Theo van Gogh (The Hague, 1957) was a film maker, was a Dutch film director, producer, columnist, author and actor. Van Gogh worked with the right wing Somali-born writer and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce the short film Submission (2004), which criticized the treatment of women in Islam. Many muslims took offense at its criticism. Earlier on, Van Gogh had criticized Islam many more times in his articles. On 2 November 2004 Van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a radical Dutch-Moroccan Muslim. The assassination shocked the Netherlands, which has a society where the freedom of speech is one of it’s foremost values. Weeks afterwards the tensions between muslims and non-muslims in Amsterdam and the county arose, but didn’t come to a way of escalation.