Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (2 page)

The
Australian:

He provoked outrage among the Netherlands’ Muslim community after branding Islam a violent religion, likening the Koran to Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
and calling the Prophet Mohammed a pedophile.

Tony Eastley on ABC Radio:

Geert Wilders, who controls the balance of power in the Netherlands’ parliament, has outraged Dutch Muslims by comparing the Koran to Hitler’s work
Mein Kampf
and calling the Prophet Muhammad a pedophile...

Golly, you’d almost think all these hardworking investigative reporters were just cutting-and-pasting the same lazy precis rather than looking up what the guy actually says. The man who emerges in the following pages is not the grunting thug of media demonology but a well-read, well-traveled, elegant and perceptive analyst who quotes such “extreme” “fringe” figures as Churchill and Jefferson. As to those endlessly reprised Oz media talking points,
Mein Kampf
is banned in much of Europe; and Holocaust denial is also criminalized; and, when a French law on Armenian genocide denial was struck down, President Sarkozy announced he would immediately draw up another genocide denial law to replace it. In Canada, the Court of Queen’s Bench upheld a lower-court conviction of “hate speech” for a man who merely listed the chapter and verse of various Biblical injunctions on homosexuality. Yet, in a Western world ever more comfortable with regulating, policing, and criminalizing books, speech, and ideas, the state’s deference to Islam grows ever more fawning. “The Prophet Muhammed” (as otherwise impeccably secular Westerners now reflexively refer to him) is an ever greater beneficiary of our willingness to torture logic and law and liberty in ever more inane ways in the cause of accommodating Islam. Consider the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a Viennese housewife who has lived in several Muslim countries. She was hauled into an Austrian court for calling Muhammed a pedophile on the grounds that he consummated his marriage when his bride, Aisha, was nine years old. Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff was found guilty and fined 480 euros. The judge’s reasoning was fascinating:

Pedophilia is factually incorrect, since pedophilia is a sexual preference which solely or mainly is directed towards children. Nevertheless, it does not apply to Mohammad. He was still married to Aisha when she was 18.

So you’re not a pedophile if you deflower the kid in fourth grade but keep her around till high school? There’s a useful tip if you’re planning a hiking holiday in the Alps. Or is this another of those dispensations that is not of universal application?

A man who confronts such nonsense head on will not want for enemies. Still, it’s remarkable how the establishment barely bothers to disguise its wish for Wilders to meet the same swift and definitive end as Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. The judge at his show trial opted to deny the defendant the level of courtroom security afforded to Mohammed Bouyeri, van Gogh’s murderer. Henk Hofland, voted the Netherlands’ “Journalist of the century” (as the author wryly notes), asked the authorities to remove Wilders’ police protection so that he could know what it’s like to live in permanent fear for his life. While Wilders’ film
Fitna
is deemed to be “inflammatory,” the movie
De moord op Geert Wilders
(The Assassination of Geert Wilders) is so non-inflammatory and respectable that it was produced and promoted by a government-funded radio station. You’d almost get the impression that, as the website Gates of Vienna suggested, the Dutch state is channeling Henry II: “Who will rid me of this turbulent blond?”

There’s no shortage of volunteers. In the Low Countries, a disturbing pattern has emerged: those who seek to analyze Islam outside the very narrow bounds of Eutopian political discourse wind up either banned (Belgium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Ayaan Hirsi Ali), or killed (Fortuyn, van Gogh). How speedily “the most tolerant country in Europe” has adopted “shoot the messenger” as an all-purpose cure-all for “Islamophobia.”

It’s not ironic that the most liberal country in western Europe should be the most advanced in its descent into a profoundly illiberal hell. It was entirely foreseeable, and all Geert Wilders is doing is stating the obvious: a society that becomes more Muslim will have less of everything else, including individual liberty.

I have no desire to end up living like Geert Wilders or Kurt Westergaard, never mind dead as Fortuyn and van Gogh. But I also wish to live in truth, as a free man, and I do not like the shriveled vision of freedom offered by the Dutch Openbaar Ministerie, the British immigration authorities, the Austrian courts, Canada’s “human rights” tribunals, and the other useful idiots of Islamic imperialism. So it is necessary for more of us to do what Ayaan Hirsi Ali recommends: share the risk. So that the next time a novel or a cartoon provokes a
fatwa,
it will be republished worldwide and send the Islamic enforcers a message: killing one of us won’t do it. You’d better have a great credit line at the Bank of Jihad because you’ll have to kill us all.

As Geert Wilders says of the Muslim world’s general stagnation, “It’s the culture, stupid.” And our culture is already retreating into preemptive capitulation, and into a crimped, furtive, (Blair again) subterranean future. As John Milton wrote in his
Areopagitica
of 1644, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience.” It is a tragedy that Milton’s battles have to be re-fought three-and-a-half centuries on, but the Western world is shuffling into a psychological bondage of its own making. Geert Wilders is not ready to surrender without exercising his right to know, to utter, and to argue freely—in print, on screen, and at the ballot box. We should cherish that spirit, while we can.

CHAPTER ONE

The Axe Versus the Pen

The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted.

—Ronald Reagan

O
n January 1, 2010, at 10:00 p.m., a 74-year-old man fled from his living room. As fast as he could move with his cane, he made for the bathroom and locked himself inside. Then there was a terrible banging on the bathroom door, the clang of steel on steel. Screams for “Blood!” and “Revenge!” rang out as someone hacked at the door with an axe, trying to force himself in, seeking to chop the old man to pieces.

The scene took place in a modest bungalow in Viby, a middle-class suburb of Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city. One observer compared the attack to the famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror movie
The Shining
in which Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, maniacally chops his way through a bathroom door with an axe in an attempt to murder his wife.
¹

The old man is Kurt Westergaard. I met him once. He is a tall, soft-spoken grandfather with a grey beard, invariably dressed in bright red pants, a black shirt, and a flowing red scarf. When he goes out, he wears a black Stetson hat. “Black and red are the colors of anarchism,” he says. He is an artist who prefers to paint landscapes, but prior to his retirement he made a living by drawing cartoons for
Jyllands-Posten
(the
Jutland Post
)
,
a local newspaper in Aarhus.

In September 2005, Westergaard’s paper asked him, among other artists, to draw a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. His editors planned to publish the drawings to address a growing trend of self-censorship in Europe on the topic of Islam. They were particularly bothered by an incident in which several artists refused to illustrate a children’s book on Muhammad, and the artist who finally agreed to do it insisted on anonymity.
²
Westergaard accepted the paper’s request and recycled an idea he had drawn up twenty years earlier—an image of a fierce-looking terrorist with a bomb tucked in his turban.

Westergaard’s cartoon has become an iconic image of our age, turning the kindhearted artist into “the most hated man in Mecca.”
³
His simple drawing, published in an obscure Danish newspaper, sparked riots and attacks on Danish embassies and properties throughout the Islamic world, resulting in over 130 deaths. The reverberations reached Britain and America, where many media outlets refused to show the cartoons even as they reported on the controversy; this included the esteemed Yale University Press, which banned a book on the cartoon riots from reproducing the cartoons themselves or any other images of Muhammad.
⁴

And the cartoon led to the nightmare in Viby, where Muhudiin M. Geele, a 28-year-old Somali Muslim immigrant, turned up at Westergaard’s house with an axe and a butcher’s knife on New Year’s Day 2010. Luckily, due to the many death threats Westergaard had already received from Islamic extremists, along with a previous plot to murder him that resulted in three arrests, the Danish authorities had fortified the Westergaard home, installing bulletproof glass and surveillance cameras, reinforcing the front door, and crucially, transforming the family bathroom into a panic room with a steel door and an emergency button to contact the Viby police station.

Westergaard was sitting in his living room when Geele, who had broken into the garden, began to smash his way through the glass door to the living room. The door, made of reinforced bulletproof glass, eventually gave way, but Westergaard had time to lock himself in the bathroom. From there he alerted the police, who arrived three minutes later. Meanwhile, the young Somali, screaming with rage, was smashing at the steel bathroom door with his axe. When the police arrived, Geele attacked an officer with his axe before other policemen shot him in the knee and shoulder. If the attack on Westergaard had happened later in the evening when the cartoonist was asleep, he might not have managed his narrow escape. “It was close, really close,” he told a journalist.
⁵

Since he drew his Muhammad cartoon, Westergaard has endured what he calls “an existence full of angst.”
⁶
In September 2011, he had to cut short a visit to Norway after police arrested yet another person suspected of plotting to assassinate him.
⁷
Time has clearly not healed the “wounds” felt by fanatical Muslims, who want Westergaard dead for offending them with a cartoon that tells a truth they do not want to hear. His drawing, the artist explained at Princeton University in October 2009, “was an attempt to expose those fanatics who have justified a great number of bombings, murders and other atrocities with references to the sayings of their prophet. If many Muslims thought that their religion did not condone such acts, they might have stood up and declared that the men of violence had misrepresented the true meaning of Islam. Very few of them did so.”
⁸

The Islamic reaction to Geele’s attempt to kill Westergaard proved his point. So-called “radical” Muslims such as the aptly named Ali Mohamud Rage, spokesman of al-Shabab, the Somali Islamic group with which Viby’s axe-wielding zealot sympathized, congratulated the would-be assassin. Though Rage denied that Geele belonged to the group, he declared, “We welcome the brave action he did. It was a good and brave step taken by that Somali man against the criminal cartoonist—we liked it.”
⁹

Equally worrisome was the response from so-called “moderate” Muslims, such as the editorial staff of
Gulf News,
an English-language newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates. In a short editorial, the paper blamed the assassination attempt on Westergaard himself, morally equating Westergaard’s actions with Geele’s. “There is no doubt that the cartoon was deeply offensive to all Muslims,” the paper wrote. “For his work Westergaard is regarded with the greatest possible contempt by all who believe in the true faith of Islam. Targeting him, however, is descending to the level of a contemptuous and despicable man. This revenge attack merely again serves to highlight the insult wrought by Danish newspapers, stoking the embers of insult with the oxygen of hatred. Westergaard and his ilk are better forgotten.”
¹⁰

Thus, the
Gulf News,
widely hailed for its supposed “moderation,” criticized the would-be assassin not for attempting to kill Westergaard, but for having “descended to the level” of this “contemptuous and despicable man.” Obviously, even some so-called “moderate” Muslims fail to see there is a world of difference between drawing a cartoon and trying to hack a human being to pieces.

There is no better metaphor to illustrate the difference between Western values and the “true faith of Islam” than the difference between a pen and an axe. We settle our arguments with the former; Islam uses the latter. It is a frightening metaphor in some ways, indicating that when we are attacked with axes, we only have pens with which to defend ourselves.

Unlike Kurt Westergaard, I was never chased around my home by an axe-wielding Islamic fanatic. However, I do live with this kind of threat every day, which is why, like Westergaard, I have a panic room in my house, where I am supposed to take refuge if one of the adherents of the “religion of peace” makes it past my permanent security detail and into my home.

In fact, it’s not really my home at all—I live in a government safe house, heavily protected and bulletproof. Since November 2004, when a Muslim murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for the crime of offending Islam, I have been surrounded by police guards and stripped of nearly all personal privacy. I am driven every day from the safe house to my office in the Dutch Parliament building in armored police cars with sirens and flashing blue lights.

I wear a bulletproof jacket when I speak in public. Always surrounded by plainclothes police officers, I have not walked the streets on my own in more than seven years. When I occasionally go to a restaurant, security has to thoroughly check the place in advance. When I go to a movie theater, the last rows of seats are cleared for me and my guards. We come in after the movie has begun and leave before it ends—the last time I saw the beginning or the end of a movie in a Dutch theater, George W Bush was still serving his first term as U.S. president.

Why do I need this protection? I am not a president or a king; I am a mere member of the Dutch Parliament, one of 150 elected parliamentarians in the
Tweede Kamer,
the House of Representatives of the Netherlands, a small country of 16.5 million in Western Europe.

However, I have joined Westergaard in a rapidly growing group of individuals throughout the world who have been marked for death for criticizing Islam. For asserting our rights to say what we really think about this political ideology that disguises itself as a religion, we have been hounded by Muslims seeking to make an example of us.
Offend us,
they are saying to the world,
and you will end up in hiding like Wilders, attacked like Westergaard, or dead like van Gogh.

Free men and women everywhere must resist this violent intimidation at all costs. Armed only with our pens, we must defy Islam’s axes and knives. We must continue to speak our minds, knowing there is nothing more powerful than the truth. This is why we write our books and speeches, draw our cartoons, and make our movies and documentaries. The truth will set us free. That is what we really believe.

There is an old Biblical expression, “An eye for an eye.”
¹¹
The acceptance of this archaic law, dating back to the days of Abraham, was the first step that lifted mankind out of its barbarian state, because it restricted the extent of revenge and retribution to an equitable punishment. Though some pretend that Islam is an Abrahamic faith like Judaism and Christianity, Islam does not restrict revenge and retribution. It does not retaliate against a cartoon with another cartoon; it demands a head for a cartoon—a head for every drawing, book, speech, or movie that it deems to be “insulting.”
¹²

In many countries—in Islamic nations, of course, but increasingly in the West as well—cartoonists, writers, bloggers, and elected officials such as myself have been prosecuted for the crime of insulting Muslims or Islam. In court, our only defense once again is the pen—expressing the truth as we honestly see it. Yet we are constantly confronted by those who want to rob us even of that weapon. They want to break our pens and force us into silence. Some say that critics of Islam like myself should keep quiet because we are just as bad and just as dangerous as the axe-wielding barbarians who invade our homes.

We will not be picking up axes and breaking into people’s homes. But we will not remain silent either. Moderation in the face of evil is not what our age needs. As Ronald Reagan declared, “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted.”
¹³

We must uncap our pens; we must speak words of truth. We are facing a determined enemy who is striving through all means to destroy the West and snuff out our traditions of free thought, free speech, and freedom of religion. Make no mistake: if we fail, we will be enslaved.

We must not let the violent fanatics dictate what we draw, what we say, and what we read. We must rebel against their suffocating rules and thuggish demands at every turn. You can help the fight just by reading this book, which explains the many ways in which Islam has marked for death not just me, but all of Western civilization.

We must, in the words of Revolutionary War veteran General John Stark, “Live free or die.”