Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (28 page)

In its 2009 report on human rights, the U.S. State Department wrote that Europe’s “discrimination” against Muslims is “an increasing concern” for the U.S. government. The report criticized the Netherlands for widespread “hatred of Muslims,” who allegedly “faced societal resentment, . . . intimidation, brawls, vandalism, and graffiti with abusive language.” There was not a word about the living conditions of my former neighbors, the native Dutch, in places like Slotervaart or Kanaleneiland. The report condemned France because President Sarkozy had uttered that
burkas
are “not welcome in France” and because a woman wearing a
burkini
was denied entry into a public pool. Switzerland was denounced because its citizens approved a referendum to ban the construction of new minarets.
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Unsurprisingly, the U.S. State Department does not have a high opinion of me either, having criticized me especially for my opposition to Turkey’s admission to the European Union. In a July 2009 briefing document for President Obama published by Wikileaks, the U.S. embassy called me a “golden-pompadoured, maverick parliamentarian” who is “no friend of the U.S.” and who “forments [sic] fear and hatred of immigrants.”
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This is quite an attack on me, considering I proudly regard myself as one of the most pro-American political figures in the Netherlands and one of the biggest Dutch admirers of the American spirit. However, I do believe that the U.S. political establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, severely underestimates the threat Islam poses to the West. This is evident in America’s solid support for Turkish membership in the EU. In my opinion, Turkey can be a good neighbor with close economic ties to Europe, but it cannot be a member of the family. If the 72.5 million Turks join the EU, Turkey will be the second most populous EU state after Germany and will probably be the most populous by 2020. Turkey will then have the most seats in the European Parliament and will profoundly influence the EU’s agenda from within, including through the new flood of Turkish immigration that EU membership will make possible.

This is intolerable. Europe, like America, is a community of values rooted in Judeo-Christian and humanist principles. Islamic Turkey, now led by the man who denounces Turkish assimilation in Europe and who declared mosques, domes, minarets, and Muslims to be an advance Islamic army, is simply not compatible with these values. Turkey’s inclusion in the EU will hasten the Islamization and fall of Europe, the culture and tradition from which America sprang. Europe is an integral part of the Western heritage, and its transformation into Eurabia will have the most profound effects on the world’s balance of power. I fear that those Americans who think the United States will not be affected by Europe’s demise live upon hope—and they will die fasting.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Facilitators

The time is now near at hand which must . . . determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves.

—George Washington

T
he party I founded, the Party for Freedom (PVV), competed in its first general elections on November 22, 2006. We won 6 percent of the vote, earning us nine of the 150 seats in the
Tweede Kamer.
Our parliamentarians included Martin Bosma, a journalist who joined me after Theo van Gogh had been murdered; Fleur Agema, a provincial councilor in North Holland; and Barry Madlener, a municipal councilor in Rotterdam and former spokesman for the late Pim Fortuyn. On June 4, 2009, we participated in our first European elections and won 17 percent of the vote, good for four of the Netherlands’ twenty-five seats in the European Parliament.

An anti-establishment party like the PVV that questions the ruling paradigms of cultural and moral relativism will face a lot of difficulties. For one thing, it takes courage to join our party. Civil servants jeopardize their careers by supporting me, teachers risk their jobs, and professionals risk losing customers and contacts.
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This is no exaggeration. Politically incorrect citizens who challenge the tenets of multiculturalism are harassed from the top down by state authorities, media figures, and employers, and from the bottom up by leftists and Islamic activists. I’ve even heard from people whose families disowned them for supporting the PVV.

PVV supporters have been subjected to physical intimidation and attacks. People who distribute PVV flyers or election posters have had stones thrown through their windows, had their cars vandalized, and have been beaten up and pelted with eggs. The threats and attacks have succeeded, to a certain extent, in dissuading some people from openly supporting me and my party. I fully understand their hesitation; I do not expect anyone to jeopardize his family, career, or personal safety for me.

Throughout its entire history, Islam has intimidated and attacked its critics, often with the assistance of groups of infidels. When Muhammad and his followers settled in Yathrib, they were helped by a group of Yathribians who became their allies. The
ansar
(“helpers”), as the Muslims called them, facilitated the fall of Yathrib and its transformation into the Islamic city of Medina.

Today, Islam finds its
ansar
in Western leftists and other fellow travelers who ferociously attack Islam’s critics and other defenders of Western civilization. For example, in October 2007, I advocated that criminals with dual nationality be stripped of their Dutch nationality and expelled from the Netherlands. My proposal became the topic of a debate on Dutch television during which former Amsterdam Police Chief Joop van Riessen said about me, “Basically one would feel inclined to say: let’s kill him, just get rid of him now and he will never surface again.”
²
In reference to PVV voters, van Riessen declared, “There are thousands of people who do not fit into the world of the new society which we are all creating; of whom in fact one should say: kick them out of the country, they no longer belong here.”
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Van Riessen’s exhortation to banish those who do not “fit into the new society” eerily resembles the musings of German communist Bertolt Brecht. Commenting on the 1953 East German uprising, Brecht asked, “Would it not be easier...for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
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Totalitarian movements, whether communism or Islam, always seem to find their
ansar.

Why have Europe’s elites acted as
ansar
by abetting Islam’s thrust into Europe over the past three decades? One explanation is the Eurabia hypothesis put forward by Bat Ye’or in her 2005 book
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
. Bat Ye’or posits that after the 1973 oil crisis, when Arab countries used oil as a weapon to punish European nations that had allied with Israel, European Union leaders began building an alliance with the Islamic world to ensure Europe’s oil supply. As part of this arrangement, Bat Ye’or contends, European leaders agreed not to hinder the spread of Islam in Europe, not to pressure Islamic immigrants to assimilate, and to ensure that European schools and media outlets would portray Islam positively.
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In order to implement these agreements, Bat Ye’or argues, the EU seized power over many immigration issues from Europe’s national governments. For example, in 2008, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU’s highest court, annulled separate Irish and Danish immigration legislation and proclaimed that national law is subordinate to EU-level laws.
⁶
I personally saw the effect of this usurpation of national sovereignty in March 2010, when the ECJ annulled Dutch legislation restricting family reunification for immigrants on welfare.
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Similarly, citing EU rules, a Dutch court in August 2011 annulled Dutch legislation that obliged Turkish immigrants to the Netherlands to take classes on integration.
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Bat Ye’or makes a strong argument, but in my view, Europe’s Islamization stems from cultural relativism rather than a reliance on Arab oil. Cultural relativism dictates that all cultures are equally moral and valuable—though in practice, Western culture is often presented as inferior to all others, stained as it supposedly is by racism and imperialism. If all cultures are equal, it follows that the state cannot promote any specific cultural values, even those of its own native people. Thus, cultural relativists deny that immigrants should assimilate, since that would champion European culture over the immigrants’ native cultures.

Cultural relativism, the ruling ethos of Europe’s political establishment, is gradually destroying our traditions and cultural identity. The so-called multicultural society tells newcomers who settle in our cities and villages: you are free to violate our norms and values, since your culture is just as good, and perhaps even better, than ours.

Cultural relativists realize their views are widely unpopular among everyday Europeans, which is why they often hide their real agenda. Consider, for example, Britain’s mass immigration policy. In October 2009, Andrew Neather, former advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, revealed that the governing Labour Party had organized mass immigration into Britain as part of a hidden social engineering project “to make the UK truly multicultural.” Neather recalled, “I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended—even if this wasn’t its main purpose—to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”
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Neather emphasized that the mass immigration policy was shrouded in secrecy: drafts of the policy were only distributed “with extreme reluctance” and “there was a paranoia about it reaching the media”; the final report was “innocuously labelled”; “there was a reluctance” in government to discuss the true implications of mass immigration, so the published report only discussed the impact on immigrants themselves, not on the native British; and “ministers wouldn’t talk about” the policy. Neather explained why the ministers insisted on so much secrecy: “In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs.”
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In other words, the ministers wanted to hide their mass immigration policy because they knew the British people wouldn’t support it.

Thanks to this policy, Britain took in three million immigrants between 1997 and 2010, permanently altering the country’s social and demographic composition. This led to growing social tensions, especially between native Brits and rapidly expanding Islamic communities. This was unavoidable; contrary to the beliefs of government social engineers, most everyday people do not want to be subject to population replacement. People feel attached to the civilization their ancestors created, and they don’t want it exchanged for a society in which they are forced to adapt to immigrants’ cultures. It is not xenophobic for Westerners to favor our own culture over others—it is plain common sense.

Belatedly, European politicians are beginning to realize their folly—at least up to a point. In February 2011, Tony Blair’s successor, British Prime Minister David Cameron, passionately denounced cultural relativism:

We have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.... We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values. So, when a white person holds objectionable views, racist views for instance, we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious frankly—frankly, even fearful—to stand up to them. The failure, for instance, of some to confront the horrors of forced marriage, the practice where some young girls are bullied and sometimes taken abroad to marry someone when they don’t want to, is a case in point.
¹¹

Cameron further argued that Britain’s tolerance of anti-Western behavior has led to the radicalization of some young Muslims who, “feeling rootless,” have turned to “Islamist extremism.” However, in truly politically correct fashion, the British prime minister added that “the ideology of extremism is the problem; Islam emphatically is not.”
¹²
The ideology of extremism,
of course, is meaningless nonsense, a cowardly euphemism that leaders employ when they want to absolve Islam of all the violence perpetuated in its name.

Still, Cameron deserves respect for denouncing cultural relativism. And he is not alone. In early 2011 French President Nicolas Sarkozy made similar remarks, declaring, “We have been too concerned about the identity of the immigrant and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.” Asked whether the policy of multiculturalism had been a failure, Sarkozy replied, “My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure.”
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These comments echoed those made a few months earlier, in October 2010, by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who called multiculturalism “an absolute failure.”
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However, that same month, her fellow Christian Democrat party member, then-German President Christian Wulff, emphasized that “Islam is a part of Germany.”
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Europe’s leaders still make a false distinction between peaceful, mainstream Islam and dangerous, extremist Islamism. This is symptomatic of their refusal to acknowledge the intrinsic problems of Muhammad’s ideology. Nevertheless, their new willingness to acknowledge the failure of multiculturalism is a promising sign. They may not really believe it, but they now realize that, at the very least, they need to pay lip service to their voters’ widespread dissatisfaction with mass immigration and other policies based on cultural relativism.

Everyday Europeans have been victimized by a cynical, condescending cultural elite that loathe their own people’s supposed illiberalism, intolerance, lack of sophistication, and inexplicable attachment to their traditional values. These ruling cosmopolitans do not see European culture as a tradition worth defending, but as a constantly evolving political project. In this utopian scheme, everyday people are reviled for their cultural conservatism, while immigrants are lionized precisely because they are not attached to those traditions.

It’s hard to say which is worse: Bat Ye’or’s accusation that the ruling elites have sold out Europe to Islam in return for a steady supply of oil, or the prospect that these elites are betraying their own people because the elites despise the people’s values and traditions. Either way, the result has been the same: the gradual Islamization of Europe.