Excerpt:
Documentary films, special reports and a memorial tribute to Theo van Gogh are among the activities taking place in the Netherlands on Monday, five years after the filmmaker was slain by a religious extremist.
Van Gogh, who was an outspoken critic of radical Islam and a descendant of the famed painter, is being remembered by politicians, family, friends and fans as the country reflects on how his violent death in Amsterdam in 2004 changed the nation.
"We learned from it," Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen said in an interview with NOS radio on Monday.
Though the scale of destruction was of course different, Cohen compared the after-effects of the filmmaker's death on the Netherlands to the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.