He directed Submission: Part 1, a short film written by Somali writer and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which criticised the treatment of women in Islam in strong terms.

The last film Van Gogh had completed before his murder, 06/05, was a fictional exploration of the assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn.

He was named after his paternal uncle Theo, who was captured and executed while working as a resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.

He was awarded a Gouden Kalf for Blind Date (1996) and In het belang van de staat ("In the Interest of the State", 1997).

Through the years he used his columns to express his frustration with politicians, actors, film directors, writers and other people he considered to be part of "the establishment".

[4] Working from a script written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Van Gogh created the 10-minute short film Submission.

In August 2004, after the movie's broadcast on Dutch public TV, the newspaper De Volkskrant reported that the journalist Francisco van Jole had accused Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh of plagiarism, saying that they had appropriated the ideas of Iranian-American video artist Shirin Neshat, whose work used Arabic text projected onto bodies.

[11] The perpetrator, 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan citizen Mohammed Bouyeri, also injured some bystanders and left a note pinned to Van Gogh's stomach with a knife containing death threats to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who went into hiding.

Fearing he might not survive a planned flight to New York, Van Gogh had spoken about his funeral wishes with friends shortly before his death.

[17] The day after the murder, Dutch police arrested eight people allegedly belonging to a group later referred to as the Hofstad Network.

[20] The Dutch Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia recorded a total of 106 violent incidents in November against Muslim targets.

The National Dutch Police Services Agency (KLPD) recorded 31 occasions of violence against mosques and Islamic schools between 23 November, and 13 March 2005.

Geert Wilders, at the time an independent member of the House of Representatives, advocated a five-year halt to immigration from non-Western societies, saying: "The Netherlands has been too tolerant to intolerant people for too long.

Theo's son Lieuwe van Gogh claims he has been attacked on several occasions by young people of Moroccan and Turkish descent, and that the police did not provide him with help or protection.

[23][24] On 18 March 2007, a sculpture honouring Theo van Gogh, entitled De Schreeuw ("The Scream"), was unveiled in Amsterdam.

[29] In the English-speaking world, controversy arose after Rohan Jayasekera's article on Van Gogh was published in Index on Censorship.

The Associate Editor of the magazine said that Van Gogh was a "free-speech fundamentalist" who had been on a "martyrdom operation[,] roar[ing] his Muslim critics into silence with obscenities" in an "abuse of his right to free speech".