THE HAGUE, March 29, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Islamic schools and centers in the Netherlands continued to come under apparently hate-driven attacks, as the Dutch police said perpetrators of an arson attack against an Islamic school, the second of its kind in a few months, were yet to be identified.

Dutch police sources said Monday, March 28, that unidentified assailants attacked the Badr Islamic school in the central town of Uden Sunday, with Molotov cocktails, causing light damages at the Islamic place.

“The damage this time was limited to two burnt chairs but the Muslim community and the school workers were “shocked that this could happen a second time,” said the mayor of Uden.

Investigations are under way to reveal identity of the attackers, said the Dutch police.

“Efforts to identify the attackers have yet proved futile. We don’t know who was behind the attack,” said a spokesman for the Dutch police.

The assault was the second such attack against the same Islamic school in a matter of months.

On November 2004, the school came under an arson attack by three Dutch teenagers. The attack left the building of the Islamic school totally destroyed.

The vandals also daubed anti-Muslim swastika on the building walls.

Condemning the assault, thousands of Dutch people took to the streets then to protest the rising anti-Muslim attacks in the country.

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende also visited the school and met with the Muslim students in a show of solidarity with the Muslim community.

The latest attack is seen as a sign of rising Islamophobia in the European country, following the murder of a controversial Dutch filmmaker several months ago.

The attack also left the Muslim minority in the Netherlands shocked at the rising racist attacks against Dutch Muslims and Islamic places in the country.

“We are shocked at the rising attacks against the Dutch Muslims,” Ahmed Boulat, a founder of the Badr school, told Dutch Brabender channel.

“Such racist attacks are organized operations, not just reckless acts, which raise concern and fears from all classes of the Dutch society,” he stressed.

On Saturday, March 26, another attempted attack was made on a mosque in Oldenzaal in the east of the country.

Racist attacks against the Dutch Muslim minority have been picking up speed and intensity since the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who was killed by a 26-year-old citizen with Moroccan origin, identified as Mohamed B.

Van Gogh was widely known for his criticism of Islam and recently caused an uproar with his short film “Submission” about Islam and women.

Dutch Muslims and human rights activists had expressed their deep disgust and outrage at the hatred-inciting 11-minute clip, saying they found it "extremely insulting”.

The Muslim minority in the Netherlands swiftly condemned the killing of the filmmaker.

“I abhor his views on Islam and find them hurtful for the Islamic community, but there is no motive that can justify a murder,” Ayhan Tonca of the Dutch organ for contact between Muslims and government, had said.

Muslims make up one million of the Netherlands’s 16 million population. Turks represent 80 percent of the Muslim minority.

There are some 450 mosques in the Netherlands, 1,000 Islamic cultural centers, two Islamic universities and 42 preparatory schools, according to recent estimates.