worst case this would lead to “ethnic ghettos where many thousands of people of immigrant origin live in cultural isolation, with high unemployment rates, little knowledge of the Dutch language and little contact with the native environment.”
So, it makes perfect sense that Bolkestein would take a bright young (beautiful) former Islamic terrorist who renounced her past and embraced liberalism under his wing. She would have been the gold-standard Muslim, in his eyes.
Things start to fall apart
“There's a terrorist on the loose here”
Geert Wilders, the current leader of the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), also an outspoken critic of Islam, entered into 24/7 police protection the day after Van Gogh’s murder, and has remained under constant surveillance ever since, nearly twenty years.
In December 2021 he gave a furious speech on the floor of the House of Representatives after he learned that Sahla was still advising the VVD.
I find it unbelievable that here in this building we in all probability we have a convicted terrorist walking around, a member of the Hofstad Group… I find that shocking. I myself was included on the kill list of the Hofstad Group.
Afterwards, Sophie Hermans, VVD party leader, said she was “uncomfortable” about Sahla’s role in the party. In January 2022, Sahla resigned her role as chair on terrorism and radicalization but remained a member of the party.
About that 85,000 euros
And then all hell broke loose last week. Martijn Bolkestein, Frits Bolkestein’s nephew, accused Shala of stealing 85,000 euros from his uncle in a bombshell interview in HP/De Tijd. Sahla admitted to accepting this money between 2018 and 2022, saying it was for the costs of her PhD and living expenses. Her PhD advisor, Professor Kinneging, backs up her story.
No one can ask Bolkestein for comment, since he was placed under administration in 2022, meaning that because of poor health a judge ruled he was no longer able to “make important decisions for himself.”
The VVD immediately sided with the family and expelled Sahla from the party. Chairman Eric Wetzels said in a statement:
As a party we have given Ms. Sahla a second chance, which was not always easy given her conviction for terrorism. It now appears that she cheated large amounts of money from our honorary member Frits Bolkestein during a vulnerable period for him. In our view, she has thus squandered that second chance in a morally extremely reprehensible manner. That is why there is no longer a place for her in our party.
A few days after the after the article was published, Sahla filed a complaint against Martijn Bolkestein for insult, libel and slander.
In any case, as soon as Bolkestein wasn’t around to protect her anymore, Sahla’s days in the VVD were probably numbered.
And we have elections coming up in a few weeks. The current leader of the VVD, Dilan Yeşilgöz, also the current Minister for Justice and Security, and who, based on current polls has a good shot at becoming our next prime minister, promises a tough approach on crime. She said she was satisfied with Sahla’s expulsion.
From a debate to a crisis
The idea of an important politician like Bolkestein taking a convicted terrorist under his wing strikes me as a relic of another time, and another way of thinking. The “multicultural society” that he wrestled with, and for which he found his idealized version in Sahla, is no longer really a topic of discussion. It has been settled that when immigrants come they must integrate. Rutte made this official state policy in 2011.
These days, sometimes an “integration” issue will flare up—like public schools struggling with whether or not to allow prayer rooms for Muslim students—but the manner and methods of integration aren’t at the top of public discourse anymore.
Instead we debate how to keep people out of the country—which people (asylum seekers, students, expats, labor migrants), how many of them, and via which new laws and regulations.
Both the “multicultural debate” and the “immigration crisis” (today’s term) are fundamentally about the same thing: a concern over the maintenance of Dutch identity, and how that relates to the cohesion of society. In the 1990s and 2000s, this took the shape of questioning what to demand culturally from the foreigners living amongst us. Today, this expresses itself as a debate over how to best protect our resources (housing, health care, land) for people who are already here.
🥳 Leuke Dingetjes
As if you have not consumed enough content about this topic, Johan Fretz has a new song: “Fritz Bolkestein is my Sugar Daddy.”
This year’s Headwind Cycling championship was cancelled last week… because the wind from Storm Ciarán was too strong. lol. The video above is from last year.
*all typos in this post are on purpose