Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (3 page)

CHAPTER TWO

On Freedom

The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God.

—John Quincy Adams

I
n 2008, I made a short movie called
Fitna,
which is the Arabic word for “ordeal,” or more specifically, “a test of faith in times of trial.”
Fitna
is a documentary meant to warn people about the Koran’s violent commandments and about the dangerous ideology of Islam.
¹
Some people think that it is because fanatical Muslims feel “insulted” by
Fitna
that now, in 2012, I still have to live in a government safe house and travel in an armored car, that I have lost all privacy, that I sometimes have to wear a bulletproof vest, and that I have to leave theaters before the movies end. They are wrong

Fitna
was released in March 2008, more than three years after my ordeal began. Long before I made
Fitna,
I had lost my freedom because of death threats related to my political activities. I lost my freedom because I am a politician, not because I am a filmmaker.

I received my first death threats in September 2003 after I asked the Dutch government to investigate, and if necessary close down, the al-Furqan mosque in Eindhoven, a city about eighty miles southeast of Amsterdam. Its main mosque was suspected of being a hotbed of Islamic extremism.
²
A second wave of threats followed a year later when I left my political party, the
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie
(People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, or VVD) because, among other things, I disagreed with its support for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. When I decided to leave the VVD and sit as an independent parliamentarian, extremists swamped me with threatening emails. “Wilders, you are a dead man,” one wrote. “We are going to cut your head off.” In October 2004, a video appeared on the internet demanding that I be decapitated. The message was accompanied by wailing in Arabic along with pictures of me and my colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Ayaan, at the time also a VVD parliamentarian, is a former Muslim originally from Somalia. Having experienced female genital mutilation and other cruel Islamic customs, she fled in the early 1990s to the Netherlands, where she became a successful politician. She was one of my closest political allies, having cooperated with me in 2003 in asking the Dutch government to crack down on radical mosques. She, too, had been receiving death threats for many months. In fact, she was subject to far more threats than I was. By renouncing her Islamic faith, she had committed apostasy, the ultimate crime in Islam, for which the Koran prescribes the death penalty; once you are Islamic, you are never allowed to leave.

Due to the video decapitation threat, I received my first personal security detail. Bodyguards followed me when I went out, but I was allowed to continue living in Venlo, my hometown in the eastern Netherlands, and keep up my normal activities.

A few weeks later, however, everything changed. On November 2, 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated by a young Muslim; two days later, just after America re-elected George W Bush as president, I lost my freedom and became a political prisoner in my own country.

I never met Theo van Gogh, who was a talented but very provocative filmmaker and columnist. Van Gogh used language that I would never use. He called Muslims “goat f***ers,” their prophet Muhammad a “f***er of little girls,” their imams “scum from Allah’s sewers,” and their god “a pig called Allah.”
³

He was equally aggressive toward Christianity and Judaism; he referred to Jesus as “that rotting fish of Nazareth,”
⁴
and he ridiculed the Holocaust, joking that “cremated Jewish diabetics smelled of caramel.”
⁵
It’s not widely known that van Gogh attacked Christianity and Judaism alongside Islam, because Christians and Jews didn’t react to his diatribes by murdering him.

Van Gogh, the great-great-grandnephew of the painter Vincent van Gogh, liked to shock people. His movies were cynical, nihilistic, and morbid, often depicting orgies of blood and sadism—many of his countrymen were particularly offended by one film in which he ran kittens through a washing machine. Theo van Gogh was, in the words of the Dutch novelist Leon de Winter, “an artiste provocateur—troublesome, offensive and hyperbolic but, it should be said, accepted within the wide boundaries of Dutch culture.”
⁶

From the late 1990s, van Gogh was concerned by the spread of Islam in the Netherlands, a trend he believed threatened Holland’s legendary liberalism. He used his usual acid, mocking style while speaking out against Islam, leading to numerous death threats. But he refused to take the threats seriously or accept police protection. “Who would want to kill the village idiot?” he asked. He was either courageous, naive, or both.

But he underestimated the violent wrath of his Islamic enemies. In 2004, Theo van Gogh was slaughtered on a busy Amsterdam street, Linnaeusstraat, on a Tuesday morning during Ramadan. The killer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutchman of Moroccan descent who had just finished his morning prayers in Amsterdam’s El-Tawheed mosque, another radical Dutch mosque that Ayaan and I had asked the authorities to investigate.

Like the 2010 murder attempt on Kurt Westergaard, the scene in Linnaeusstraat on the fateful morning of November 2, 2004, could have come straight from a horror film—one set in a typically Dutch locale, since both the murderer and his victim were riding bikes. At around 9:00 a.m., as van Gogh was biking to work, Bouyeri overtook him, pulled a gun, and shot and wounded the filmmaker, knocking him off his bike. The assassin, who was dressed in an Arabian
djellaba,
jumped on the 47-year-old man, pulled out a butcher’s knife, and slit van Gogh’s throat according to the Islamic slaughtering ritual. Then he planted the knife in the filmmaker’s chest and used a second knife to pin a five-page letter into van Gogh’s stomach.

Three months before his assassination, van Gogh had finished a ten-minute documentary entitled
Submission,
the English translation of the Arabic word for “Islam.” Discussing the abuse of women in Islam, the film had been broadcast on Dutch television in late August 2004. The documentary showed a woman whose naked body was visible through her transparent chador and gown. On her body were calligraphed verses describing the physical punishments prescribed by the Koran for “disobedient” women.

It was a powerful, almost poetic film with a shocking message. Van Gogh had made a subtle and subdued movie, refraining from his usual vulgar language. In fact, the script for
Submission
had been written by my colleague, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who as a child and young woman had herself experienced the terrifying plight of Islamic women.

After the release of
Submission,
both Ayaan and Theo van Gogh received death threats from Islamic fanatics. Van Gogh insisted that he feared more for Ayaan’s safety than his own, noting that “she is the apostate.”
⁷
Some people believe van Gogh was murdered because of
Submission
; friends of the killer, however, claim that the filmmaker had to die because he had once called Allah a pig.
⁸
Perhaps Bouyeri simply picked van Gogh because, having refused police protection, he was an easier target than Ayaan or myself.

On the morning of van Gogh’s murder, my guards accompanied me to my office at the
Tweede Kamer.
A few minutes later, they came back and told me Theo van Gogh had been assassinated. Journalists soon began calling and visiting me to get my reaction. I remember my legs were shaking with shock and indignation. I do not pretend to be a man who knows no fear, but when I heard about van Gogh’s murder I can honestly say I felt anger, not fear. I defiantly proclaimed to the journalists that I would not allow anyone to intimidate me into silence.

I was angry at the assassin and his accomplices, I was angry at Islam—this doctrine that has people murdered for their opinions—and I was angry at the naive politicians, journalists, and so-called intellectuals in the West who refuse to admit how dangerous Islam is and how fundamentally incompatible it is with our Western values and ideals. I was also mystified why Theo van Gogh had been so careless—he had told everyone that Islam was dangerous, but he refused to take precautions.

I was angry because, whatever one may think about Theo van Gogh, he was slaughtered like an animal simply for criticizing Islam. Nevertheless, on the very day of his assassination, academics, politicians, imams, and Islamic spokesmen—even those of Amsterdam’s El-Tawheed mosque, where the murderer had prayed just before he killed van Gogh—were already on the radio and television spouting their usual apologetics: that Islam is a “religion of peace,” that the murderer did not represent “real Islam,” and even that the assassination had been, according to Mohamed Ousalah, Deputy Chairman of the Association of Dutch Imams, an “anti-Islamic act”
⁹
—as if a Muslim were the victim instead of the assassin.

Stunningly, a few years later, the Dutch government would adopt the same language. Since April 2007 the website of the official Dutch counterterrorism agency has stated that the Dutch authorities avoid using the terms “Islamic terrorism,” “Muslim terrorism,” “Islamist terrorism” or “religiously inspired terrorism” because “the large majority of Muslims sees terrorism as un-Islamic.”
¹⁰
Most European governments have now adopted this misguided policy. In January 2008, the British government officially adopted new language for declarations about Islamic terrorism. Islamic terrorists were henceforth to be referred to as people pursuing “anti-Islamic activity”—because, they say, “linking terrorism to Islam is inflammatory, and risks alienating mainstream Muslim opinion.”
¹¹

Of all the upsetting things about van Gogh’s killing, the cowardice of the Dutch government angered me the most. One would think the government, if it were really concerned about the safety and security of its citizens, would react to van Gogh’s murder by launching a sustained crackdown on Islamic extremism in the Netherlands—shutting down radical mosques, investigating suspected extremists, and stopping the spread of this ideology by reducing Islamic immigration. Instead, the government took a much different approach—on November 10, 2004, barely a week after van Gogh’s assassination, Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner, a Christian Democrat, and Interior Minister Johan Remkes, VVD, wrote a letter to the Speaker of the
Tweede Kamer
suggesting that the Netherlands “prevent and counter Islamic radicalization” by penalizing “insults and blasphemy.”
¹²

In the hours and days that followed the murder, the media revealed many disturbing details, including the fact that van Gogh had been ritually slaughtered. The police also revealed the content of the five-page letter impaled on his body. It was an open letter in Dutch and Arabic to Ayaan Hirsi Ali in which Bouyeri complained that the Netherlands was “controlled by the Jews” and called for
jihad
—Islamic holy war—against non-Muslims. He threatened Ayaan’s life and boasted that she, the Netherlands, Europe, and America would soon perish. The police also discovered a similar open letter that Bouyeri had addressed to me, “the filthy thing Wilders.” It warned that I, and people of my ilk, would soon be “destroyed.”
¹³

The killing of van Gogh was a shock, but I could not foresee that in just two days’ time, it would dramatically impact nearly every aspect of my everyday life.