Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (4 page)

On the evening of November 4, 2004, my guards accompanied me home to Venlo, wished me good night, and left. It was around 7:00 p.m. Fifteen minutes later they were back, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying machine guns. “You will have to leave at once,” they announced. After giving me ten minutes to pack, they pushed me into an armored car and drove me off into the night. That was the last time I was in my house.

The guards told me they had to bring me to a safe place because the authorities had discovered imminent threats to assassinate me. They would not tell me where we were going, and they refused my demand to call the Minister of the Interior to find out exactly what was happening. Later, I learned that even the guards themselves initially had not known where they had to take me. They drove me around for several hours and changed cars a couple times before delivering me to an army barracks in the woods near the Belgian border.

Shortly before midnight I arrived at the barracks, where I met my fellow parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali and my wife, both of whom had been taken there separately. We were not allowed to go out, call anyone, or meet anyone, and we had no radio or television. Even the soldiers at the barracks were not allowed to know we were there. My wife and I were brought to a small, ice-cold room that had only a table, two chairs, and two single beds. We had no warm water or central heating.

The next morning, Ayaan managed to contact a friend and tell her where she was. When the friend tried to reach her by calling the barracks, our cover was blown. The angry guards moved us to another place, a nearby school for police officers that was empty for the weekend. The following morning we were driven to yet another location.

Meanwhile, the international media reported that Ayaan and I, two “anti-Muslim politicians,” had “gone into hiding after death threats.”
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They portrayed us as having run away like cowards, shunning responsibility for our alleged hatred of Muslims. In reality, we found ourselves practically imprisoned in our own country for the mere fact that we had spoken out against enemies of the West.

On June 4, 2009, I watched President Barack Obama on television give his famous speech at al-Azhar University in Cairo. I heard Obama proclaim that he “consider[ed] it part of [his] responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
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I remember thinking,
But what if these so-called “negative stereotypes of Islam” are the truth—will you denounce people for telling the truth? And if violent Islam is really just a “negative stereotype,” then why have I had to live like a virtual prisoner for more than four years due to death threats from Muslims?

Normally, as a Dutch politician, I would refrain from judging the U.S. president. I admire the American people, I respect their political choices, and they chose Barack Obama as their leader. However, the U.S. president is also seen as the leader of the free world. As such, President Obama’s Cairo speech affected not only America, but also Europe and the entire world. As someone who has experienced a different side of Islam than Obama has, I feel entitled to speak frankly about his remarks.

First, we must understand the significance of the location of Obama’s speech. Cairo’s al-Azhar University is the chief center of Sunni Islamic learning in the world. It is sometimes called “the nearest thing to a Sunni Vatican,”
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as its Islamic scholars pronounce
fatwas
(Islamic edicts) regarding proper conduct for Muslims. In typical Islamic fashion, al-Azhar practices institutional apartheid. Non-Muslims such as Copts—members of Egypt’s indigenous Christian minority—are banned from studying there. The ban covers not just the faculty of Islamic theology, but also non-religious faculties such as medicine, economics, agriculture, and all others.
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Ignoring this blatant discrimination, President Obama praised al-Azhar as “a beacon of Islamic learning.” He also declined to mention the fate of Abdelkareem Soliman Amer, a 22-year-old al-Azhar student who was expelled from the university in 2006 for writing a blog that supported freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and women’s rights. In February 2007, the young Muslim was given a four-year jail sentence for, among other things, calling al-Azhar a “university of terror” and accusing the school of suppressing free thought.
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Amer was still in prison while Obama spoke, but the president wasn’t moved to mention the plight of a young man whose own father has called for his execution under Islamic law.
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Previous American presidents, of course, have given their own historic speeches, such as John F. Kennedy’s famous “
Ich bin ein Berliner
” speech and Ronald Reagan’s legendary address demanding that Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” We are compelled to add President Obama’s Cairo speech to this list, for it is just as important as Kennedy’s and Reagan’s remarks, though in a much different way.

In Obama’s address to “Muslims around the world,” for the first time in America’s 233-year history, a U.S. president offered a pact to the followers of one particular religion. By announcing a “partnership between America and Islam” and by explicitly stating that “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes about Islam,” Obama bestowed upon Islam a privileged position above all other religions and ideologies. Neither he nor any of his predecessors have taken a pilgrimage to the Vatican to offer a “partnership between America and Christianity” and to pledge to use the power of their office “to fight against negative stereotypes” about Christians. Such a move would rightly be seen as an act of American submission to a faith system. And that’s exactly the way the Islamic world interpreted Obama’s naive declarations in Cairo—that henceforward, America’s president would be subservient to Islam’s political agenda. Islam has a word for such a pact of subservience. It is called a
dhimma,
and non-Muslims who accept subservience to Islam are called
dhimmis.
In Cairo, simply put, Obama indicated to the Islamic world that he was a dhimmi.

This is how his speech was understood by, among many others, Wafa Sultan, a courageous Arab ex-Muslim. She was a psychiatrist in Syria before she was forced to emigrate to the United States, where she became an American citizen. Wafa is a voice of moderation and a beacon of light, widely known in the Arab world through her participation in political debates on al Jazeera.

President Obama’s Cairo speech, Wafa wrote, “makes my work and that of others who speak up against intolerant Islamic doctrines more challenging. He undermines this mission by placating abusive, xenophobic policies and enabling those within the Islamic world to subjugate others, to coerce others to its beliefs, and to continue these pursuits with his blessing.” She continued, “The president failed to join freedom-loving individuals, liberated Arabs like myself. He failed to lead the Muslim world into modernization and vital reform.”
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By pandering to Islam, Obama let down Wafa and other Arabs who yearn for freedom. He also let down America. Not once did the president mention the words “terrorism,” “terrorist,” or “terror,” let alone the need to fight this scourge. Ten times, however, he used the word “respect,” soaking his speech in professions of reverence for Islam.

Obama further proclaimed that “Islam is a part of America,” arguing that America and Islam “overlap and share common principles.” He asserted there are “nearly 7 million American Muslims in our country today” and stressed that “Islam has always been a part of America’s story.” To prove the latter, he referred to Thomas Jefferson keeping the “Holy Koran...in his personal library”; to Morocco “being the first nation to recognize my country”; and to “our second President, John Adams,” who “in signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, wrote, ‘The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.’”

While Obama undeniably has deep personal links to Islam stemming from his upbringing in Indonesia and his Islamic ancestry through his father’s lineage in Kenya, his arguments supposedly proving that America is indebted to Islam, and has been so from the beginning of the Republic, are thoroughly flawed.

It is simply not true, at least not yet, that there are 7 million American Muslims—that is a wild exaggeration put forward by U.S.-based Islamic interest groups. According to the nonpartisan Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a mere 0.8 percent of the American population was Muslim in 2010, yielding a figure of 2.6 million American Muslims.
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It is also untrue that Morocco was “the first nation to recognize” the United States. Morocco signed a treaty with the U.S. in 1786, after major European countries such as France (1778), the Netherlands (1782), Britain (1783), Sweden (1783), Prussia (1785), and Spain (1786) had already done so.
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While it is true that Thomas Jefferson possessed a Koran, in no way did he regard it as “holy,” as Obama implied. In 1801 Jefferson waged war against the Islamic Barbary states of north Africa in order to stop the pillaging of ships and the enslavement of more than a million Christians. The ambassador of these Islamic nations had told Jefferson and John Adams that Muslims justify their slaughter and enslavement of non-Muslims through the “Laws of the Prophet” and the Koran. Jefferson kept a copy of the book to understand the hostile nature of Islam, not because he admired it.
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There is also no proof that John Adams, America’s second president, was convinced of the “tranquility of Muslims,” since Adams did not write the lines Obama attributed to him.
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But John Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president, wrote several essays on the threat that Islam posed throughout world history. He used words such as “fanatic” and “imposter” to describe Muhammad, calling him a “false prophet” who “spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth.” Adams said Muhammad had perverted faith in God “by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion.” Muhammad, Adams argued, “poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE”
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[emphasis in original].

Further contradicting Obama’s innocent view of Islamic history, John Quincy Adams wrote that war had been raging between Islam and Christianity for twelve hundred years. This conflict, he argued, cannot “cease but by the extinction of that imposture [Islam], which has been permitted by Providence to prolong the degeneracy of man.” He posited that as long as “the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth.”
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President Obama, like his immediate predecessor George W. Bush, refuses to admit that Adams was right. Contrary to the entire history of Islam—from the caravan raiding, warfare, and slave-trading that was condoned by Muhammad himself, to Islam’s bloody spread throughout the Middle East and beyond, to the honor killings, suicide bombings, wanton violence against non-Muslims, and countless other outrages that characterize Islamic countries today—President Bush parroted the mantra that “Islam is peace.”
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Echoing this ahistorical falsehood, Obama told his audience in Cairo, “Throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance.... Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism—it is an important part of promoting peace.”
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It is ironic that Obama’s Cairo address mentioned the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli. While his speechwriters invoked it to prove that Islam has been part of America’s history from the very beginning, the treaty in fact proves something else—that from the earliest days of the Republic, Islam was trying to enslave American citizens.

The Tripoli Treaty was signed between the young, weak United States and the Bey of Tripoli, a leader of the ruthless Barbary pirates who were raiding American ships and enslaving American sailors. In this treaty, America agreed to pay tribute to the Bey so that he would stop attacking its ships. A quote often cited by Islamic apologists—that “the United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen”—is from article 11 of this treaty.
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