Geert Wilders: Marked for Death

By Fjordman
http://frontpagemag.com/
May 11, 2012

The courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders released his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me in May 2012. The foreword to this title was written by the eloquent Canadian-born political commentator and cultural critic Mark Steyn, who has a special talent for writing about serious topics in a humorous way. He has published several books and written essays for publications ranging from the Jerusalem Post and the Chicago Sun-Times to the National Review, The Australian and Canada’s National Post.

Steyn is honest enough to admit that when he was first asked to contribute to Wilders’ new book, his initial reaction was to say no. The main reason for this is the potentially high cost of being associated with a man who lives with constant death threats.

Yet, after taking a stroll in the woods, Mark Steyn felt ashamed at the ease with which he was caving in to the enemies of freedom, and decided to accept the offer after all. He recalled how the Canadian Islamic Congress boasted that their attempts by legal aggression to silence Steyn’s critical writings about Islam had cost his magazine substantial sums, and thereby attained their “strategic objective” of increasing the cost of publishing anti-Islamic material.

In the case of Geert Wilders, that cost is not merely limited to money. Despite being an elected Member of Parliament in what used to be one of Europe’s freest and most tolerant countries, he is regularly vilified by Western mass media. When trying to enter Britain, a nation that once was a champion of liberty, he was detained by plainclothes border guards on arrival at London’s Heathrow airport in February 2009 and deported from the country.

The democratic Dutch MP had been invited to the House of Lords, where Baroness Cox and Lord Pearson wanted to show his 17-minute Islam-critical film Fitna. The Home Office refused him entry on the grounds he “would threaten community security and therefore public security,” not because he threatened to use violence, but because Muslims might use it.

Lord Ahmed from the Labour Party, Britain’s first Muslim member of the House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament, pledged to bring a 10,000 strong force of angry Muslims to lay siege to Parliament. A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain claimed that Wilders has been an open and relentless preacher of “hate.” At the same time, London has become a notorious intentional center for Islamic militants, who spew hate on a daily basis.

Geert Wilders accused the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown of being “the biggest bunch of cowards in Europe.” He was later allowed entry to the UK, however. He was also put on trial in the Netherlands accused of criminally insulting religious and ethnic groups. Wilders was eventually found not guilty in 2011, but the entire process took several years.

As Mark Steyn puts it, “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 twenty-first 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’ (AFP) 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.”

Maybe those who are out on the fringe are the ones who think that disliking Islam is “far-right.”
Yet it’s not just Wilders himself who is being attacked in this fashion. Those who dare to meet him or support some of his views could find themselves attacked by the mass media and the political elites in a comparable manner. Cory Bernardi, born and raised in Adelaide and currently representing the state of South Australia for the Liberal Party in the Australian Senate, in 2011 came under fire not only from members of other parties but also from his own — allegedly conservative — party when he wanted to facilitate a trip to Australia by Wilders.

The Sydney Morning Herald simply labeled Geert Wilders “an Islamaphobic Dutch politician.” The Melbourne-based The Age claimed that Wilders’ “objectionable” and “poisonous anti-Islam views” are “abhorrent and plainly wrong” and that his ideas are self-evidently “repugnant.” The newspaper continued to suggest that if Senator Bernardi did not dissociate himself from Mr. Wilders’ views, then perhaps his own party should demote him.

Wayne Swan, Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia under PM Julia Gillard, said Bernardi has right-wing extremist views. Other senior Labor Party members indicated that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott should discipline the senator and remove him from his portfolio responsibilities. Labor frontbencher Peter Garrett declined to say whether he believed Abbott should have Bernardi expelled from the Liberal Party, or copy the way former Prime Minister John Howard had Pauline Hanson disendorsed as a candidate ahead of the 1996 national election due to her vocal opposition to non-European mass immigration. Australian Greens senator Richard Di Natale also condemned Bernardi’s associations with Wilders. “Multiculturalism is one of this country’s great successes and it must be defended,” he stated.

Wilders commented in an essay published in The Washington Times on May 4 2012 that “As I write these lines, there are police bodyguards at the door. No visitor can enter my office without passing through several security checks and metal detectors. I have been marked for death. I am forced to live in a heavily protected safe house. Every morning, I am driven to my office in the Dutch Parliament building in an armored car with sirens and flashing blue lights. When I go out, I am surrounded, as I have been for the past seven years, by plainclothes police officers. When I speak in public, I wear a bulletproof jacket. Who am I? I am neither a king nor a president, nor even a government minister; I am just a simple politician in the Netherlands. But because I speak out against expanding Islamic influence in Europe, I have been marked for death. If you criticize Islam, this is the risk you run. That is why so few politicians dare to tell the truth about the greatest threat to our liberties today.”

Wilders received his first death threats in 2003 after asking the government to investigate a radical mosque. In November 2004, after a Muslim fanatic murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh, policemen armed with machine guns pushed him into an armored car and drove him off into the night. That was the last time he was in his own house. Since then, he has lived “in an army barracks, a prison cell and now a government-owned safe house.” The security detail has become part of his daily routine, but it must still be hard getting used to being a virtual prisoner in your own country and unable to visit a restaurant or cafe in a normal manner.

Hostile journalists often denounce Wilders and his Party for Freedom as “populists,” but they are popular for a reason: They state uncomfortable truths that the ruling elites want to sweep under the carpet. The natives are rapidly being turned into a harassed minority in Amsterdam, Rotterdam or The Hague, a pattern that can now be seen in far too many European cities.

Fifty-seven percent of the Dutch people say that mass immigration was the biggest single mistake in Dutch history. Yet what is arguably the greatest change their country and their continent have experienced in historical times is beyond honest discussion in the mainstream media.

Wilders goes on to note that “I have read the Koran and studied the life of Muhammad. It made me realize that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology rather than a religion. I feel sorry for the Arab, Persian, Indian and Indonesian peoples who have to live under the yoke of Islam. It is a belief system that marks apostates for death, forces critics into hiding and denies our Western tradition of individual freedom. Without freedom, there can be no prosperity and no pursuit of happiness. More Islam means less life, less liberty and less happiness.”

Geert Wilders has sacrificed his personal freedom of movement and the prospects of a normal life in order to warn his country, his continent and his civilization against serious threats to their freedom. We should honor that sacrifice by listening carefully to what he has to say.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Author Geert Wilders: No Difference Between Islam, Radical Islam

By Henry J. Reske and Kathleen Walter

http://www.newsmax.com/

May 4, 2012

Controversial Dutch politician and author Geert Wilders is speaking out against Islam, but unlike most Westerners he does not draw a distinction between Islam and radical Islam, but claims that they are the same.

Wilders is a member of the Dutch parliament and founder of the Party for Freedom. He said outspokenness about Islam has taken a toll on his life. He has been threatened with death, been taken court, and been banned from other European countries.

“Anybody who dares to speak out against this ideology called Islam will pay a heavy price,” he in an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV. “I lived with my wife for six months in a prison cell for security reasons. We didn’t commit any crime. We lived in army barracks and safe houses. I always say if I spoke up, which I’m not planning to do, but just for argument’s sake, if I spoke out against Christianity, all those things would not have happened. We use the pen and, unfortunately, they use the ax.”

Wilders is a controversial critic of Islam, campaigning against what he sees as the "Islamisation of the Netherlands." He has compared the Quran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and has called for the book to be banned. He also advocates ending immigration from Muslim countries.

Wilders was banned from entering Britain for nine months in 2009; the ban was overturned in October 2009 after he appealed. In June 2011, he was acquitted of hate charges.

The author of “Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me” said that Islam, “at the end of the day, will cost us our freedom, our freedom of speech.”

“I acknowledge the fact that the majority of the Muslims are law-abiding people,” he noted. “It would be ridiculous to even suggest that the majority of the Muslims are terrorists. They are not. There is only one Islam; this is the Islam of the holy book the Quran and the Islam of the prophet Mohammed. It’s not so much a religion, it’s an ideology.

“It’s an ideology that should be compared not with Christianity or Judaism, but with communism or with fascism. Let me give you one example: If you want to leave Islam ... the penalty for that is death. You have to be killed. This is not the case with Christianity or with Judaism. But it was the case in Nazi Germany or with Communist Russia. You have to see Islam for what it is because if we don’t, we will lose our free, Christian-based society.”

Wilders said that Islam has spread throughout Europe and led to honor killings, genital mutilation, and Sharia courts, aided by the “disease called cultural relativism.” He said that all cultures are not equal.

“In my book, I tell the American public, Europe is in very, very bad shape today and please don’t think that what’s happening to Europe today will not happen to America tomorrow,” he said. “It will happen to America tomorrow unless you fight for freedom, you fight for your own identity and you cut back on the Islamization of our society.”

One key bulwark in the fight against Islam is Israel.

“I know that we should all support the state of Israel,” Wilders said. “Israel is fighting our fight. Israel is exactly on the border of Jihad and reason and Israel is a beacon of light, a canary in a coal mine, so to say, in an area of darkness and tyranny. I believe that parents in America and Europe can sleep easily at night because Israeli parents lay awake at night worrying about their children defending our borders. The border of Jihad is our border.

“We share the same cultural values as Israel does. If Jerusalem falls, Athens will fall, Amsterdam will fall, and America will fall as well. They are fighting our fight. We should do anything possible to support the state of Israel. Certainly against this barbaric regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”


© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Time to Unmask Muhammad

Editor’s note: Below is an English translation of an op-ed piece that Geert Wilders published in the Dutch magazine “HP/De Tijd” on March 30, 2011.

By Geert Wilders
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
March 31, 2011

Portrait of Mohammed from Michel Baudier's Histoire générale de la religion des turcs (Paris, 1625). It was sold at auction by Sotheby's in 2002. The same image was incorporated into the cover of issue #2195 of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur.

To know why Islam is a mortal danger one must not only consider the Koran but also the character of Muhammad, who conceived the Koran and the entirety of Islam.

The Koran is not just a book. Muslims believe that Allah himself wrote it and that it was dictated to Muhammad in the original version, the Umm al-Kitab, which is kept on a table in heaven. Consequently one cannot argue with the contents. Who would dare to disagree with what Allah himself has written? This explains much of Muhammadan behaviour, from the violence of jihad to the hatred and persecution of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims and apostates. What we in the West regard as abnormal, is perfectly normal for Islam.

A second insuperable problem with Islam is the figure of Muhammad. He is not just anyone. He is al-insan al-kamil, the perfect man. To become a Muslim one must pronounce the Shahada (the Muslim creed). By pronouncing the Shahada one testifies that there is no god that can be worshipped except Allah, and one testifies that Muhammad is his servant and messenger.

The Koran, and hence Allah, lays down that Muhammad’s life must be imitated. The consequences of this are horrendous and can be witnessed on a daily basis.

There has been much analysis of Muhammad’s mental sanity. In spite of all the available research, it is rarely mentioned or debated. It is a taboo to discuss the true nature of the man whom one and a half billion Muslims around the world regard as a holy prophet and example to be followed. That taboo must be breached in the West, and here in the Netherlands.

Ali Sina is an Iranian ex-Muslim who established the organisation for apostates of Islam Faith Freedom International. In his latest book[1] he posits that Muhammad is a narcissist, a pedophile, a mass murderer, a terrorist, a misogynist, a lecher, a cult leader, a madman, a rapist, a torturer, an assassin and a looter. Sina has offered 50,000 dollars for the one who can prove otherwise. Nobody has claimed the reward as yet. And no wonder, as the description is based on the Islamic texts themselves, such as the hadiths, the descriptions of Muhammad’s life from testimonies of contemporaries.

The historical Muhammad was the savage leader of a gang of robbers from Medina. Without scruples they looted, raped and murdered. The sources describe orgies of savagery where hundreds of people’s throats were cut, hands and feet chopped off, eyes cut out, entire tribes massacred. An example is the extinction of the Jewish Kurayza tribe in Medina in 627. One of those who chopped off their heads was Muhammad. The women and children were sold as slaves. Confronted with the lunacy of Islamic terrorists today, it is not hard to find out where the lunacy comes from.

In Vienna the women’s rights activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was recently sentenced to paying a fine for insulting a religion by calling Muhammad a pedophile. However, that is the truth. Numerous hadiths contain testimonies by Muhammad’s favorite wife, the child wife Aisha. Aisha literally says: “The prophet married me when I was six years old, and had intercourse with me when I was nine.”

According to the historian Theophanes (752-817) Muhammad was an epileptic. Epileptic crises are sometimes accompanied by hallucinations, perspiration form the forehead and foaming at the mouth, the very symptoms which Muhammad displayed during his visions.

In his book “The other Muhammad” (1992) the Flemish psychologist Dr. Herman Somers concludes that in his forties the “prophet” began to suffer from acromegaly, a condition caused by a tumor in the pituitary gland, a small organ that is situated just below the brain. When the tumor in the pituitary gland causes too much pressure in the brain, people start to see and hear things that are not there. Somers’s psychopathological diagnosis of Muhammad’s condition is: organic hallucinatory affliction with paranoid characteristics.

The German medical historian Armin Geus speaks of a paranoid hallucinatory schizophrenia. A similar analysis can be found in the book “The Medical Case of Muhammad” by the physician Dede Korkut.

In his book “Psychology of Mohammed: Inside the Brain of a Prophet” Dr. Masud Ansari calls Muhammad “the perfect personification of a psychopath in power.” Muhammad had a unhinged paranoid personality with an inferiority complex and megalomaniac tendencies. In his forties he starts having visions that led him to believe he had a cosmic mission, and that there was no stopping him.

The truth is not always pleasant or politically correct. On the basis of the research referred to above it can be argued that the Islamic creed obliges one and a half billion people around the world, including the one million living in the Netherlands, to take Muhammad as their example. There is no turning back once one has become a Muslim. For even though article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has the right to “change his religion or belief,” in Islam there is a death penalty for leaving the faith.

Anyone who voices criticism of Islam and Muhammad is in grave personal danger – as I have experienced. And whoever attempts to escape from the influence of Islam and Muhammad risks death. We cannot continue to accept this state of affairs. A public debate about the true nature and character of Muhammad can provide insight and support to Muslims all over the world who wish to leave Islam.

Apostates are heroes and more than ever they deserve the support of freedom loving people all over the world. Party politics should not be at play in this matter. It is time for us to help these people by exposing Muhammad.

Geert Wilders is an MP in the Netherlands. He is the Chairman of the Party for Freedom (PVV).

Link:

[1] http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Article.aspx?id=104835

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/31/time-to-unmask-muhammad/

Who Says Islam Is Totalitarian?

Not long ago, Bernard Lewis sounded almost like Geert Wilders.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
October 19, 2010 4:00 A.M.


Who says Islam is a totalitarian doctrine? Well, Geert Wilders does, of course. As the editors point out in Monday’s superb National Review Online editorial, the Dutch parliamentarian has even had the temerity to compare Islam with Nazism. Strong stuff indeed, and for speaking it, Wilders has earned the disdain not just of the usual Muslim Brotherhood satellite organizations but even of many on the political right.

Though they support free-speech rights, and thus grudgingly concede that Wilders (pictured at right) should be permitted to say such things, they want you to understand they find his sentiments deplorable. Taking the politically correct view, they assure you that Islam is not a problem at all — it’s just those bad extremists and Islamists who have, as the Bush-era refrain went, “hijacked one of the world’s great religions.”

Emblematic is the estimable Charles Krauthammer, who has described Wilders’s views as “extreme, radical, and wrong.” Dr. K.’s complaint, expressed on Fox News back in March (and published on the Corner), was that Wilders conflates “Islam and Islamism.” The latter, Krauthammer insists, is “an ideology of a small minority which holds that the essence of Islam is jihad, conquest, forcing people into accepting a certain very narrow interpretation [of Islam].”[1]

As I take a backseat to no one in my admiration of Dr. K., I wonder what he’d make of Bernard Lewis’s take on this subject. Professor Lewis is the distinguished scholar widely and aptly admired, including by Wilders’s detractors, as the West’s preeminent authority on Islam. At Pajamas Media, Andrew Bostom has unearthed a 1954 International Affairs essay in which Professor Lewis quite matter-of-factly compared Islam with Communism. The essay, in fact, was called, “Communism and Islam.”[2]

In it, Lewis considered “the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought,” and concluded that its principal defining characteristic is the “authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition.” Expanding on this, he wrote:

There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law.#…#For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy,” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.”

But what about the conceit that undergirds current American foreign policy, the notion that Islam and Western democracy are perfectly compatible? Lewis dismissed the idea as so much elite wishful thinking:

Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical — attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the uprooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, restate, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West.

Clearly, the ensuing half-century has found Western intellectuals — regardless of political bent — joining romantic forces with their uprooted Muslim counterparts. Thus the accusation by Dr. Krauthammer, to take a prominent but by no means singular example, that Wilders fails to perceive the distinction — I’d call it a hoped-for distinction — between Islam and Islamism. Yet this accusation itself conflates Islam with Muslims, as well as Islamists with violent jihadists. This confusion leads Krauthammer to surmise both (a) that only a small minority of Muslims believe jihad is “the essence of Islam,” and (b) that because most Muslims in the West are not terrorists, it should be “obvious” that they are not Islamists.

This is wrong on several levels. First, as Robert Spencer explains, “Jihad#…#is a key element of the Islamic faith according to every single Islamic authority on the planet.” [3] To deny that it is the “essence of Islam” — which is how the prophet Mohammed regarded it — is to deny a basic fact. And though, as Spencer acknowledges, jihad is subject to varying interpretations, Lewis is clear on the preponderant construction. As he has recounted several times, most recently in The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, “The overwhelming majority of early authorities#…#citing relevant passages in the Qur’an and in the tradition, discuss jihad in military terms.” This jibes, to quote Ibn Warraq, with “the celebrated Dictionary of Islam,” which describes jihad as an “incumbent religious duty,” and defines it as “a religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad.”

Spencer echoes Lewis when he elaborates that “all the mainstream sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach as a matter of faith that Islam is intrinsically political and that Muslims must wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law.” The fact that most Muslims do not engage in violent jihad, whether out of practicality, indifference, or what have you, does not change what Islamic doctrine says. Nor does it mean these Muslims are “rejecting” that mandate. They are ignoring it.

Moreover, as I’ve noted on several occasions, the point of jihad is to spread sharia, the Islamic legal system whose installation is the necessary precondition to creating an Islamic society. That need not be done by violent means. In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamist organization, maintains that America and Europe will be “conquered” not by violence but by dawa­ – the proselytism of Islam by non-violent (or, more accurate, pre-violent) means, such as infiltration of our institutions. Spencer calls this phenomenon “stealth jihad.”

Consequently, one can be an Islamist without engaging in violent jihad, which is precisely the case with the vast majority of Islamists. The fact that they are not terrorists does not mean — as we wish it would mean — that they are not extremists. While they abstain from the use of force (particularly against other Muslims), staggering majorities of Muslims throughout the world favor the implementation and strict application of sharia. Andrew Bostom’s essay demonstrates this, citing polling done in 2009 by World Public Opinion in conjunction with the University of Maryland.

Back in 1954, Lewis (pictured at right) recalled “the political history of Islam” as “one of almost unrelieved autocracy” that was “authoritarian, often arbitrary, [and] sometimes tyrannical.” Besides this, the most interesting part of his essay is its focus on “certain uncomfortable resemblances” between “the Ulama of Islam” and “the Communist Party.” Though “very different” in some ways, the two, he stated, “profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth.”

Those answers, of course, are worlds apart in their particulars. Nonetheless, Lewis saw them as strikingly similar in

their finality and completeness, and in the contrast they offer with the eternal questioning of Western man. Both groups offer to their members and followers the agreeable sensation of belonging to a community of believers, who are always right, as against an outer world of unbelievers, who are always wrong. Both offer an exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the infidel evil-doers. The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, two necessarily opposed groups, of which the first has the collective obligation of perpetual struggle against the second, also has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. There again, the content of belief is utterly different, but the aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as “There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet” was laying his finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith — a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy — might well strike a responsive note.

In light of this scholarly comparison of Islam to Soviet totalitarianism, is it really so outrageous for Geert Wilders to compare Islam to Nazi totalitarianism? One needn’t agree with the analogy — and, agree or not, one needn’t think it a useful analogy — in order to understand why someone who is not intimidated by political correctness might employ it.

In thinking about how to argue the depth of terrorist depravity to the jury while prosecuting a 1995 terrorism trial, I must confess it crossed my mind that jihad literally means “struggle,” the same word found in the title of Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). I quickly dismissed any thought of mentioning this as too explosive — nothing provokes a mistrial motion faster than a prosecutor’s comparison of defendants to Nazis, and when your evidence is damning, it’s always better to let it, rather than your rhetoric, do the talking. But I certainly didn’t think the point was beyond the pale. As noted by Daniel Pipes (who does not agree with Wilders’s analogy), no less a figure than Winston Churchill described Mein Kampf as “the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.”[4]

In the middle of the 20th century, before suffocating political correctness took hold, it was not all that controversial to say such things. Note that in 1954, Bernard Lewis obviously felt no need to resort to such devices as “Islamism” — a device I adopt myself in The Grand Jihad — to conform to today’s obligatory but unproved assumption that there exists a moderate, tolerant Islam, scripturally based and doctrinally distinguishable from the Islam of the “extremists.”

In those bygone days, the term “Islamist” was usually used to identify a scholar of Islam — akin to a Sinologist or an Arabist. There was another usage, dating back to the 1920s. It was the one coined by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna to denote a person who urged Islam as a complete way of life and favored installation of the sharia system. For Banna, there was no difference between Islam and Islamism.

That, by the way, is not only the Brotherhood’s view. It is the adamant opinion of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist prime minister of Turkey who continues to be regarded by the U.S. government as a great moderate, just as he was during the Bush administration. “Very ugly” was his take on the term “moderate Islam” in a 2007 interview. As Erdogan fumed at the time, “It is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.”[5]

Islam is Islam. That is Erdogan’s position, it seems to have been the position of Bernard Lewis a half century ago, and it is Geert Wilders’s position today. Not that Muslims are bad, but that Islam is a dangerous ideology. Wilders summed up his views in a 2009 interview with Jeff Jacoby (also quoted in Andrew Bostom’s piece):

I have nothing against the people. I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state.

These claims are materially indistinguishable from points Professor Lewis’s made in 1954 — other than, perhaps, Wilders’s assertion that Islam “is not a religion,” although by that, I take him to mean Islam is not merely a religion or a set of spiritual principles but a comprehensive system controlling all of life.

From those premises, Wilders concluded that “Islam is totally contrary to our values.” That is a bracing conclusion. I think the problem people have with Wilders is that he is bracing. He says out loud what they fear is the case, or what they refuse to examine for fear of discovering that it is the case. That makes him inconvenient. It doesn’t make him wrong.

– Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Links:

[1] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/195969/krauthammers-take/nro-staff

[2] http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/geert-wilders-western-sages-and-totalitarian-islam/

[3] http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/03/krauthammer-on-wilders-ignorant-naive-and-wrong.html

[4] http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/02/winston-churchill-compares-mein-kampf-to-the

[5] http://www.thememriblog.org/turkey/blog_personal/en/2595.htm

Wilders: One Step Closer to Victory

Posted by Robert Spencer on Oct 18th, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com

Friday came the good news: Amsterdam public prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman declared Dutch freedom fighter Geert Wilders not guilty of discrimination against Muslims and inciting hatred against them. But his trial continues: the prosecutors’ decision is not final. A judge will issue a ruling on November 5, and he doesn’t have to follow the prosecutors’ recommendations. So the freedom of speech still hangs in the balance in the Netherlands, as well as in Europe and the West in general.

Nonetheless, van Roessel and Velleman brought an unexpected bit of common sense to this ridiculous and ominous show trial. Regarding Wilders’ much-trumpeted call to ban the Koran, the prosecutors said, according to Dutch News, that “comments about banning the Koran can be discriminatory, but because Wilders wants to pursue a ban on democratic lines, there is no question of incitement to discrimination ‘as laid down in law.’”

Many of Wilders’ critics, and even some who would otherwise support his stand for human rights against the discrimination and oppression of Sharia, have professed to find an inconsistency in Wilders’ defense of the freedom of speech and call to ban the Koran. However, in this Wilders was actually calling upon Dutch authorities to be consistent themselves: the Netherlands has “hate speech” laws, under which Mein Kampf is banned. Wilders said in the Dutch Parliament that “the Koran is a book that incites to violence,” and that “the distribution of such texts is unlawful according to Article 132 of our Penal Code.” If Mein Kampf could be banned under that article, why not another book that manifestly incites its readers to violence and hatred?

I myself don’t support “hate speech” laws or the banning of any book. While there is no justification for speech that is genuinely and legitimately hateful — racial slurs, etc., “hate speech” laws are simply tools in the hands of those who are entrusted with deciding what constitutes “hate speech” in the first place: the powerful can all too easily use them to label their opposition “hateful” and thereby silence dissent. But as long as the Netherlands has such laws, Dutch authorities should not apply them selectively, and Wilders is not self-contradictory in standing up for the freedom of speech while calling for these laws to be applied consistently, not in a self-serving and politically manipulative manner.

Meanwhile, regarding his comparison of the Koran with Mein Kampf, van Roessel and Velleman called it “crude but that did not make it punishable,” and generously acknowledged that Wilders had spoken out not against Muslims as such, but against the threat to human rights and Dutch society represented by the growing assertiveness of Islam in Dutch political and social life.

Nonetheless, the judge could still rule against Wilders, sending him to prison or levying a fine upon him. Wilders himself has ably articulated what’s at stake: “I am being prosecuted for my political convictions. The freedom of speech is on the verge of collapsing. If a politician is not allowed to criticize an ideology anymore, this means that we are lost, and it will lead to the end of our freedom.”

Indeed. If the Dutch convict Wilders and declare the truth about Islamic supremacism and jihad to be “hate speech,” they will have set a dangerous precedent that will be used ultimately to render Europeans and Americans mute, and thus defenseless, in the face of the advancing jihad and attempts to impose elements of Sharia upon the West. In fact, one of the key elements of the laws for dhimmis, non-Muslims subjugated under Islamic rule, is that they must never be critical of Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an. Thus the action against Wilders in the Netherlands not only aids the advance of Sharia in the West, but is itself an element of that advance.

But of course, it couldn’t happen here: freedom of speech could never disappear in America, right? After all, we have the First Amendment. Yet “hate speech” laws and other attempts to limit the freedom of speech, which are favored by a large number of Obama Administration officials, could be justified by a declaration that free speech is still a constitutional right, but after all, every right has its limits: “hate speech” will be specifically exempted from its protections — and “hate speech” will be defined to encompass speaking honestly about the actual texts and teachings of Islam that contain exhortations to violence and assertions of supremacism, unless one is referencing such material approvingly as a believer. For to speak of such things in any other way would be to “insult” Muslims, as has Geert Wilders.

It could happen here. That’s why what is happening to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is so immensely important, and portentous, for the future and the freedom of every American.

The Wilders West

Once a place of free inquiry, Europe is slowly stifling itself.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
October 16, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Geert Wilders (R) stands in court on October 4, 2010 next to his lawyer Bram Moszkovicz (L) before the start of his trial on charges of inciting racial hatred against Muslims (Getty Images)

For a prosecutor, it was a simple matter of cause and effect. First, I showed that the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, called for acts of violence: He admonished Muslims that Allah commanded them to slay non-believers and precisely quoted Islamic scriptures to back up that admonition. Then I showed that Muslim terrorists responded to these scripturally based exhortations by plotting and carrying out terrorist acts.

For this, the Clinton administration presented me the Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award, the Justice Department’s highest honor. For doing exactly the same thing, the justice department of the Netherlands presented Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders with an indictment.

I got the pretty glass eagle for the mantelpiece, and the Blind Sheikh got sent to prison. Wilders, by contrast, got to stand in the dock while the global Islamist movement got to savor the possibility of something far more valuable than a trophy: a white flag draped over the shriveling remains of free speech. Wilders has been acquitted, but his trial was nonetheless damaging to what remains of the Western tradition of free discourse and inquiry.

For demonstrating cause and effect, for graphically displaying — most notoriously in his short film, Fitna — that Islamic scriptures beget jihadist atrocities, Wilders was put on trial in the Netherlands. In this Kafkaesque situation, as Diana West reports, it would have been hard to conjure words more frightening than the ones that tripped off the Dutch prosecutor’s lips: “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’ witnesses might prove Wilders’ observations to be correct. What’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.”

And so they might easily have proved to be, in much of Europe.

Wilders was charged with speaking words and producing images that were discriminatory toward Muslims, and that insult and incite hatred against Muslims. Such speech is criminal in the Netherlands, as it is throughout Europe, which teems with defiantly non-assimilating Muslims and which has responded to the resulting cultural confrontation with the societal surrender known as political correctness. That the things Wilders has said may be true made no difference in the case. It is immaterial whether the bracing opinions he has expressed are grounded in fact, or that the success of a free society hinges on its being an informed society. Wilders, says the prosecution, was guilty simply for saying these things. In the new West, we are unconcerned with the pathologies that besiege us. But those who call our attention to the pathologies — who dare to puncture our “religion of peace” fantasy — must be quelled. After all, they may get Muslims upset, and you know what happens when Muslims get upset.

Here in America, I can still write the last part of that last sentence — for now. But maybe not for long, if President Obama has anything to say about it. Last spring, the administration joined with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to propose a United Nations resolution that condemns “negative stereotyping of religions.” The resolution exhorts all nations to take “effective measures” to “address and combat” incidents involving “any advocacy of#…#religious hatred” that could be construed as an “incitement” not just to “violence” but to any form of “discrimination,” or even to mere “hostility.”

We needn’t worry about that here, you tell yourself. We’ve got the First Amendment. Don’t be so sure. The anti-hostility resolution states that the “effective measures” it urges are compelled by each nation’s “obligations under international human-rights law.” When we look at one source of such law, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (foolishly ratified by the first President Bush, after U.S. Senate consent, in 1992), we find — nearly verbatim in Article 20 — the same speech-suffocating standard proposed by Obama and the OIC: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”

Even before Elena Kagan made it to the Supreme Court, there existed a five-justice majority (including Anthony Kennedy) for the proposition that international and foreign law should be weighed in interpreting American constitutional guarantees. Justice Kagan keeps that bloc intact, sliding comfortably into the shoes of her predecessor, Justice John Paul Stevens. She is also known to harbor hostility toward free speech: As an academic she belittled its value, and as solicitor general she argued that “categories of speech” may be suppressed if the government, in its wisdom, decides the “societal costs” of permitting them are too high.

When it comes to Islam as a category of speech, there is no doubt that our current government reflects the transnational progressive consensus: that the Western tradition of critical examination must give way to the Muslim tradition of submission. This is why when jihadists attack, the self-loathing elite’s response is to wonder what we did to offend them. It is also why when Muslims rioted over harmless cartoon depictions of their warrior-prophet as a warrior-prophet, the State Department’s harshest condemnation was reserved not for the marauders but for the offending newspaper. It is why Yale University Press would only publish a book about the cartoon controversy after the author agreed to purge from its pages the cartoons themselves. It is why the Washington Post just spiked a “Where’s Mohammed?” spoof in which the prophet nowhere appeared — and, by this craven act, validated cartoonist Wiley Miller’s point about Western timidity.

At least Mr. Miller is around to tell the tale. Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris had to go underground for merely suggesting an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” — as Mark Steyn observes, even being a good lefty who never followed through and tried to disavow the whole business didn’t help her. The threat whose name must not be spoken was too much. On the FBI’s advice, she disappeared without a trace, much to the relief of her former employer, the Seattle Weekly.

The Blind Sheikh has more maladies than I’ve got space to describe them. He can’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. His one and only capacity to cause mayhem is his renowned mastery of Islamic doctrine. We know little about Islam. By comparison, the Blind Sheikh is a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence, graduated from storied al-Azhar University and steeped in that ancient institution’s literalist, militant construction of Muslim theology. We are instructed by our betters to view Islam as a religion of peace — indeed, as one of our best assets in the fight against terrorism. To the contrary, the Blind Sheikh instructed the faithful that Islamic scriptural commands — Allah’s personal commands — to violence and intolerance mean exactly what they say.

Because of his exalted clerical status — that is, owing to his authority in Islam and nothing else — the Blind Sheikh was able to spur Muslims to terror. Upon demonstrating this fact, I was given an award, while he was locked in a prison cell.

Fifteen years later, for making a similar demonstration, Geert Wilders risked being the one locked in a prison cell. Fifteen years later, when Iraq’s Ayatollah Ali Sistani says Islam requires the killing of homosexuals, it is considered preaching; when Geert Wilders says it, it is a hate crime.

I don’t know if the Netherlands gives its prosecutors baubles for proving this sort of thing. Wilders’ prosecutors seem unlikely to be lauded: They have now tried to dismiss the charges against him for a second time, the first (in 2008) having been rejected by Dutch jurists who seem hell-bent on nailing Wilders and whose approval is needed before the case can be dropped. I do know the Islamists at the OIC have already been handsomely rewarded by this travesty. Their campaign to impose sharia proscriptions against speech unfavorable to Islam — against telling uncomfortable truths about Koranic injunctions and the terrible consequences that flow from them — is steadily vanquishing the West’s commitment to discourse and reason.

– Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Will Islam Conquer the Netherlands?

By Diana West
http://www.townhall.com
October 15, 2010


Geert Wilders (R), set to become a shadow partner in the next Dutch government, and his lawyer Bram Moszkovicz (L) attend on October 6, 2010 the third day of his trial in Amsterdam. Wilders faces five charges for comments made in Dutch newspapers and on internet forums between October 2006 and March 2008. He risks up to a year in jail or a 7,600-euro fine for statements calling Islam 'fascist' and likening the Koran to Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. (Getty Images)

All eyes are on the war on free speech, the one that Dutch powers-that-be are waging inside an Amsterdam courtroom. That's where Geert Wilders is standing trial for his increasingly popular political platform, based on his analysis of the anti-Western laws and principles of Islam, that rejects the Islamization of the Netherlands.

But don't stop there. There's much more to see in the trial of Wilders, whose Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) is the silent partner in the Netherlands' brand new center-right coalition government. That camel in the courtroom is the tip off.

You haven't noticed it? I've been watching it since last year, when sometime after Dutch prosecutors announced in January 2009 that Wilders would go to trial for "insulting" Muslims and "inciting" hatred against them, Stephen Coughlin, famous in national security circles in Washington for his airtight and exhaustive briefs on jihad, clued me in to his analysis of the Wilders trial to date.

What we know now we knew then: that this trial presented a watershed moment. Wilders, leader of a growing democratic movement to save his Western nation from Islamization, risks one year in prison for speaking out about the facts and consequences of Islamization. Such speech is prohibited not by the Western tradition of free speech Wilders upholds, but rather by the Islamic laws against free speech that he rejects. Wilders' plight demonstrates the extent to which the West has already been Islamized.

"It is irrelevant whether Wilder's witnesses might prove Wilders' observations to be correct," the public prosecutor stated back at the beginning. "What's relevant is that his observations are illegal." Since when are observations "illegal"? Under communist dictatorships is one answer. Under Sharia is another.

Writing in Wilders' defense in the Wall Street Journal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself a former Dutch parliamentarian, reported that Dutch multiculturalist parliamentarians, "spooked" by Wilders rising political star, modified the Dutch penal code in the fall of 2009 to fit Wilders' alleged crimes. They crafted what Hirsi Ali went on to call "the national version of what OIC diplomats peddle at the U.N. and E.U." when trying to criminalize defamation (criticism) of religion (Islam).

This is a crucial point to understand, and one that takes me back to what Stephen Coughlin posited last year. Everywhere the OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) goes, it peddles Islamic law. In effect, then, to build on Hirsi Ali's point, the Dutch modified their laws to conform with Islam's. This gibes precisely with how Coughlin saw the trial from the start: as an attempt to apply Islamic law, as advanced by the OIC, in the Netherlands.

The OIC is an international body guided by policy set by the kings and heads of state of 57 Islamic countries in accordance with Islamic law. Such law permeates OIC activities, which are shaped by the Sharia-based Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. The OIC relies on the Cairo Declaration as its "frame of reference and the basis ... regarding issues related to human rights." (These include free speech rights as restricted by Sharia.) The organization's 57 foreign ministers meet annually, as the OIC's website explains, to "consider the means for the implementation" of OIC policy. As Coughlin puts it, these are "real state actors using real state power to further real state objectives." Sharia objectives.

Topping the OIC wish list is its effort to criminalize criticism of Islam in the non-Muslim world. And this is what makes the Wilders case is so significant. It's one thing if Islamic street thugs mount assassination attempts in Western nations against violators of Islamic law (i.e., elderly Danish cartoonists), or Muslim ambassadors to Western nations lobby them to punish such violations (the free press), or OIC representatives introduce similar Sharia resolutions at the United Nations. It would be something else again if a Western government were itself to convict a democratically elected leader for violating the Sharia ban on criticizing Islam. That's not war anymore; that's conquest.

In this context, Wilders' trial was never a straight judicial process; it was a political battle from the start, a proving ground for Sharia in the West, dovetailing with the OIC's "10 year Plan," which includes a global campaign against so-called Islamophobia. It remains a test of the tolerance of Dutch elites -- tolerance for the truth -- and their openness to the intolerance of Sharia.


- Diana West is a contributing columnist for Townhall.com and author of the new book, The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.

Wilders’ Trial: Win One, Lose One

Posted by Robert Spencer on Oct 14th, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com/

On Tuesday, as his trial resumed in Amsterdam on various charges of offending Muslims, Dutch freedom fighter Geert Wilders (pictured at right)won one victory and suffered one defeat. This is welcome news for Wilders personally, since any acquittal moves him closer to the end of these nightmarish proceedings; however, the ominous implications of his trial in general for the freedom of speech were reinforced on the same day, and those implications could have deleterious effects far beyond the Wilders trial itself.

First, the good news: public prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman noted that the statements for which he is on trial referred to Islam and the Qur’an, not to Muslims as people – although they did add in the politically correct observation that Wilders’ statements might nevertheless hurt Muslims’ feelings. Despite that assertion, in a burst of logical thinking unusual in these proceedings, they recommended that since Wilders was speaking about Islamic texts and teachings and not Muslim people, the charge against him of group defamation should be dropped.

That was good as far as it went, although Wilders still faces charges of incitement that are as dangerous as they are vague. The danger of such charges was thrown into vivid relief Tuesday by a chilling statement that the prosecutors made: that Wilders will not be allowed to defend himself from charges of inciting hatred by arguing that what he said was true. Said van Roessel: “You can expect a politician to be aware of the impact of his words and in any case, the legal limit may not be crossed, no matter how important it may be to address supposed problems and to contribute to matters of general interest.”

So if the truth is not deemed to “address supposed problems and contribute to matters of general interest,” then it may not be spoken. The truth is now inadmissible in Dutch courtrooms – a chilling reality with likely reverberations far beyond the trial of Wilders himself.

By declaring the truth inadmissible in court, the prosecutors have stepped over the boundary of the rule of law into an arrogance of power that historically has led to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, powered by and only capable of being stopped by brute force. For van Roessel did not say, and indeed could not say, who would be given the right or authority to determine whether or a particular truth addressed supposed problems and contributed to matters of general interest, and could thus lawfully be encunciated. If the truth is no longer the criterion of judgment in Dutch courts, then the only thing that can fill the vacuum it will leave is the raw will to power. Judges no longer have to sift evidence and come to a conclusion based thereon; they only need to make sure they are satisfying those with the most money or the biggest guns.

In today’s Europe, Islamic supremacists will be only too happy to fill this vacuum, and certainly no difficulty coming up with whatever is required in terms of money and ordnance to bring their will to power to fruition. Authoritarian states abound in the Islamic world, and a rootless and aimless Europe, having utterly severed its own cultural moorings, will be fertile soil before too long to plant new ones.

Dutch authorities have opened the door to the extinguishing not only of the freedom of speech, but of all the other freedoms, arising from the nature and dignity of the human person, that are the hard-won legacy of Western Judeo-Christian civilization. Equality of rights of all people before the law? Citizens of the new Europe will indeed be equal with one another, but only in the sense that all will be equal in having no rights before the almighty state, which alone defines what is acceptable to be thought and said and what isn’t.

Europe faces this multifarious hell whether or not Wilders is acquitted of the remaining charges against him: a crucial Rubicon has already been crossed with the trial itself, and if the prosecutors’ statement that the truth is no defense is not countermanded and rebuked forthwith by the highest possible relevant authorities, then the darkness will descend upon Europe even more quickly than it did during the halcyon days of the Third Reich.

Even with his partial acquittal Tuesday, Wilders’ nightmare – and Europe’s – could be just beginning.

Click on link below to view Geert Wilders' film Fitna:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/03/here-is-fitna.html

Truth On Trial

Posted by Robert Spencer on Oct 5th, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com/


How imperiled is the freedom of speech? Take this passage from Slate magazine: “In 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered after making anti-Muslim remarks, as was the anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Why is there so much anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Netherlands?”

If Slate flipped those sentences, they’d have their answer. If there is any actual “anti-Muslim rhetoric” in the Netherlands, it is because those who dare to point out the outrages against human rights that Islamic law sanctions get murdered; and those who are still alive are vilified, marginalized, smeared, and put on trial – like Dutch politician and freedom fighter Geert Wilders, whose trial resumed Monday.

“I am on trial, but on trial with me is the freedom of expression of many Dutch citizens.” So said Wilders as his trial reopened in Amsterdam. Wilders faces a year in prison or a fine of up to 7,600 euros for supposedly inciting hatred against Muslims – which he has supposedly done by telling the truth about how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam themselves to incite hatred and violence against non-Muslims. If anyone should be on trial for “hate,” it should be the jihadist imams depicted in Wilders’ film Fitna – but in the hyper-politically correct Netherlands of today, the only offender is the non-Muslim who dared to call attention to the hatred they preach: Geert Wilders.

On Monday, after asserting that the freedom of expression of many Dutch citizens was on trial, Wilders continued: “I can assure you, I will continue proclaiming it.” He added: “I am sitting here as a suspect because I have spoken nothing but the truth. I have said what I have said and I will not take one word back, but that doesn’t mean I’ve said everything attributed to me.” Then he asserted the right to remain silent for the remainder of the proceedings — whereupon the presiding judge, Jan Moors, claimed that Wilders had gotten a reputation for making bold proclamations but then refusing to discuss them, saying that he was “good in taking a stand and then avoiding a discussion.” Moors added: “By remaining silent, it seems you’re doing that today as well.”

At that, Wilders’s attorney, Bram Moszkowicz, moved to have Moors removed for his bias, and the just-resumed trial ground to a halt. Wilders commented: “I thought I had a right to a fair trial, including the right to remain silent. It is scandalous that the judge passes comment on that. A fair trial is not possible with judges like that.”

A ruling will be made Tuesday on Moszkowicz’s motion, which, if granted, could delay the trial for months. But if the Dutch authorities had any sense of what is really at stake, they would drop all charges against Wilders and adjourn the trial for good. The Wilders trial is a turning point for the West: will Western authorities defend the hard-won principle of the freedom of speech as a bulwark against tyranny and the establishment of protected classes that enjoy rights that other citizens do not have, or will they – in the interests of suicidal political correctness — allow Islamic supremacists to obliterate that freedom in the interests of establishing in the West the Sharia principle that Islam is not to be questioned or criticized, especially by non-Muslims?

If they succeed in doing this, Europeans and Americans will be rendered mute, and thus defenseless, in the face of the advancing jihad and attempt to impose Sharia on the West. It is no coincidence that one of the key elements of the laws for dhimmis, non-Muslims subjugated under Islamic rule, is that they are never critical of Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an. Thus this prosecution in Amsterdam not only aids the advance of Sharia in the West, but is itself an element of that advance.

This is part of an ongoing initiative by the 57-government Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). In 2008 the Secretary General of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, issued a warning: “We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed” regarding free speech about Islam and jihad terrorism. Even at that time, he reported success: “The official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”

Since then, Ihsanoglu must be more than pleased by how successful his offensive against the freedom of speech in the West is proving to be. Wilders is on trial for charges including having “intentionally offended a group of people, i.e. Muslims, based on their religion.” If intentionally offending someone is a criminal offense, numerous Islamic supremacists could end up in court, but of course that is not the purpose for which the law was drafted. The Dutch political establishment hopes to use the Wilders trial to stop his rise in Dutch politics, since he challenges so many of the core assumptions upon which current Dutch and European Union policy are based. Since one of those policies is unrestricted immigration from Muslim countries, Dutch officials hope to discredit Wilders’s work in exposing how Islamic jihadists use violent passages of the Qur’an to justify violence and supremacism.

Unfortunately for them, however, Wilders really is telling the truth: Islamic jihadists really do use the Qur’an to justify violence and supremacism, and as I show in my book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, there is plenty in the Muslim holy book that they can use in this way. As my colleague Pamela Geller has noted, “Truth is the new hate speech” – and nowhere is that aphorism truer than in the trial of Geert Wilders. The Dutch authorities can jail and fine Wilders, and do their best to discredit him domestically and internationally, but there is one thing neither they nor anyone else can do: engage him in honest debate and prove him wrong. And so instead, we have this Stalinist show trial.

Wilders has stated the problem plainly: “I am being prosecuted for my political convictions. The freedom of speech is on the verge of collapsing. If a politician is not allowed to criticise an ideology anymore, this means that we are lost, and it will lead to the end of our freedom.”

Wilders’s words are true not just for the Netherlands, but for all of Europe – and ultimately for the United States of America as well.


Related Links:

http://www.slate.com/id/2269658?wpisrc=newsletter

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/10/05/dutch-courage-liberal-cowardice/

To view Geert Wilders' film Fitna click on link below:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/03/here-is-fitna.html

Australian Muslim cleric calls for a beheading. Who cares?

By Larry Elder
Washington Examiner Columnist
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/
September 23, 2010

What happens when an Australian(!) Muslim cleric calls for the beheading of a Dutch politician?

Not much.

What happens when an American pastor no one ever heard of threatens to burn a Koran?

It ignites an international outcry.

Terry Jones, pastor of a 50-member church in Gainesville, Fla., threatened to burn the Koran as a protest against the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center. Democrats and Republicans denounced Jones. Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, warned that Jones' action would put American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan at risk, and he personally telephoned the pastor to dissuade him.

Those who would desecrate the Koran or who would draw a cartoon of Prophet Muhammad or who would otherwise "disrespect" Islam run the risk of being murdered. This is quite a response from followers of what President George W. Bush called a "religion of peace," the "hijacking" of which motivated the 9/11 hijackers. Bush repeatedly distinguished between a war against Islamofascism and a war on Islam. But the distinction apparently collapses if one pastor doesn't get the memo.

How dare this pastor of some church-nobody-heard-of show insufficient respect for Islam, many of whose followers support a global jihad that demands replacement of all non-Islamic governments, as well as the conversion of all to Islam, by force if necessary?

Feiz Muhammad

Where is the international outcry from this recent story from Reuters?

"A well-known Australian Muslim cleric has called for the beheading of Dutch anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders. ...

"The Sydney-born (Feiz) Muhammad has gained notoriety for, among other things, calling on young children to be radicalized and blaming rape victims for their own attacks.

"(De Telegraaf, the Netherlands' largest newspaper) posted an English-language audio clip in which he refers to Wilders as 'this Satan, this devil, this politician in Holland' and explains that anyone who talks about Islam like Wilders does should be executed by beheading. ...

"Wilders is currently on trial in the Netherlands for inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims.

"The Freedom Party leader made a film in 2008 which accused the Koran of inciting violence and mixed images of terrorist attacks with quotations from the Islamic holy book.

"Wilders was also charged because of outspoken remarks in the media, such as an opinion piece in a Dutch daily in which he compared Islam to fascism and the Koran to Adolf Hitler's book 'Mein Kampf.'"

Civil libertarian groups vigorously defend vile but protected speech. Where are the free-speech groups denouncing Wilders' prosecution for making abrasive comments? Or does the right to free speech only apply to the nasty comments routinely made on cable shows by Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/tea party-hating lefties?

If a proposed Koran burning generates international news and condemnation, isn't the call by an Australian Muslim cleric for the beheading of a democratically elected European politician worthy of a few moments on the network nightly news?

Offensive acts by non-Muslims provoke calls for sensitivity and understanding. Offensive acts by Muslims generate indifference rather than denunciations of the barbarous statements and acts that Muslim clerics and others call for in the name of Islam.

Why the double standard?

Dr. Fred Gottheil is an economics professor at the University of Illinois. He calls himself a "Keynesian-type economist" who is "not afraid of deficit spending" -- not exactly Reaganesque.

In January 2009, some 900 academics signed a four-page petition calling for a U.S. abandonment of the support of Israel. Gottheil learned that many of the petition signatories belonged to faculty from women's and gender studies departments. He decided to conduct an experiment.

Would the same professors sign a "Statement of Concern" over the anti-human rights, anti-gay, anti-woman practices in the Muslim Middle East? Gottheil composed a four-page document citing evidence of atrocities, along with the names of Muslim clerics and scholars defending these violations of human decency. He e-mailed his statement to 675 signers of the anti-Israel petition.

What happened? "The results were surprising," Gottheil said, "even though I thought the responses would be few. They were almost nonexistent."

Bottom line: Barbarity in the name of Islam is not even remotely condemned to the degree that the West condemns insensitivity by cartoonists, politicians and anti-Islam clerics.

Why? A denunciation of Muslim practices suggests a superiority of American values and culture. The left finds the very notion objectionable.

Gottheil put it this way: "If leftist 'progressives' really cared about women, gays and lesbians, then they would be fighting for their rights in places where such rights are really violated -- like under Hamas in Gaza and under the mullahs in Iran. But doing so would legitimize their own society and its values and therefore completely cripple their entire identity and life purpose, and so their purported concern for women, gays and lesbians has to go out the window."

It is a bizarre and dangerous double standard that allows a Pastor Jones to become more notorious than a Feiz Muhammad.

Examiner Columnist Larry Elder is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate.


Related Video Link (Feiz Muhammad calling for the beheading of Geert Wilders):

http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/7544764/__Haatprediker__dood_aan_Wilders__.html

Wilders’ Message to Muslims

Posted by MuslimsDebate.com on Jul 20th, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com/

(Editor’s note: the new site http://www.muslimsdebate.com/ asked Geert Wilders why he became anti-Islam and what his message would be to Muslims. Below is his response.)

I first visited an Islamic country in 1982.

I was 18 years old and had traveled with a Dutch friend from Eilat in Israel to the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh.

We were two almost penniless backpacking students.

We slept on the beaches and found hospitality with Egyptians, who spontaneously invited us to tea.

I clearly recall my very first impression of Egypt: I was overwhelmed by the kindness, friendliness and helpfulness of its people.

I also remember my second strong impression of Egypt: It struck me how frightened these friendly and kind people were.

While we were in Sharm el-Sheikh, President Mubarak happened to visit the place.

I remember the fear which suddenly engulfed the town when it was announced that Mubarak was coming on an unexpected visit; I can still see the cavalcade of black cars on the day of his visit and feel the almost physical awareness of fear, like a cold chill on that very hot day in Summer.

It was a weird experience; Mubarak is not considered the worst of the Islamic tyrants and yet, the fear of the ordinary Egyptians for their leader could be felt even by me. I wonder how Saudis feel when their King is in town, how Libyans feel when Gaddafi announces his coming, how Iraqis must have felt when Saddam Hussein was near. A few years later, I read in the Koran how the 7th century Arabs felt in the presence of Muhammad, who, as several verses describe, “cast terror into their hearts” (suras 8:12, 8:60, 33:26, 59:12).

From Sharm el-Sheikh, my friend and I went to Cairo. It was poor and incredibly dirty. My friend and I were amazed that such a poor and filthy place could be a neighbor of Israel, which was so clean. The explanation of the Arabs, with whom we discussed their poverty, was that they were not in any way to blame for this affliction: They said they were the victims of a global conspiracy of “imperialists” and “Zionists”, aimed at keeping Muslims poor and subservient. I found that explanation unconvincing. My instinct told me it had something to do with the different cultures of Israel and Egypt.

I made a mistake in Cairo. We had almost no money and I was thirsty. One could buy a glass of water at public water collectors. It did not look clean, but I drank it. I got a terrible diarrhea. I went to a hostel where one could rent a spot on the floor for two dollars a day. There I lay for several days, a heap of misery in a crowded, stinking room, with ten other guys. Once Egypt had been the most advanced civilization on earth. Why had it not progressed along with the rest of the world?

In the late 1890s, Winston Churchill was a soldier and a war correspondent in British India (contemporary Pakistan) and the Sudan. Churchill was a perceptive young man, whose months in Pakistan and the Sudan allowed him to grasp with amazing clarity what the problem is with Islam and “the curses it lays on its votaries.”

“Besides the fanatical frenzy, …, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy,” he wrote. “The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist where the followers of the Prophet rule or live. … The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to a sole man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. … Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it.” And Churchill concluded: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

There are people who say that I hate Muslims. I do not hate Muslims. It saddens me how Islam has robbed them of their dignity.What Islam does to Muslims is visible in the way they treat their daughters. On March 11, 2002, fifteen Saudi schoolgirls died as they attempted to flee from their school in the holy city of Mecca. A fire had set the building ablaze. The girls ran to the school gates but these were locked. The keys were in the possession of a male guard, who refused to open the gates because the girls were not wearing the correct Islamic dress imposed on women by Saudi law: face veils and overgarments.

The “indecently” dressed girls frantically tried to save their young lives. The Saudi police beat them back into the burning building. Officers of the Mutaween, the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” as the Police are known in Saudi Arabia, also beat passers-by and firemen who tried to help the girls. “It is sinful to approach them,” the policemen warned bystanders. It is not only sinful, it is also a criminal offence.

Girls are not valued highly in Islam; the Koran says that the birth of a daughter makes a father’s “face darken and he is filled with gloom” (sura 43:15). Nevertheless, the incident at the Mecca school drew angry reactions. Islam is inhumane; but Muslims are humans, hence capable of Love – that powerful force which Muhammad despised. Humanity prevailed in the Meccan fathers who were incensed over the deaths of their daughters; it also prevailed in the firemen who confronted the Mutaween when the latter were beating the girls back inside, and in the journalists of the Saudi paper which, for the first time in Saudi history, criticized the much feared and powerful “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.”

However, Muslim protests against Islamic inhumanity are rare. Most Muslims, even in Western countries, visit mosques and listen to shocking Koranic verses and to repulsive sermons without revolting against them.

I am an agnosticus myself. But Christians and Jews hold that God created man in His image. They believe that by observing themselves, as free and rational beings capable of love, they can come to know Him. They can even reason with Him, as the Jews have done throughout their history. The Koran, on the contrary, states that “Nothing can be compared with Allah” (sura 16:74, 42:11). He has absolutely nothing in common with us. It is preposterous to suppose that Allah created man in his image. The biblical concept that God is our father is not found in Islam. There is no personal relationship between man and Allah, either. The purpose of Islam is the total submission of oneself and others to the unknowable Allah, whom we must serve through total obedience to Muhammad as leader of the Islamic state (suras 3:31, 4:80, 24:62, 48:10, 57:28). And history has taught us that Muhammad was not at all a prophet of love and compassion, but a mass murderer, a tyrant and a pedophile. Muslims could not have a more deplorable role model.

Without individual freedom, it is not surprising that the notion of man as a responsible agent is not much developed in Islam. Muslims tend to be very fatalistic. Perhaps – let us certainly hope so – only a few radicals take the Koranic admonition to wage jihad on the unbelievers seriously. Nevertheless, most Muslims never raise their voice against the radicals. This is the “fearful fatalistic apathy” Churchill referred to.

The author Aldous Huxley, who lived in North Africa in the 1920s, made the following observation: “About the immediate causes of things – precisely how they happen – they seem to feel not the slightest interest. Indeed, it is not even admitted that there are such things as immediate causes: God is directly responsible for everything. ‘Do you think it will rain?’ you ask pointing to menacing clouds overhead. ‘If God wills,’ is the answer. You pass the native hospital. ‘Are the doctors good?’ ‘In our country,’ the Arab gravely replies, in the tone of Solomon, ‘we say that doctors are of no avail. If Allah wills that a man die, he will die. If not, he will recover.’ All of which is profoundly true, so true, indeed, that is not worth saying. To the Arab, however, it seems the last word in human wisdom. … They have relapsed – all except those who are educated according to Western methods – into pre-scientific fatalism, with its attendant incuriosity and apathy.”

Islam deprives Muslims of their freedom. That is a shame, because free people are capable of great things, as history has shown. The Arab, Turkish, Iranian, Indian, Indonesian peoples have tremendous potential. It they were not captives of Islam, if they could liberate themselves from the yoke of Islam, if they would cease to take Muhammad as a role model and if they got rid of the evil Koran, they would be able to achieve great things which would benefit not only them but the entire world.

As a Dutch, a European and a Western politician, my responsibility is primarily to the Dutch people, to the Europeans and the West. However, since the liberation of the Muslims from Islam, will benefit all of us, I wholeheartedly support Muslims who love freedom. My message to them is clear: “Fatalism is no option; ‘Inch’ Allah’ is a curse;

Submission is a disgrace.

Free yourselves. It is up to you.

Geert Wilders

TRIAL BALLOONS

Mark Steyn on People
http://www.marksteyn.com/
Tuesday, 20 April 2010

HAPPY WARRIOR from the April 19, 2010 issue of National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/

You’ve probably heard of Geert Wilders, the “far right” Dutch politician currently on trial in Amsterdam for offending Islam. But have you heard of Guy Earle? He’s a Canadian stand-up comedian currently on trial in Vancouver for offending lesbians. Two lesbians in particular. They came to a late-night comedy show he was hosting and got a table near the stage. They were drunk, and began disrupting the act, and so he did the old Don Rickles thing and put down the hecklers. So, naturally, the aggrieved party went to the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal, and Mr Earle has now been hauled into the dock for the “homophobic” nature of his putdowns.

Between them, these two trials symbolize where most of the western world is headed, and very fast. Geert Wilders is an elected member of parliament and the leader of what, since last month’s local elections, is the second biggest political party in the Hague and, according to recent national polls, tied for first place as the most popular party in the country. So, although he’s invariably labeled “far right” in European and US news reports, how far he is depends on where you’re standing: When the “extreme right” “fringe” is more popular than the “mainstream”, maybe the mainstream isn’t that mainstream, and the center isn’t exactly where the European establishment would like it to be.

A while back, Wilders was asked what his party would do in its first days in office after winning the election (to be held later this year). He replied that it would pass a bill ending “non-western immigration” to the Netherlands. This remark is now one of the “crimes” listed on the indictment against him. So the Dutch state is explicitly prosecuting the political platform of the most popular opposition party in the country. Which is the sort of thing we used to associate with your average banana-republic caudillo rather than free societies.

So a man who lives under armed guard because Muslims want to kill him is now on trial for “incitement”. But, of course, this was a fight the famously provocative Wilders chose to pick: He feels Islamization puts a question mark over the continued existence of his country, and that therefore he is bound to resist it. He knew what he was doing.

By contrast, Guy Earle had no idea what he was doing. Until the aggrieved Sapphists consumed his life, he was a man of conventionally Canadian views. He’s not a rightwing blowhard like me or Ezra Levant or Geert Wilders. When he first found himself ensnared by the “human rights” circus, he got some comedy colleagues to organize a fundraiser for him, and they all said “f—k” a lot and did anti-Bush jokes. If that’s not “mainstream”, what is? He offered to make a kind of apology and a donation to a "woman advocate group", whatever that is. In other words, he didn’t react like Ezra and me and go nuclear on the whole ugly racket.

But they screwed him over anyway, and in the three years since all the cool comedians who pride themselves on their “edginess” and “transgressiveness” and their courage in speaking truth to power seem to have fallen by the wayside, and the business as a whole has decided that discretion is the better part of valor. To fund his stay in Vancouver for the trial, he suggested a possible booking to a promoter he knew. But the promoter figured he didn’t need a lot of trouble from “the gay community”: “A lot of people don’t want to have anything to do with me,” Earle told radio host Rob Breakenridge. “I don’t know what the silver lining is.” After three years on the receiving end of Canadian “human rights”, he’s out of dough, out of laughs, and facing a $20,000 shakedown from the aggrieved lesbian.

Under Canada’s “human rights” regime, members of preferred identity groups – women, gays, Muslims – can sue and get their tab picked up by the taxpayer, and defendants have their lives and savings destroyed, regardless of the verdict, which by the time it comes is all but irrelevant. Canadian “liberals” are generally satisfied with the system, because they assume it’s just rightwing haters like me and Levant who get clobbered. But in fact most of the victims are fellows like Guy Earle – they hold all the correct views on the Iraq war, gay marriage and everything else, but they get destroyed anyway. All tyranny is whimsical, and, with the state ever more aggressive in its role as the only legitimate mediator between identity groups, its whimsicality will inevitably fall on those just trying to keep their heads down and get on with life without catching the commissar’s eye.

If Geert Wilders is convicted and jailed, there will be consequences. Significant numbers of Dutch citizens understand that something important is at stake in this trial – even if the media don’t quite know how to cover it. No matter what evasions and euphemisms you deploy, the awkward reality glares through: Wilders is being prosecuted for his opinions, and that truth is simply too shaming, even to the Dutch poodle media.

The Earle trial is attracting even less coverage, perhaps because it’s even more embarrassing: Canada is now a land that prosecutes comedians for their jokes. But there is no equivalent sense that anything big is at stake. It’s just an incremental increase in the state’s reach. Mr Earle will be convicted, few people will pay any attention, and the next case will be more absurd, and the one after that even more so. The lesson for the overreaching Dutch establishment is that, if you’re going to extinguish the lamps of liberty, do it one by one, and no one will notice.

Is Wilders Wrong About Islam?

Posted by Moorthy Muthuswamy on Apr 9th, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com/


The recent criticism of Geert Wilders’ views on Islam by the leading lights of the conservative movement has created much indignation and surprise in certain quarters.

If conservative analysts with strong national security credentials couldn’t be convinced of Islam’s threat, getting the point across to the centrist politicians who define and execute policy will indeed be even tougher.

In a particularly striking criticism of Wilders, conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer asserts that “What he [Geert Wilders] says is extreme, radical, and wrong. He basically is arguing that Islam is the same as Islamism. Islamism is an ideology of a small minority which holds that the essence of Islam is jihad, conquest, forcing people into accepting a certain very narrow interpretation [of Islam]. The untruth of that is obvious.”

Without commenting on the merits of Dr. Krauthammer’s critique, it is pertinent to note that it is his opinion. This is true of Geert Wilder’s reasoned views on Islam as well. After all, both have not quoted any scientific study to back their assertions.

If Islam is a threat as some claim, what would it take to persuade that certain fundamental attributes of Islam enshrine it a violent ideology of conquest? The key to settling what Islam stands for is to let science, not opinion, dictate the debate. This is reality crystallized by an analogy:
There was a time when a male lion was seen as an embodiment of a great and dominant hunter of a pride. This perception reflected the majority of opinions at a certain time. However, various studies conducted in ensuing years told a different story: that female lions were the real hunters of a pride. That is, statistics of female lions hunting for their pride dominated the overall hunting pattern of a pride. These statistics put to rest the specific question of who hunted the most in a pride. In fact, these statistics form the definitive scientific basis of these studies.

More than a few Muslims have claimed that they engage in jihad (a religious war waged to advance the cause of Islam at the expense of unbelievers) because Islamic scriptures command them to do so. Even nations representing Muslim communities—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran—have taken to sponsoring jihad worldwide, on the basis of the scriptures. There are widely varying opinions on the root cause of this—the dominant one is that the relevant Islamic scriptures have been misinterpreted. As with the discussion of the lions, a corresponding scientific query would be to find out the extent or the statistics of dislike of unbelievers and their conquest in the Islamic doctrines.

Recently, Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam has carried out a groundbreaking statistical analysis of Islamic doctrines. I summarize his studies by noting that about sixty-one percent of the contents of the Koran are found to speak ill of unbelievers or call for their violent conquest; at best only 2.6 percent of the verses of the Koran are noted to show goodwill toward humanity. Moreover, about seventy five percent of Muhammad’s biography (Sira) consists of jihad waged on unbelievers.

While there might be some subjectivity to the above analysis, the overwhelming thrust of the inferences should be noted. This overall thrust exposes the sheer absurdity of excusing the Koran-inspired terror on the so-called “selective interpretation” of the Muslim holy book or its “verses being taken out of context.”

The burden of scientific or statistical evidence suggests that Islam is an intolerant religion that drives its followers toward a violent conquest of unbelievers. If such is the thrust of the Islamic doctrines, their propagation would lead to increased violence directed at non-Muslims. Indeed, rise in Muslim extremism of the past decades is directly correlated with hundreds of billions of dollars spent by government-linked Saudi charities to “propagate” Islam worldwide.

Not surprisingly, even in the modern context, manifestations of Islamic supremacy and conquest are the norm, rather than the exception. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden outlined a condition for terror attacks against America to cease: “I invite you to embrace Islam.” During the past sixty years most non-Muslim minorities—tens of millions—in all Muslim-majority regions of South Asia were terrorized into leaving for nearby non-Muslim-majority lands. All of this points to conquering land and people for Islam.

America’s policy approach to the Muslim world has been clouded by misrepresentations of Islam’s character. For instance, in one of the most important foreign policy initiatives of his presidency, in the now-famous Cairo speech, Obama observed that “[America and Islam] overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

We are left with the grim reality that at the fundamental level America’s policies toward the Muslim world are based on false premises—and hence, are untenable. This reality must be acknowledged widely before alternate policies can be devised.

We live in the era of science that has brought unprecedented security, development, health and prosperity. Yet, we have allowed opinions to dictate debate and policy on an existential threat. The importance of letting science drive policy couldn’t be clearer on the subject of Islamic radicalism.

The writer is a U.S.-based nuclear physicist and author of the book Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War. His email is moorthym@comcast.net.