Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (6 page)

In recent decades, Islamic immigration to the West has rapidly accelerated, resulting in the appearance of large Muslim minorities for the first time in many countries’ history. Meanwhile, Islamic extremists throughout the world have become increasingly successful at intimidating—either through the threat of legal action or the threat of violence—anyone, anywhere, from criticizing or satirizing Islam. These days, cartoons published in Denmark are enough to stoke deadly riots in Islamic countries. Or consider the fate of Molly Norris, a Seattle cartoonist who proposed an “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” on Facebook as a protest against Islamic censorship and threats. As a result of this simple protest, Norris ended up on an Islamic terrorist hit list and, at the FBI’s advice, changed her name and went into hiding.
⁴¹

Due to these two trends—increasing Islamic emigration to the West and rising Islamic intimidation of the non-Muslim world—the West is confronted by Islam in a way it has never been confronted before, with our most fundamental rights hanging in the balance.

Many Western countries, including my own, have sought to appease Islam by restricting freedom of speech. The Dutch Penal Code decrees that anyone who either “publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in any way that incites hatred against a group of people” or “in any way that insults a group of people because of their race, their religion or belief, their hetero- or homosexual inclination or their physical, psychological or mental handicap, will be punished....”
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I know this part of the penal code well—at the behest of various Islamic groups, I was prosecuted on these charges merely for criticizing Islam, and I could have faced more than a year in jail if convicted.

America—unlike the Netherlands, Canada, and most European countries—does not have hate speech laws, thanks to its First Amendment. Nevertheless, even in America, criticism of Islam and its basic tenets is often equated with religious intolerance. Thus, in America, too, there seems to be a growing conflict between freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Indeed, as President Obama indicated in Cairo, he considers the “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear” to be a major obligation of the U.S. president.

At first sight, this deference to Islam may seem to be consistent with the views of America’s Founding Fathers, who posited that the state should not interfere in religious matters. In America, freedom of religion is as sacrosanct as freedom of speech. That is only logical; freedom is indivisible. Europeans such as myself admire America precisely because it is the freest nation in the world.

And yet, freedom of speech is being undone in the West by allowing too much freedom for Islam. How is this possible? The explanation is that Islam is not just a religion, as many Americans believe, but primarily a political ideology in the guise of a religion.

In an op-ed piece commenting on my 2010-11 trial for allegedly insulting Muslims and inciting hatred and discrimination, Ayaan Hirsi Ali demonstrated how Islamic organizations abuse our liberties in order to curtail our freedoms. “There are,” she wrote, “the efforts of countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference to silence the European debate about Islam. One strategy used by the 57 OIC countries is to treat Muslim immigrants to Europe as satellite communities by establishing Muslim cultural organizations, mosques and Islamic centers, and by insisting on dual citizenship. Their other strategy is to pressure international organizations and the European Union to adopt resolutions to punish anyone who engages in ‘hate speech’ against religion. The bill used to prosecute Mr. Wilders is the national version of what OIC diplomats peddle at the U.N. and EU.”
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It is important that the West recognize the nature of the enemy it faces. America’s eighteenth-century Founding Fathers had few dealings with Islam. Their own philosophy of freedom, however, indicates how we should deal with Islam today. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Thomas Jefferson said in one of his paeans to religious freedom.
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But he made this statement in 1781, five years before he and John Adams met a representative of the Barbary pirates and discovered that the Koran
does
in fact command its followers to inflict violence on non-Muslims.

To avoid any misunderstandings, I wish to emphasize—as I always do—that I am talking about the ideology of Islam, not about individual Muslim people. There are many moderate Muslims, but that does not change the fact that the political ideology of Islam is not moderate—it is a totalitarian cult with global ambitions.

We should not treat Islam more leniently than other political ideologies like communism and fascism just because it claims to be a religion. We must treat Islam as we do every other despotic creed that calls for the submission of those who do not adhere to it. “If anything pass in a religious meeting seditiously and contrary to the public peace, let it be punished in the same manner and no otherwise than as if it had happened in a fair or market,” Jefferson wrote in 1776, the year of America’s independence.
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I agree.

We are fortunate that the majority of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims do not act according to the Koran, although a significant and growing minority does. Given Islam’s dangerous and seditious political message, we must ask ourselves whether it is wise to allow its unhindered propagation. We extend freedom of speech at our own peril to those who incite violence against us. As Abraham Lincoln declared in connection with slavery, “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and under a just God, can not long retain it.”
⁴⁶

Under the guise of freedom of religion, Islam is exploiting our laws to erode everyone else’s freedom of speech. We should not allow total freedom to an ideology that intends to force upon us the grim choice of death, enslavement, or conversion to Islam—which is the fate of all non-Muslims as prescribed by Muhammad himself.
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Using methods described later in this book, we must stop the Islamization of Western civilization. This should not even be a political issue—it has become a simple matter of self-preservation.

CHAPTER THREE

Islamofascism

Wherever the Christians have been unable to resist [the Mohammedans] by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared.

—Teddy Roosevelt

M
y bodyguards are always there. They rule my life, even on days of death and sorrow. I was at my parents’ house when my dad passed away in August 2005—and so were my bodyguards, who are under orders from the Dutch government to go everywhere I go.

After Dad died, the guards drove me back to my hiding place. In the car, I wanted to be strong, but I couldn’t do it. The tears welled up and I broke down, sobbing my heart out. It was like a dam that suddenly caved in. The bodyguards felt uneasy and embarrassed, not knowing what to do. “Shall we stop for a moment,
mijnheer
?” one of them asked. They are good, decent guys, but they are still strangers—awkward, unwilling witnesses of my grief at a moment when I most needed to be alone or with my nearest and dearest. “No, it’s all right,” I told them, but the tears kept coming.

The bodyguards were there during Dad’s funeral, too, discrete but alert. To this day, they accompany me whenever I visit my father’s grave. I’m not complaining about their presence, though. I only need to think of Teddy Roosevelt, America’s twenty-sixth president—of Dutch stock and one of my favorite historical figures—who, as vice president, was unexpectedly called to the highest office when President William McKinley was murdered in 1901. Roosevelt himself survived an assassination attempt in 1912—he was shot in the chest as he was about to give a speech, though the bullet was slowed by his eyeglass case and by a copy of his speech he carried in his jacket. Despite his wound, Roosevelt insisted on delivering his full 90-minute address before being rushed to a hospital. Knowing that McKinley had died after an operation to dislodge the bullet, Roosevelt refused to have the bullet removed. It remained in his body until his death in 1919.

“Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die,” Roosevelt wrote in 1918, after his 20-year-old son had been killed in World War I. “Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure.... All of us who give service, and stand ready for sacrifice, are torch-bearers. We run with the torches until we fall, content if we can pass them to the hands of some other runners.”
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I was born on September 6, 1963, in Venlo, a town along the banks of the river Maas in Limburg, the southernmost of the Netherlands’ twelve provinces. Limburg forms the long, narrow panhandle part of the Netherlands. Belgium—or rather the Belgian half of Limburg—is to its west, Germany to its east.

Our house was less than three miles from the German border, yet Dad never visited our eastern neighbor after World War II. Hearing German brought back too many terrible memories of the war, when he had assisted the resistance and had been forced into hiding from the Nazis. He was so averse to everything German that there were no congratulations when I came home from school with good marks for German—a sharp contrast from his delight when I’d show him good grades for French.

Populating one of the most Catholic parts of the Netherlands, Limburgians have a strong sense of identity stemming from their attachment to their land, their traditions, and their faith. The province holds slightly over 1 million people, who according to the 2003 census are 78 percent Roman Catholic, 2 percent Protestant, 5 percent non-Christian religious, and 15 percent non-religious.

Growing up in Venlo, I was a rebellious, difficult kid, especially between the ages of ten and eighteen; I must have driven my parents crazy. I was one of the 15 percent of Limburgians classified as non-religious, having declared myself an atheist in the fervor of my youth. As I have grown older and wiser, my atheist radicalism has mellowed into agnosticism. I no longer categorically declare that there is no God; I simply acknowledge that I do not know whether God exists. Moreover, I realize now how important religion is for the vibrancy and the very survival of a culture. I have come to agree with Friedrich Hayek, who wrote, “I long hesitated whether to insert this personal note here, but ultimately decided to do so because support by a professed agnostic may help religious people more unhesitatingly to pursue those conclusions that we do share. Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive.”
²

Defenders of Western civilization, whether religious or not, should unite in protecting our way of life. The criticism of our traditional culture that permeates Western society today is disproportionate and self-destructive. No doubt Judeo-Christian civilization is imperfect, but it’s unfair to denounce its faults in a historical vacuum. When you compare the West to any other culture that exists today, it becomes clear that we are the most pluralistic, humane, democratic, and charitable culture on earth. I realized that fact while talking to my former colleague, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who grew up as a Muslim and was the victim of genital mutilation performed by her own grandmother. This relative, no doubt, was convinced that subjecting her granddaughter to this barbaric procedure was the right thing to do. “She was doing it out of love,” says Ayaan.
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Nevertheless, you don’t see Christian parents in Europe or America inflicting this loving act on their daughters.

I do not come from a political family. We did know, however, that Dad was pro-American, grateful for America’s contribution in liberating Europe from the Nazis. We also knew why he abhorred Nazi Germany—because of its unspeakable atrocities.

Usurping the powers of religion, Nazi rulers substituted a political ideology for the conscience of the free individual. Ideocratic states like Nazi Germany are ruled by governments whose legitimacy is grounded in claims to be the guardian of morality and truth. Anyone who opposes such a state is considered to be an enemy of the truth, a vessel of immorality and falsehood who deserves to be silenced. This explains why such states—whether revolutionary France, the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany—exterminated their perceived enemies with guillotines, gulags, and gas chambers.

There is no fundamental difference between ideocratic states and theocratic states, because the totalitarian impulse erases the difference between state and religion. A state can use religion to enforce draconian social control, such as in Iran or Saudi Arabia today, or it can be totalitarian absent a religious framework, such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. A state can also be rooted in religious principles without being theocratic, such as the United States—a strongly religious country that proudly proclaims itself “one nation under God,” as the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance says.
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This God is the Judeo-Christian God.

“Our Saviour...has taught us to judge the tree by its fruit,” Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, wrote to Martin Van Buren, America’s eighth president.
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That is precisely what we should do with regard to Islam, which constitutes the greatest political threat facing the West today. Many people underestimate this threat. Some do not see it at all, believing Islam is merely a religion like any other. The threat, however, is political, because Islam seeks to exert totalitarian control over every aspect of life. Islam claims it all: God’s part, but also Caesar’s.

Some are driven to despair by the threat; the new totalitarian enemy is so huge, representing the faith of 1.5 billion people, that they do not see how we can ever defeat it. We should not lose heart, however. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, a former Stalinist and a deep thinker about the totalitarian impulse, was fundamentally optimistic. Why? Because, Kolakowski argued, totalitarianism is incompatible with human nature.

“People need mental security, and this leaves them open to the devilish temptation of an ideocratic order,” Kolakowski wrote. “But they need to be human as well, and thus to use their freedom in questioning orders, in suspecting every truth, in venturing into uncharted realms of the spirit. The need for security is not specifically human; the need to take risks in exploring the unknown is.”
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Kolakowski is right. If the Dutch had valued the security of the known over the exploration of the unknown, they would never have settled New York.

Kolakowski also emphasized that the outcome of the struggle between totalitarianism and freedom, between evil and good, or as Kolakowski puts it, “between the devil and God,” depends on every one of us: “We are not passive observers or victims of this contest, but participants as well, and therefore our destiny is decided on the field on which we run and play. To say this is trivial, and, like many trivial truths, is well worth repeating.”
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As Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is... never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”
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That is why every free man and woman is a torchbearer for liberty.

People who reflexively insist that Islam is a religion of peace apparently are unfamiliar with the religion’s history and how it spread. Islam began in 610 AD, 1,400 years ago,
⁹
when the 40-year-old Muhammad, husband of the rich Meccan trader and caravan agent Khadija, climbed a mountain near Mecca, in the countryside of Hejaz, to meditate in the cave of Hira, as he was wont to do. There, during what Muslims
¹⁰
call the Night of Qadr, the archangel Jibreel (Gabriel) came to Muhammad with an order from Allah. “Recite,” Jibreel said, and he began to dictate to Muhammad the content of the Koran:
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“Recite in the name of your Lord who created, created man from clots of blood! Recite! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by the pen taught man what he did not know.”
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Muhammad returned home and told Khadija that when the angel, in the guise of a man, first came to him, he feared he had gone mad. Allah reassured him, “By the Pen, and what they write, you are not mad.”
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But Muhammad still wondered whether he was possessed by the devil. The man, whom only he could see, continued to visit him with verses, not only during moments of meditation in the cave, but also at other places. Muhammad wanted to know whether the man was truly the archangel Jibreel. Fortunately, Khadija knew how to determine this. During Jibreel’s next visit, she told Muhammad to have sex with her. Lo and behold, as soon as Muhammad penetrated his wife, the visitor disappeared. Surely he must have been an angel, Khadija concluded,
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since the devil would have stayed to watch their sexual escapades.

In Muhammad’s day Arabia was inhabited by Jewish, Christian, and pagan tribes. There is evidence of a Jewish presence in the Hejaz as early as the sixth century BC,
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1,200 years before Muhammad’s birth. Mecca was a trading hub, with contacts to Ethiopia, India, Persia, Egypt, and the Levant. It was also an important religious locale where worship centered on the
Kaaba,
a black stone that is possibly the remnant of a meteorite. The pre-Islamic
Kaaba
was a shrine housing a pantheon of gods. It contained up to 360 idols, with three female deities—Al-Lat, Al-Uzzah, and Manat—as the most prominent, but also with statues of Hindu gods and icons of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
¹⁶
The Meccans were multiculturalists
avant la lettre.
They were pluralistic and tolerant, willing to accommodate new religious groups.