Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (5 page)

By 1800, the annual tribute and ransom payments to the Barbary pirates reached about $1 million, comprising 20 percent of the U.S. federal budget.
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Seeking to end this blackmail, Thomas Jefferson waged war on the pirates shortly after he became president in 1801. Captain Stephen Decatur Jr. bombarded their harbors and the U.S. Marines brought the war to the shores of Tripoli.

John Quincy Adams explains in his writings that the pirates’ conduct was in line with the coercive, violent nature of Islam as well as their religious duty to lie and deceive in order to advance Islam. “The precept of the Koran,” Adams wrote, “is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.”
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He subsequently referred to an episode during the Barbary War when the Dey of Algiers (a colleague of the Bey of Tripoli)
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tried to deceive American diplomats:

Of Mahometan good faith, we have had memorable examples ourselves. When our gallant Decatur had chastised the pirate of Algiers, till he was ready to renounce his claim of tribute from the United States, he signed a treaty to that effect: but the treaty was drawn up in the Arabic language, as well as in our own; and our negotiators, unacquainted with the language of the Koran, signed the copies of the treaty, in both languages, not imagining that there was any difference between them. Within a year the Dey demands... an indemnity in money.... Our Consul demands the foundation of this pretension; and the Arabic copy of the treaty, signed by himself is produced, with an article stipulating the indemnity, foisted into it, in direct opposition to the treaty as it had been concluded. The arrival of Chauncey, with a squadron before Algiers, silenced the fraudulent claim of the Dey, and he signed a new treaty in which it was abandoned; but he disdained to conceal his intentions; my power, said he, has been wrested from my hands; draw ye the treaty at your pleasure, and I will sign it; but beware of the moment, when I shall recover my power, for with that moment, your treaty shall be waste paper.... Such is the spirit, which governs the hearts of men, to whom treachery and violence are taught as principles of religion.
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Most people today, even most Christians, will acknowledge that many Christians throughout history committed terrible crimes in the name of Christ. Adams, however, rightly observed that such actions actually violate Christian doctrine. This is not the case with Islam, since the Koran plainly sanctions violence in the name of Allah. A Christian who proclaims hatred to any group of people violates Christian principles. Not so with the Muslims, said Adams:

This appeal to the natural
hatred
of the Mussulmen towards the infidels, is in just accordance with the precepts of the Koran. The document does not attempt to disguise it, nor even pretend that the enmity of those whom it styles the infidels, is any other than the necessary consequence of the hatred borne by the Mussulmen to them.... No state paper from a Christian hand, could, without trampling the precepts of its Lord and Master, have commenced by an open proclamation of hatred to any portion of the human race. The Ottoman lays it down as the foundation of his discourse.
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Adams concluded, “As the essential principle of his faith is the subjugation of others by the sword; it is only by force, that his false doctrines can be dispelled, and his power annihilated.”
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President John Quincy Adams appears to have been an avid reader of the Koran, which has many chapters that call for violence and hatred against non-Muslims, or infidels (called
kafirs
).
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I myself am a fervent reader of the Koran, a book that must be taken seriously, considering that hundreds of millions of people believe it is the literal word of Allah. It is simply impossible to study the Koran and the
Hadith
(stories from Muhammad’s life), and their calls for limitless warfare against non-Muslims throughout the entire world, without noticing how fundamentally different Islam is from all other religions.

I have read the Koran several times, including readings in some of the safe houses where my guards took me to protect me against the book’s followers. For a few weeks in late 2004 and early 2005, my wife and I were constantly moved from one place to another. At a moment’s notice, we had to pack the few belongings we had with us and leave. It eventually became a routine, though an unsettling one. Sometimes we stayed in prisons, sometimes in army barracks, sometimes in a house or apartment in some city, town, or village. I was not allowed to leave the car without disguising myself in a brown wig, a hat, and an ill-fitting fake mustache. I thought everyone would see through the ridiculous costume, but it apparently worked.

One Sunday morning in December, we had again been brought to an army barracks. Suddenly the siren went off. The guards grabbed their machine guns and ran to their positions. One of the guards—a real professional—ran straight out of the shower, grabbed his gun, and dashed, stark naked and dripping wet, to take his position on the roof. It was freezing cold, and I don’t know how he avoided catching pneumonia. Other guards positioned themselves in front of our door, yelling at us to stay inside. It was a frightening experience, but it was a false alarm; apparently the steam from the guard’s shower had triggered a fire alarm. The military fire fighters arrived, but the guards kept them out of our room—even the firemen were not allowed to know that Geert Wilders was in the barracks.

During this period, my wife and I were not allowed to have any visitors—no family, no friends, no colleagues. When the cleaners came, we had to move out so they would not see us. For a few weeks, we lived in a small wooden house near the runway on the Soesterberg military airbase. From there we were taken to a jail in Camp Zeist, having been informed that a prison was one of the safest places for us to stay. The guards drove me to Parliament every morning and back again every evening. Every morning at 7:00, including the weekends, the lights automatically switched on in our cell, as they did in all other cells. After I complained several times that we should not be treated like common prisoners, they finally put our cell on a different circuit than the rest of the prison so we could control our own lights.

Camp Zeist is a former U.S. Air Force base near the town of Zeist, not far from Utrecht in the central Netherlands. In 1999 a high-security prison was installed there. This is where, in 1999-2001, two Libyans stood trial for blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270 people. In fact, we spent our days in the very cell that held Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Libyan terrorist sentenced to life imprisonment for the Flight 103 bombing. There was some bitter irony in the jail cell serving as home both to Islamic terrorists and their intended victims. Incidentally, in August 2009 the Scottish government released Megrahi and sent him back to Libya, where he was welcomed as a returning hero. Amid pressure for his release by the Libyan government, the Scots had let him go for “humanitarian reasons,” claiming he was expected to die from prostate cancer within three months. More than two years later, at the time of this writing, Megrahi is still alive and living in freedom, while Kurt Westergaard, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, myself, and other critics of Islam have yet to be “released” for “humanitarian reasons” by the hounds of Islam. When will we be able to resume a normal life without the fear of an assassin showing up at our door?

The cells at Camp Zeist were more comfortable than the places where we had previously stayed. We had a bedroom with two single beds, which we put next to each other, and some closets for our clothes. We also had a bathroom with a shower (but no heating), a living room with a couch and a television set, and a red carpet. Red curtains adorned barred windows that looked out at a six-foot-high wall. We could even see a little slice of the sky.

Despite the improvement in our situation, we still lived like prisoners. Whenever we left our premises, bells started ringing and guards came running. We had no privacy and were hardly ever alone.

Leading a life like that got me thinking about some big questions. It is sometimes said that Americans and Europeans differ a lot and that they are growing further apart. I disagree—we share the same fundamentals, and that binds us together. Western societies guarantee their citizens something that no other civilizations grant them: privacy. It’s one of those things you tend to take for granted unless you lose it.

The importance of privacy is unique to Western society with its notion of the sovereign individual. In stark contrast to Western norms, Islam robs people of their privacy and dignity. Islamic societies—includ—ing Islamic enclaves in the West—exert tight social control that is indicative of the totalitarian character of Islam.

The Koran teaches, “Believers, do not enter the dwellings of other men until you have asked their owners’ permission and wished them peace.”
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This verse always makes me laugh. One only needs to think of axe-wielding Muhudiin Geele invading Kurt Westergaard’s house to understand that this small dose of privacy does not apply to non-Muslims. Infidels have no rights in Islam. Their “dwellings” are not protected, as Muhammad himself made clear—he had five of his followers break into the house of Abu Rafi, a chief of the Jewish-Arab Banu Nadir tribe, and murder him.
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The Koran tells all sorts of similar stories and issues myriad instructions indicating a total lack of respect for the privacy and even the lives of non-Muslims. Referring to apostates, the Koran says, “If they desert you, seize them and put them to death wherever you find them.”
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The death penalty is to be taken literally, as is the phrase “wherever you find them.” Clearly, no permission is needed to enter the dwellings of these renegades.

How can there be privacy in a system that does not allow people to change their minds? The American Constitution and the Bill of Rights are based on the belief that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Connected to their recognition of man as a sovereign being, these documents also imply a basic right to privacy—that people will be left alone in their homes, entitled to freedom of conscience and the right to live freely regardless of their religious affiliation. In Islam, by contrast, man is not sovereign; Allah is sovereign, and man must submit to Allah.

Jews and Christians believe their God is a loving God; He longs for human beings to love Him. Since love by definition must be freely given, man must by definition be free and sovereign. Allah, however, does not ask for love; he demands
islam
—“submission.” As Ali Sina and other founding members of Islam Watch, an organization of ex-Muslims, write on their website, “The only way to escape from the tyranny of Islam is to leave it altogether.”
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There is no privacy in a theocracy, just as there is no freedom in Islam.