Between 2007 and 2015 I provided a weekly column in Theodor Holman’s radio program Oba Live, which was called Ketter & Geest. “Messages of interest to the wicked,” said a sombre bass voice at the announcement. Every week I cut the papers and scoured the internet, looking for all that the puzzling phenomenon of religion has to offer. From child abuse to the Wailing Wall, from vaccination denials on Urk to the sheikh who wanted the death penalty for Mickey Mouse – everyone and everything came along, sometimes to the sadness and sometimes to the laughter of the listeners.
One day, about fifteen years ago, a young woman unknown to me was sitting in the public gallery of the program. Afterwards she came to me and introduced herself as Soumaya Sahla. We got talking. To my surprise, she told me that she had been in prison as a member of the Hofstad group – in the same ward as Mohammed B., the murderer of Theo van Gogh. She also shared that she listened faithfully to Heretic & Spirit every week and had become curious about the voice that spoke so boldly about God and his followers.
We then went for a drink with a group of program employees in an adjacent establishment, where we became engaged in an animated conversation. It was interesting for me personally, because at that time I wrote a biography about Theo van Gogh – later taken over by Jaap Cohen – and had tried to get in touch with Mohammed B through lawyer Peter Plasman. To no avail, but Soumaya was able to give me a glimpse in the cell of Theo’s killer.
After that I kept in touch with her via e-mails. Every now and then we met in café Schlemmer, opposite the Binnenhof. She no longer wore a headscarf. I also met her once at a dinner party with journalists and columnists, where we talked about Islam and the Arab world. She seemed genuine to me. Maybe I’m naive, but if she wanted to blow me and others up, she would have already done so.
She traveled a lot and once I received warm greetings from Israel from her. There I know my Pappenheimers a bit and I suspect that as a former terrorist you really don’t enter that country if you plan to throw a hand grenade. I leave further conclusions to the reader. She had also been to Yad Vashem and attended a lecture on the Holocaust. She sent another interview that a Hebrew newspaper had taken from her.
In the meantime, she had been apprenticed to the Leiden professors Kinneging and Cliteur, and she hopes to receive her PhD in the near future. Both are professors of a conservative-liberal streak. You often see a convert find a new home that is diametrically opposed to the old home. When Soumaya invited me a while back for a lecture that Cliteur and she were to give, I also met Wierd Duk, the tireless reporter of the Telegraph which you cannot suspect of subversive activities either.
The last time I met Soumaya was at a garden party at the Prometheus publishing house last summer. She was there with VVD celebrity Frits Bolkestein, who took her under his wing as his assistant. I think old Bolk was just a little bit in love with her, that’s what it looked like. Unfortunately we can’t ask him for a while, because he is currently recovering.
The fact that Soumaya was just wandering around in the wild at that garden party can only mean that all of Amsterdam, and presumably all of the Netherlands, has long known that she is part of Dutch politics and its capillaries. I can only imagine that Geert Wilders has also been aware of it for a long time. If he would not have known, he would have had some kind of horns on. From his point of view, he has every right to make such a fuss about it now, but that seems a bit late to me, and his attack on the VVD is of course not free from political motives.
It must be said that Sophie Hermans, the new party leader of the VVD in the House of Representatives, was able to produce little rebuttal and has acted rather cowardly. If something like that happens in your party, you stand right in front of your people. Or you let them fall – if there really is no other way – in full sincerity. But ‘it’s just in my stomach’ is mostly weak tea. Politicians are in favor of solving stomach problems.
I wonder if Soumaya will ever be summoned to the turret again.