By Mark Steyn
When I was asked to write a foreword to Geert Wilders’ new book,
my first reaction, to be honest, was to pass. Mr. Wilders lives under
24/7 armed guard because significant numbers of motivated people wish to
kill him, and it seemed to me, as someone who’s attracted more than
enough homicidal attention over the years, that sharing space in these
pages was likely to lead to an uptick in my own death threats. Who needs
it? Why not just plead too crowded a schedule and suggest the author
try elsewhere? I would imagine Geert Wilders gets quite a lot of this.
And then I took a stroll in the woods, and felt vaguely ashamed at
the ease with which I was willing to hand a small victory to his
enemies. After I saw off the Islamic enforcers in my own country, their
frontman crowed to The Canadian Arab News that, even though the
Canadian Islamic Congress had struck out in three different
jurisdictions in their attempt to criminalize my writing about Islam,
the lawsuits had cost my magazine (he boasted) two million bucks, and
thereby “attained our strategic objective — to increase the cost of
publishing anti-Islamic material.” In the Netherlands, Mr. Wilders’
foes, whether murderous jihadists or the multicultural establishment,
share the same “strategic objective” — to increase the cost of
associating with him beyond that which most people are willing to bear.
It is not easy to be Geert Wilders. He has spent almost a decade in a
strange, claustrophobic, transient, and tenuous existence little
different from kidnap victims or, in his words, a political prisoner. He
is under round-the-clock guard because of explicit threats to murder
him by Muslim extremists.
Yet he’s the one who gets put on trial for incitement.
In 21st-century Amsterdam, you’re free to smoke marijuana and pick
out a half-naked sex partner from the front window of her shop. But you
can be put on trial for holding the wrong opinion about a bloke who died
in the seventh century.
And, although Mr. Wilders was eventually acquitted by his kangaroo
court, the determination to place him beyond the pale is unceasing: “The
far-right anti-immigration party of Geert Wilders” (The Financial Times) . . . “Far-right leader Geert Wilders” (The Guardian) . . . “Extreme right anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders” (Agence France-Presse) is “at the fringes of mainstream politics” (Time) . . . Mr.
Wilders is so far out on the far-right extreme fringe that his party is
the third biggest in parliament. Indeed, the present Dutch government governs only through the support of Wilders’ Party for Freedom. So he’s
“extreme” and “far-right” and out on the “fringe,” but the seven
parties that got far fewer votes than him are “mainstream”? That right
there is a lot of what’s wrong with European political discourse and its
media coverage: Maybe he only seems so “extreme” and “far-right”
because they’re the ones out on the fringe.
And so a Dutch parliamentarian lands at Heathrow to fulfill a public
appearance and is immediately deported by the government of a nation
that was once the crucible of liberty. The British Home Office
banned Mr. Wilders as a threat to “public security” — not because he
was threatening any member of the public, but because prominent Muslims
were threatening him: The Labour-party peer Lord Ahmed pledged to bring a
10,000-strong mob to lay siege to the House of Lords if Wilders went
ahead with his speaking engagement there.
Yet it’s not enough to denormalize the man himself, you also have to
make an example of those who decide to find out what he’s like for
themselves. The South Australian senator Cory Bernardi met Mr. Wilders
on a trip to the Netherlands and came home to headlines like “Senator Under Fire For Ties To Wilders” (The Sydney Morning Herald) and “Calls For Cory Bernardi’s Scalp Over Geert Wilders” (The Australian).
Members not only of the opposing party but even of his own called for
Senator Bernardi to be fired from his post as parliamentary secretary to
the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. And why stop there? A
government spokesman “declined to say if he believed Mr Abbott should
have Senator Bernardi expelled from the Liberal Party.” If only Bernardi
had shot the breeze with more respectable figures — Hugo Chávez, say,
or a spokesperson for Hamas. I’m pleased to report that, while sharing a
platform with me in Adelaide some months later, Bernardi declared that,
as a freeborn citizen, he wasn’t going to be told who he’s allowed to
meet with.
For every independent-minded soul like Senator Bernardi, Lord Pearson of
Rannoch, or Baroness Cox (who arranged a screening of Wilders’ film Fitna
at the House of Lords), there are a thousand other public figures who
get the message: Steer clear of Islam unless you want your life consumed
— and steer clear of Wilders if you want to be left in peace.
But in the end the quiet life isn’t an option. It’s not necessary to
agree with everything Mr. Wilders says in this book — or, in fact, anything
he says — to recognize that, when the leader of the third-biggest party
in one of the oldest democratic legislatures on earth has to live under
constant threat of murder and be forced to live in “safe houses” for
almost a decade, something is badly wrong in “the most tolerant country
in Europe” — and that we have a responsibility to address it honestly,
before it gets worse.
A decade ago, in the run-up to the toppling of Saddam, many media
pundits had a standard line on Iraq: It’s an artificial entity cobbled
together from parties who don’t belong in the same state. And I used to
joke that anyone who thinks Iraq’s various components are incompatible
ought to take a look at the Netherlands. If Sunni and Shia, Kurds and
Arabs can’t be expected to have enough in common to make a functioning
state, what do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian
bi-swinging stoners and anti-whoring anti-sodomite
anti-everything-you-dig Muslims? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq,
how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of the Netherlands?
The years roll on, and the gag gets a little sadder. “The most
tolerant country in Europe” is an increasingly incoherent polity where
gays are bashed, uncovered women get jeered in the street, and you can’t
do The Diary of Anne Frank as your school play lest the Gestapo walk-ons are greeted by audience cries of “She’s in the attic!”
According to one survey, 20 percent of history teachers have
abandoned certain, ah, problematic aspects of the Second World War
because, in classes of a particular, ahem, demographic disposition,
pupils don’t believe the Holocaust happened, and, if it did, the Germans
should have finished the job and we wouldn’t have all these problems
today. More inventive instructors artfully woo their Jew-despising
students by comparing the Holocaust to “Islamophobia” — we all remember
those Jewish terrorists hijacking Fokkers and flying them into the
Reichstag, right? What about gangs of young Jews preying on the elderly,
as Muslim youth do in Wilders’ old neighborhood of Kanaleneiland?
As for “Islamophobia,” it’s so bad that it’s, er, the Jews who are
leaving. “Sixty per cent of Amsterdam’s orthodox community intends to
emigrate from Holland,” says Benzion Evers, the son of the city’s chief
rabbi, five of whose children had already left by 2010. Frommer’s
bestselling travel guide to “Europe’s most tolerant city” acknowledges
that “Jewish visitors who dress in a way that clearly identifies them as
Jewish” are at risk of attack, but discreetly attributes it to “the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” “Jews with a conscience should leave
Holland, where they and their children have no future,” advised Frits
Bolkestein, former Dutch Liberal leader. “Anti-Semitism will continue to
exist, because the Moroccan and Turkish youngsters don’t care about
efforts for reconciliation.”
If you’re wondering what else those “youngsters” don’t care for, ask Chris Crain, editor of The Washington Blade,
the gay newspaper of America’s capital. Seeking a break from the
Christian fundamentalist redneck theocrats of the Republican party, he
and his boyfriend decided to treat themselves to a vacation in
Amsterdam, “arguably the ‘gay-friendliest’ place on the planet.”
Strolling through the streets of the city center, they were set upon by a
gang of seven “youngsters,” punched, beaten, and kicked to the ground.
Perplexed by the increasing violence, Amsterdam officials commissioned a
study to determine, as Der Spiegel put it, “why Moroccan men are targeting the city’s gays.”
Gee, that’s a toughie. Beats me. The geniuses at the University of
Amsterdam concluded that the attackers felt “stigmatized by society” and
“may be struggling with their own sexual identity.”
Bingo! Telling Moroccan youths they’re closeted gays seems just the
ticket to reduce tensions in the city! While you’re at it, a lot of
those Turks seem a bit light on their loafers, don’t you think?
But not to worry. In the “most tolerant nation in Europe,” there’s still plenty of tolerance. What won’t
the Dutch tolerate? In 2006, the justice minister, Piet Hein Donner,
suggested there would be nothing wrong with sharia if a majority of
Dutch people voted in favor of it — as, indeed, they’re doing very
enthusiastically in Egypt and other polities blessed by the Arab Spring.
Mr. Donner’s previous response to “Islamic radicalism” was (as the
author recalls in the pages ahead) to propose a new blasphemy law for
the Netherlands.
In this back-to-front world, Piet Hein Donner and the University
of Amsterdam researchers and the prosecutors of the Openbaar Ministrie
who staged his show trial are “mainstream” — and Geert Wilders is the
“far” “extreme” “fringe.” How wide is that fringe? Mr. Wilders cites a
poll in which 57 percent of people say that mass immigration was the
biggest single mistake in Dutch history. If the importation of large
Muslim populations into the West was indeed a mistake, it was also an
entirely unnecessary one. Some nations (the Dutch, French, and British)
might be considered to owe a certain post-colonial debt to their former
subject peoples, but Sweden? Germany? From Malmö to Mannheim, Islam
transformed societies that had hitherto had virtually no connection with
the Muslim world. Even if you disagree with that 57 percent of Dutch
poll respondents, the experience of Amsterdam’s chief rabbi and the
gay-bashed editor and the elderly residents of Kanaleneiland suggests at
the very minimum that the Islamization of Continental cities poses
something of a challenge to Eutopia’s famous “tolerance.” Yet the same
political class responsible for this unprecedented “demographic
substitution” (in the words of French demographer Michèle Tribalat)
insists the subject remain beyond discussion. The British novelist
Martin Amis asked Tony Blair if, at meetings with his fellow prime
ministers, the Continental demographic picture was part of the “European
conversation.” Mr. Blair replied, with disarming honesty, “It’s a
subterranean conversation” — i.e., the fellows who got us into this mess
can’t figure out a way to talk about it in public, other than in the
smiley-face banalities of an ever more shopworn cultural relativism.
That’s not enough for Geert Wilders. Unlike most of his critics, he
has traveled widely in the Muslim world. Unlike them, he has read the
Koran — and re-read it, on all those interminable nights holed up in
some dreary safe house denied the consolations of family and friends.
One way to think about what is happening is to imagine it the other way
round. Rotterdam has a Muslim mayor, a Moroccan passport holder born the
son of a Berber imam. How would the Saudis feel about an Italian
Catholic mayor in Riyadh? The Jordanians about an American Jewish mayor
in Zarqa? Would the citizens of Cairo and Kabul agree to become
minorities in their own hometowns simply because broaching the subject
would be too impolite?
To pose the question is to expose its absurdity. From Nigeria to
Pakistan, the Muslim world is intolerant even of ancient established
minorities. In Iraq half the Christian population has fled, in 2010 the
last church in Afghanistan was razed to the ground, and in both cases
this confessional version of ethnic cleansing occurred on America’s
watch. Multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon.
But Europe’s political establishment insists that unprecedented
transformative immigration can only be discussed within the conventional
pieties: We tell ourselves that, in a multicultural society, the nice
gay couple at Number 27 and the polygamous Muslim with four child-brides
in identical niqabs at Number 29 Elm Street can live side by side, each
contributing to the rich, vibrant tapestry of diversity. And anyone who
says otherwise has to be cast into outer darkness.
Geert Wilders thinks we ought to be able to talk about this — and
indeed, as citizens of the oldest, freest societies on earth, have a
duty to do so. Without him and a few other brave souls, the views of 57
percent of the Dutch electorate would be unrepresented in parliament.
Which is a pretty odd thing in a democratic society, when you think
about it. Most of the problems confronting the Western world today arise
from policies on which the political class is in complete agreement: At
election time in Europe, the average voter has a choice between a
left-of-center party and an ever so mildly right-of-left-of-center party
and, whichever he votes for, they’re generally in complete agreement on
everything from mass immigration to unsustainable welfare programs to
climate change. And they’re ruthless about delegitimizing anyone who
wants a broader debate. In that Cory Bernardi flap Down Under, for
example, I’m struck by how much of the Aussie coverage relied on the
same lazy shorthand about Geert Wilders. From The Sydney Morning Herald:
“Geert Wilders, who holds the balance of power in the Dutch
parliament, likened the Koran to Mein Kampf and called the Prophet
Muhammad a pedophile . . . ”
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 précis 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 in
regulating, policing, and criminalizing books, speech, and ideas, the
state’s deference to Islam grows ever more fawning. “The Prophet
Mohammed” (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 Mohammed 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 Ministrie, 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
pre-emptive 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.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. This article is adapted from his foreword to Geert Wilders’ Marked for Death: Islam’s War against the West and Me.
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