Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (19 page)

The OIC telegraphed decades ago its campaign to undermine traditional human rights and adopt special protections for Islam. In 1990, the organization rejected the UN’s iconic Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and replaced it with the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. The Cairo Declaration does not recognize freedom of religion or freedom of speech for non-Muslims, or equal rights for men and women. Instead, it is a document of unabashed Islamic supremacism as established in its preamble, which states that man has the “right to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shari’ah.”
¹⁰
Sharia
is Islamic holy law as derived from the Koran and the example set by Muhammad. The Declaration does not mention man’s right to live a dignified life
outside
the bounds of Islamic Sharia because the OIC does not believe in that right. This is made clear in numerous passages:

• Article 2 guarantees the right to life of every human being “except for Shari’ah prescribed reason.” Likewise, safety from bodily harm is guaranteed unless “a Shari’ah-prescribed reason” dictates otherwise.

• Article 7 restricts parents’ rights to those that are “in accordance with the tenets of the shari’ah.” Article 12 restricts the rights of free movement “within the framework of the Shari’ah” and further states that the safety of asylum-seekers must be guaranteed “unless asylum is motivated by committing an act regarded by the Shari’ah as a crime.”

• Article 16 protects a person’s rights to the moral and material interests derived from his scientific, literary, artistic or technical labor “provided it is not contrary to the principles of the Shari’ah.” Article 19 states that “there shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Shari’ah.”

• Article 22 restricts freedom of speech and opinion to “such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari’ah.” It states that “everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari’ah.” Article 23 guarantees political rights as long as they are “in accordance with the provisions of Shari’ah.”

• Article 24 summarizes, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah.” Article 25 reaffirms that “the Islamic Shari’ah is the only source of reference for the explanation and clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration.”

In short, the OIC’s Cairo Declaration limits every human being’s rights and freedoms so fundamentally that nothing remains but the limited number of liberties granted by the Koran and by Muhammad. As explained in previous chapters, these few rights and freedoms are reserved for practicing Muslims, hence they are not universal rights at all—they are rules for an apartheid society that privileges Muslims and oppresses non-Muslims.

The Cairo Declaration is such a blatant attack on universal human rights that states that adhere to it do not belong in the United Nations. After all, the UN’s fundamental document is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the OIC rejects in favor of the discriminatory Cairo Declaration. Because OIC members have placed themselves outside the civilized world by rejecting the very concept of human rights, Western nations should demand that OIC member states be expelled from the UN until they revoke the Cairo Declaration. The West should stop paying its financial contributions to the UN as long as the UN accepts such members.

In a debate in the Dutch Parliament on November 7, 2007, I said that we should limit our bilateral relations with these countries to a minimum and stop our development aid unless they renounce the Cairo Declaration.

I want to contain the further expansion of those who intend to destroy our freedom. As President John F. Kennedy said: “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.”
¹¹

By speaking the truth to the peoples of the
Umma
—as Reagan did to Soviet peoples when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”—we will demonstrate our steadfast resolve and our conviction in our own civilization. This show of strength may persuade some in the Islamic world to turn against the Islamic yoke, just as everyday people in Eastern Europe grew disgusted by communism and ultimately overthrew it. As with communism, a Western campaign of constant pressure could expedite the collapse of Islam through its own contradictions.

I am by no means the first to note the similarities between Islam and communism. In a 1956 article, French author and statesman André Malraux wrote,

The outstanding event of our time is the violence of the advance of Islam. Underestimated by most of our contemporaries, the ascendancy of Islam is analogically comparable to the beginnings of communism at the time of Lenin. The consequences of this phenomenon are still unpredictable. At the outset of the Marxist revolution, people thought they could stem its tide through partial solutions. Neither Christianity nor organizations such as corporations or labor unions found a solution. Likewise today the Western world is hardly prepared to confront the problem of Islam.
¹²

Malraux, a valiant veteran of France’s anti-Nazi resistance movement, was pessimistic that we could prevail over the Islamic onslaught. “Perhaps partial solutions would have been sufficient to stem the tide of Islam, if they had been applied in time,” he said. “Now it is too late! All that we can do is to become conscious of the gravity of the phenomenon and to try to slow down its progression.”
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I do not share Malraux’s pessimism; in fact, I reject cynicism and despair as vehemently as I reject violence. Our commitment to truth, human dignity, and a just and honorable defense of the West do not permit us to resort to bloodshed or to give in to despondency. I cherish the tradition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yelena Bonner, Lech Walesa, and Ronald Reagan, heroes who helped to defeat a totalitarian ideology through the strength of their convictions. As the Islamic apostate Ali Sina declared about his anti-Islam activism, “We don’t raise a sword against darkness; we lit a light.”
¹⁴

Like his compatriot Malraux, the great French writer and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville was also acquainted with Islam. “I studied the Koran a great deal,” he wrote in an 1843 letter to a friend, “I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.”
¹⁵

Nevertheless, in his seminal book
Democracy in America,
Tocqueville was optimistic that Islam would ultimately be vanquished. “Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories,” he wrote. “The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy.”
¹⁶

On March 2, 2010, a Muslim woman in a
niqab
—Islamic garb that covers the whole body and face except for the eyes—went to buy some stamps at the post office of the main train station in Hamburg, Germany. “I will not wait on you,” the female clerk told the mummy in front of her. “You will not be served while veiled. I am face to face with you, so I expect you to do the same for me.”
¹⁷
The Muslim woman, a 20-year-old German who had converted to Islam the previous year, complained to her Islamic-born husband, who lodged an official complaint with the post office. “This has hurt us deeply,” he wailed. “We are not living in Nazi Germany anymore.” Following this complaint, the boss of the post office employee warned her that he would not tolerate her “discriminatory behavior” and that she was putting her job in jeopardy. “In our office, every customer is treated equally,” he told a local newspaper. “If she has a problem with serving veiled people, then she cannot continue working at the counter.”
¹⁸

The post office employee, however, should never have been reprimanded. In fact, if Westerners want to preserve our liberty, we should follow her courageous example. She experienced some of the consequences that are faced by anyone who takes a peaceful stand against the oppressions of Islam—our jobs are put at risk, we are harassed by the authorities, and our very lives are threatened. And yet, it is our duty to speak the truth, however shocking and politically incorrect it may be.

In that same month of March 2010, Margareta Ritter, mayor of the German town of Monschau, where I had spent some holidays, declared me
persona non grata
and forbade me from entering her town because I had compared the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s
Mein Kampf.
¹⁹

I was not the first to make that comparison. In Winston Churchill’s six-volume history
The Second World War
, for which he won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature, the great British statesman wrote of
Mein Kampf,
“All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message. The main thesis of
Mein Kampf
is simple. Man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation, being a community of fighters, is a fighting unit.”
²⁰

Many Western countries—though not the United States with its First Amendment—prohibit the publication, distribution, sale, or possession of
Mein Kampf.
These include the Netherlands, which outlaws the distribution of Hitler’s infamous book. I attracted a lot of attention when I said that if the Netherlands bans
Mein Kampf
as a threat to our society, then it should ban the Koran for the same reason. In reaction to my proposal, a Dutch minister suggested lifting the ban on
Mein Kampf,
but Dutch politicians overwhelmingly rejected his suggestion “out of respect for the victims of the Nazis.”
²¹
I don’t understand why the victims of Islam do not deserve the same respect. Why is it hate speech when Hitler calls Jews vermin, but not when the Koran calls them pigs and commands that they be killed?

In Austria, Hitler’s native country, it is illegal to possess copies of
Mein Kampf.
Why doesn’t the same rule apply to the Koran in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad’s native country? Both books propagate an ideology that resulted in the deaths of millions, so why is one legal and the other banned? Because the Saudis believe that the Koran was written by Allah in the seventh heaven? Who can reasonably accept that argument?

In France, publications of
Mein Kampf
must include a warning about its contents, but no similar warning is required for the Koran. Perhaps French authorities believe French readers would take Hitler’s words more seriously than Muslims would take the words of Allah. Nevertheless,
Mein Kampf
is not a huge commercial success in France. The same cannot be said for Turkey, where Hitler’s treatise is not only legal, it is one of the country’s bestselling non-fiction books.
²²
The same is true in the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere in the Arab world.
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Most people in the West are fair-minded and educated enough that they can’t be incited to commit violence against a group of people just by reading some book. But there is a minority of easily impressionable people who
can
be incited, and this danger is magnified when people believe they are reading a book ordained by God. History teaches that we cannot underestimate the impact a single book can have, from the Bible—which shaped all of Western civilization—to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
—which helped spark the American Civil War.