Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (24 page)

In 2009, Frans Timmermans, then-Dutch Minister of European Affairs, visited Dearborn “to discern why Muslims are more accepted in the United States than in the Netherlands.” Reporting on the visit, the
Detroit News
commented, “Dutch society is plagued with problems of high unemployment and low integration and participation in the society by Moroccan and some Turkish immigrants. There also are ongoing culture wars between Muslims and the Dutch, including the assassination of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 and the production of a film ‘Fitna,’ which Muslims criticized as highly intolerant.”
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It was a revealing statement, one that suggested a moral equivalence between my movie and a political murder. The paper continued, “Amid the social and religious tensions, the Dutch are trying to negotiate the difficulties sometimes caused by free speech and seeking to reassert their long tradition of tolerance and freedom.”
The difficulties sometimes caused by free speech
—what a wonderful euphemism for Islam’s tendency to riot and murder whenever it feels offended by a speech, drawing, or film.
⁴⁷

The
Detroit News
announced, “While Muslims in Metro Detroit and the United States sometimes struggle with discrimination, religious bigotry, verbal harassment and other forms of intolerance, there is a general sense, backed by public opinion research, that their circumstances here are more tolerable—sometimes considerably so—than in Europe.”
⁴⁸
There is indeed a certain intolerance surrounding Islam in Europe—but it’s not Europeans’ intolerance for Islam, it is Islam’s intolerance for anyone else.

In 2006, Petra Akesson, a Swedish sociologist, conducted a study of Islamic youths in Malmo, a city that has one of the highest crime rates in Sweden along with one of the highest percentages of welfare recipients and one of the largest Islamic communities. Disturbingly, Akesson found that Islamic youths, having been raised in a culture that extols Islamic supremacy, regard their criminal activities as acts of war against non-Muslim infidels. “When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war against the Swedes,” a typical youth told her. “Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet. We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to.”
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Few politicians or journalists are willing to admit that significant parts of the West’s Islamic communities view their host societies as the enemy. In 2005, a Turkish imam who had been living in Berlin since 1971 was ordered deported after he gave a sermon in which he called Germans “stinking people . . . doomed to go to hell because they [are] useless creatures and infidels.” The shocking statement by the imam, who co-founded an organization responsible for teaching Islam to Muslim students at German schools, did not seem to offend his Muslim congregation. According to a journalist who was there, “There was nobody in the mosque who stood up and demanded that the Imam stop his nasty talk about Germans. Nobody seemed to mind at all. We asked people as they were leaving the mosque to tell us what they thought about the Imam. Everyone was looking daggers at us, and we certainly didn’t have the impression that the Imam had voiced an isolated opinion.”
⁵⁰

Drawing a bitter lesson from the 2005 riots in France, Jewish French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut explained how the basic impetus of Islamic unrest in the West is not poverty, but an urge to attack infidels: “The first targets of those who were violent were their neighbors. And those neighbors are the [non-Muslims] who are demanding that the public order of the Republic be restored.... Here’s a charming rap couplet [sung by immigrant youths]: ‘France is a slut, don’t forget to f*** her till she drops like a bitch, you gotta deal with her, guy! Me, I piss on Napoleon and General de Gaulle.’”
⁵¹

Finkielkraut bemoaned his country’s tendency to excuse the violence and its perpetrators. “Instead of being outraged by the scandals of schools being burned, people pontificate about the despair of the arsonists. Instead of listening to what they’re saying—‘F*** your mother!’, ‘F*** the police!’, ‘F*** the State!’—we listen to them, that is, we convert their appeals to hatred as appeals for help and their vandalization of school buildings as demands for education.”
⁵²

In her book
A God Who Hates
, former Muslim Wafa Sultan argues that the behavior of Islamic immigrants is conditioned by Islam, particularly by the Arab desert culture of raiding. “For me,” she writes, “understanding the truth about the thought and behavior of Muslims can only be achieved through an in-depth understanding of this philosophy of raiding that has rooted itself firmly in the Muslim mind.... When I immigrated to America I discovered right away that the local inhabitants were not proficient in raiding while the expatriate Muslims could not give it up.”
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By viewing the world as Islam sees it, we come to understand why some Muslims consider it only natural to extract money out of the infidels, whether by robbing and raiding them or by making them pay
jizya.
The welfare payments they receive in the West are not seen as generosity to the deprived and underprivileged, but as
jizya,
to which they are divinely entitled because Allah himself wrote in the Koran that dhimmis have to pay tribute to Muslims.
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Once we find the courage to acknowledge the real problem, the solution becomes clear: we must use the full force of the state to suppress criminal violence and restore law and order in the neighborhoods that are succumbing to jihadist violence.

At the height of the French riots of 2005, Michel Pajon, the Socialist deputy mayor of Noisy-le-Grand, pleaded over the radio for the army to intervene. “Women have been made to stop on the streets of my town,” he cried. “They were dragged from their cars by their hair, they were practically stoned and their cars were set ablaze.... My town has a psychiatric hospital which has been attacked with Molotov cocktails. This is beyond comprehension.... For a socialist to say that the army has to intervene is an inconceivable admission of defeat, but what I can say is that one cannot abandon the people like this. At some point we need to know whether this country still has a state.”
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A similar plea was heard in 2007 when, following another spate of French urban rioting, youths fired shots at the police, causing a well-known French judge to warn of a possible civil war. “The suburbs,” Jean de Maillard, Vice-president of the Superior Court of Orléans, declared, “...have been armed for a long time with caches of quality war weapons, lethal weapons, against which the bullet-proof vests will be useless.... The methods become more professional and the police and gendarmes will soon have to confront, if they have not already, experts in urban guerilla warfare.... I hope that the public authorities will become aware of the immence of calamity and especially that they will finally seek solutions.... To shower the [youths] with subsidies to buy armed peace will be the chosen way: it will provide only a short respite.”
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Seeming to fulfill the judge’s grim prediction, in March 2008, four police officers were shot and wounded in Grigny, a suburb of Paris, after being ambushed by around thirty masked youths. According to the BBC, “The armed youths fired cartridges containing lead shot and nails at the police, while others threw stones and Molotov cocktails, setting a car alight.”
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The huge social problems created by Islam are making Europeans increasingly doubtful that Islam is “enriching” the West, as we’re constantly told. A 2011 poll showed that 63 percent of the Dutch are worried by the growing influence of Islam in Western Europe.
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According to a 2008 poll, 57 percent of the Dutch believe that allowing large-scale immigration was the biggest mistake ever made in Dutch history.
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We see similar results throughout Europe when the people themselves, as opposed to the media or the political class, speak out on the issue. On November 29, 2009, 58 percent of Swiss voters approved a ban on the construction of new minarets—the soaring, triumphalist spires that commonly adorn mosques and dominate the surrounding skyline. (The four existing minarets were allowed to remain and the building of new mosques—Switzerland already had some 200—was also permitted.) Turnout for the referendum was unusually high at 53 percent, with the ban passing in twenty-two of Switzerland’s twenty-six cantons.

Polls indicate that many other European nations would vote similarly. A 2009 survey showed 46 percent of the French support a ban on minarets, with 40 percent opposed; 41 percent also want to ban construction of new mosques, a substantial rise since 2001, when only 21 percent of the French supported such a ban.
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A 2009 poll in Belgium found 60 percent support a minaret ban and 57 percent want a ban on mosques.
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In the Netherlands, my party is currently trying to hold a referendum to ban new minarets.

In some countries, such as France, Belgium, and the Canadian province of Quebec, the
niqab
and the
burka,
two varieties of the full Islamic veil that reveal only a woman’s eyes, have been banned from public places. “If you are someone employed by the state and you deliver a service, you will deliver it with your face uncovered,” Jean Charest, the Liberal premier of Quebec, says. “And if you are a citizen who receives services, you will receive them with your face uncovered.”
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Quebec’s demand is clear:
We want to see your face
. It is a perfectly reasonable demand though, as we saw in chapter seven, it could get you fired if you work in a German post office. In January 2012, the Dutch cabinet submitted a similar bill to ban
niqabs
and
burkas
in public places.

Christian churches are sometimes far too accommodating to Islam and too anxious to find a “common ground” that doesn’t really exist—as Thomas Jefferson said, “in matters of principle” one must “stand like a rock.”
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But churches, too, are beginning to draw the line. On March 31, 2010, a fight broke out in the Roman Catholic cathedral of Córdoba, Spain, when guards intervened against Muslims who attempted to pray in the cathedral. One of the Muslims drew a knife and wounded the guards. When the police were called, they too were attacked. Islam claims the cathedral as its own because it was a mosque until the thirteenth century, but Bishop Mgr. Demetrio Fernández, who has forbidden Islamic worship in the church, notes that the location held a church even before the mosque was built in the eighth century. Though the British
Guardian
reported the fight had occurred in “Cordoba’s former mosque,” the Bishop refuses to see his cathedral as anything but a church.
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This begs the question: How would the
Umma
react if Christians or Jews began praying in mosques that had once been churches or synagogues? Consider the prohibition against Jewish prayer on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, formerly the site of the Jewish Temple and now home to Islam’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Suppose a group of Jewish activists began praying inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque and then attacked its Islamic guards with knives. Would Islam react with as much restraint as Spanish Catholics showed after the fight in Córdoba’s cathedral? History shows the answer: when Israeli politician Ariel Sharon simply visited the Temple Mount on September 29, 2000, the Palestinians responded by launching the Second Intifada, which lasted four years and cost thousands of lives.