Geert Wilders: Defender of the West Against the Grand Jihad

by Jerry Gordon (May 2012)

Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me
By Geert Wilders
Regnery, 2012
256 pages

 
On Saturday, April 21st, Geert Wilders, populist leader of the PVV Freedom Party in the Netherlands walked out of intense negotiations with the ruling minority center-right coalition government headed by PM Mark Rutte of the VVD Liberal Party. Wilders and the PVV had sought to protect the pension rights of average citizens in Holland in the current budget crisis.

Wilders’ dramatic exit ended the 557 days of this minority working coalition composed of the VVD, Christian Democrats and the PVV, which had finished third in the 2010 general elections. Wilders’ surging popularity in the 2010 general elections had made him a veritable kingmaker – effectively giving the Rutte-led coalition a working majority in the Hague parliament. Wilders, however, had refrained from joining the Rutte government in any cabinet post.

Wilders had also railed against the European Union, while fielding a PVV slate in 2009 that captured four positions in the Dutch delegation to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Like the UK Independent Party, Wilders believes the EU has interfered with Dutch sovereignty. Wilders also objected to the recent visit of Islamist President Abdullah Gul of Turkey commemorating four centuries of relations between the two countries. Prior to his arrival, Gul had criticized Wilders for being an “extreme voice.” Wilders had earlier campaigned as a VVD member of parliament to deny Turkey’s entry into the EU. Wilders subsequently withdrew from the VVD in June 2004. Officials of the Islamist AKP government in Turkey in 2010 objected to Wilders’ inclusion in a Dutch parliamentary delegation visiting the NATO member.

Wilders is scheduled to arrive in the US in early May to promote his new book, Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me. Against the backdrop of the recent fall of the Dutch government, could this book tour be a prelude to a possible run for the PM position in a snap election?

Wilders’ book is an important and well-documented testimony, a warning to Americans and the West that conquest by violence, intimidation and infiltration of our government is the aim of the Islamic Grand Jihad. His message is that only through vigorous exercise of free speech and eternal vigilance can we protect the basic freedoms and liberties guaranteed by the US Constitution. As he amply demonstrates in Marked for Death, Americans must hold elected officials to account for their failure to stop this totalitarian doctrine from gaining a foothold here, suborning our bedrock Judeo-Christian values and jeopardizing our future.

In Marked for Death, Wilders propounds a thesis that Mohammed, not Allah was the author of the Qur’an that served his own nefarious ends. A thesis that would be viewed as blasphemous by mainstream Muslims.  In an essay written, just prior to publication of Wilders’ book, and published on the website of the Dutch publication, Dagelijkse Standaard, Wilders outlines his thesis:

The Koran is not a book that was written by Allah, but on the contrary, one that was written by Muhammad. That is the truth, but to Islam that is outright blasphemy.
 
[. . .]
 
Yet the evidence that not Allah, but Muhammad is the author of the Koran is overwhelming. When one reads the Sira, the biography of Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq in the eighth century, it is striking how Allah produced texts that catered directly for Muhammad’s political, sexual and covetous desires. One must be blind not to see that Muhammad was an opportunist who adapted texts as it suited him.
 
[. ..]
 
That the Koran was not written by Allah in heaven is a fact. The Koran was made up by Muhammad as it suited him according to his opportunistic goals. We must confront Muslims with this truth. Because only the truth sets people free. And if the truth is that the Koran is not the word of Allah, it does not need to be taken literally.

 
In her book, Allah is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion, my colleague Rebecca Bynum buttressed Wilders’ arguments and further asserted that the Islamic system acts as a “substitute God” imposing a wedge between the believer and his own natural spiritual tendancies, eventually leading devotees into a realm of inverted morality where cruelty and killing for the cause of Allah are considered the highest “good.”
 
Andrew Bostom in his American Thinker review essay on Wilders’ Marked for Death discusses the extensive body of criticism of Islamic doctrine that constitutes the underpinning of Wilders’ thesis. Bostom pays this tribute to Wilders:

[Geert Wilders is] one of the West’s most important political leaders, whose grasp of the civilizational jihadist threat, and willingness to combat it, are unequalled.

Even before Wilders’ book was given a title, its publication was the subject of an international diplomatic démarche. We noted in an Iconoclast post on December 14, 2011:

Egyptian Human Rights blogger, Mahmoud Elsokby posted on the Al Ahram report:

Egypt’s foreign ministry Wednesday summoned Dutch Ambassador Susan Blankhart to protest against what it perceives to be a defamation of Islam by parliament member Geert Wilders.

According to Egyptian diplomatic sources, the foreign ministry insisted it could not tolerate “such unacceptable acts that could affect the spirit of cooperation, which should prevail between countries.”

Egyptian authorities have recently banned him from entering the country during a visit of a European Parliament delegation.

However, the Al Ahram report had an error. According to the Freedom Party (PVV) headquarters in the Netherlands:

It is not Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), who was recently banned by the Egyptian authorities from entering Egypt, but Raymond De Roon MP, one of the PVV’s foreign affairs spokesmen.

Al Ahram was clearly confused about which Dutchman was banned from entering Egypt. This is a mere piffle, when the objective is to publicize Muslim outrage over any criticism of the divine word of Allah in the Qur’an. No matter, all this episode in Egypt does is raise the visibility and importance of Wilder’s new book. It is left for Wilders to have the final word:

Fortunately we have freedom of opinion here. The Egyptian military regime should concern itself with the rights and protection of Christians in Egypt and preventing further bloodshed rather than worrying about me.

Wilders' book has a foreword by Canadian-born commentator Mark Steyn, a kindred fighter for free speech, subjected to prosecution brought by Muslim complaints against Steyn by human rights councils in Canada. Both authors are leaders of a burgeoning movement in the West, in the courts and the public square, defending the right to criticize Islam. Wilders’ book is both a primer on the underlying totalitarian doctrine of Islam and a personal chronicle. It illustrates his endeavors over the past decade to alert the West to the tsunami of Islamic hatred of freedom and liberty. A tsunami on the verge of engulfing his native Holland and other European countries, turning them into what Bat Ye’or has called Eurabia.

This native of Venlo in The Netherlands, as Steyn notes in his forward, has been a virtual prisoner under 24/7 protection by the Royal Dutch Protective Service (RDPS) since November 2004 when the assassination of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Moroccan Muslim extremist occurred in Amsterdam. He and his wife have been shunted among a variety of safe houses including military barracks and even jails on a nightly basis. This tall Dutchman with his signature blonde pompadour never tires from seizing every opportunity to issue a warning about how Islam threatens the future of the West. A future free of Islamic doctrinal tyranny denigrating the rights of women, apostates (those who leave Islam by personal choice) Christians, Jews and all unbelievers. A political doctrine with the thin veneer of religious practices seeking to supplant our bedrock constitutional freedoms with Islamic Shariah law via a Grand Jihad. A stealth jihad which uses our laws against us, while intimidating the media and public officials to achieve their ultimate goal.

Steyn notes why Wilders has put his life at risk:

Geert Wilders thinks we ought to be able to talk about this – and indeed, as citizens of the oldest, freest societies on earth, have a duty to do so. Without him and a few other brave souls, the views of 57 percent of the Dutch electorate would be unrepresented in the parliament.

[. . .]

How speedily “the most tolerant country in Europe” has adopted “shoot the messenger” as an all purpose cure-all for “Islamophobia.”

It’s not ironic that the most liberal country in Western Europe should be the most advanced in its descent into a profoundly illiberal hell. It was entirely foreseeable, and all Geert Wilders is doing is stating the obvious: a society that becomes more Muslim will have less of everything else, including individual liberty.

[. . .]

As Geert Wilders says of the Muslim world’s general stagnation, “It’s the culture, stupid.”

Wilders left the VVD in order to create the PVV as a bulwark against Dutch multiculturalist policies abetting wholesale Muslim immigration with the attendant overarching threat of Islamization. There are currently approximately 1 million Muslims out of a total population of 16.5 million in The Netherlands.

Wilders’ had inflamed the debate about what he sees as self-destructive policies by suggesting the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book, was the equivalent of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a mother and housewife, was tried and fined 480 euros in a Viennese courtroom after being surreptiously recorded at a private lecture for re-stating the Qur’anic legend that Mohammed consummated his marriage to Aisha at the age of nine. She claimed this was evidence of pedophilia. Sabaditsch-Wolff subsequently lost an appeal. Danish Free Press Society President, Lars Hedegaard was similarly entrapped by leftist media in an interview in which he criticized Islamic treatment of women. He was convicted and fined 1000 euros by the Danish eastern Superior Court in May 2011. He was recently acquitted by the Danish Supreme Court on the grounds that his privacy had been invaded. That still leaves untouched the Orwellian Danish penal code article under which he was charged with hate speech by prosecutors in Copenhagen. Under that law, the truth of what is spoken is no defense.

Wilders draws attention at the start of his book to the attack on Danish political cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard by an enraged Somali Danish immigrant wielding an axe. Westergaard drew the Mohammed cartoon published in 2005 by the Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, depicting Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb. This cartoon was used by radical Danish Muslim clerics and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to foment death and destruction throughout the Muslim world and threats on the life of Westergaard. Those threats forced him into 24/7 police protection including construction of what turned out to be a life-saving safe room in his home. Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who likewise drew a controversial sketch of Mohammed as a roundabout dog, was also targeted for violence in a failed fire bombing attack by Bosnian Muslim immigrants on his home. As Westergaard commented in a New English Review interview, “Free speech – use it!” A rubric that Wilders propounds in his proposal for adoption of an EU version of the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

According to Steyn, world media placed Wilders “beyond the pale.” He notes these press comments:

The far-right anti-immigration party of Geert Wilders (the Financial Times). . . Extreme right anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders (AFP) . . .”at the fringes of mainstream politics” (Time).

Our counter to those mainstream media comments is that Wilders’ stands have built an alliance across the EU with the sprouting of Freedom Parties in the UK and Germany, the Vlaam Blok in neighboring Belgium, and the Swiss People’s Party. Such “fringe groups” as the French National Assembly have voted bans on Shariah compliant burkas for Muslim women. A referendum in Switzerland voted a ban on further construction of minarets, what Islamist Turkish PM Recep Erdogan referred to as the “bayonets of Islam.”

Wilders’ espousal of this cause célèbre had painted a virtual bull’s eye on his back. That is reflected in calls for his death by Muslim extremists in the Netherlands and the Ummah. Interpol warrants were issued by Shariah courts in Jordan for defaming Islam occasioned by the release of his short firm, Fitna (chaos in Arabic), in 2008 critical of Islamic doctrine and practice. That Interpol warrant complicates his travels abroad as the Dutch Foreign office and the RDPS detail that guards him 24/7 must clear with host countries that he will not be arrested. We witnessed those extensive security arrangements by the RDPS first hand when we facilitated Wilders controversial presentation at Columbia University in October 2009.

The Fitna film spawned a unique event at Heathrow airport in February 2009 described in Chapter Twelve. Wilders had flown into the UK to show Fitna at a conference room at the House of Lords at the invitation of Baron Malcolm Pearson of Rannoch and Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury. Wilders describes how Lord Nazir Ahmed of the Labour Party had “flown into a rage,” visited Baron Pearson and the Black Rod, head of security at Westminster, suggesting that Wilders’ presence “would lead to the incitement of religious and racial hatred, which constitutes a public order offence.” Given the security threats, the showing of Fitna was postponed until February 12^th. On February 10^th, Wilders received a letter from the British Home Secretary Jacquie Smith declaring him persona non grata stating that, “your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.”

Wilders picked up Ms. Smith cudgel, flew to Heathrow on February 12^th and was denied entry into the UK. He was locked up in a detention room for several hours before being ejected to fly back to the Netherlands. Protests were promptly lodged with the British government by the Dutch PM and Foreign Minister along with Baron Pearson and Baroness Cox who “accused the British government of appeasing violent Islam.”

Wilders got his day in the public square in October 2009 when the ban against him was overturned by a British immigration tribunal and he was allowed to re-enter the UK and show Fitna. Then, given the threat posed by massive demonstrations by Muslim extremists, he was denied the opportunity to show it once again. That opportunity finally came on March 5, 2010 at Westminster under the aegis of Baron Pearson and Baroness Cox before a group of British politicians and citizens, this time without protests.

The instigator of the original denial of Wilders’ showing of Fitna at Westminster, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, was recently suspended from the Labour Party for allegedly having placed bounties on the heads of Presidents Bush and Obama while speaking in Pakistan.

Jacquie Smith, the former Labor Home secretary involved in the UK Fitna incident resigned in disgrace in June 2009 given press revelations about her husband’s padding of expenses for pornography purchases and listing of her sister’s London home as her own.

Wilders was able to show Fitna at the Danish parliament and at the US Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, DC sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). He was denied showing Fitna at the European parliament in Strasbourg. A conference at the Marriott Hotel in Delray Beach, Florida and a New English Review symposium at the Loews Hotel in Nashville were both forced to move as a result of his involvement.

Wilders was subjected to a show trial brought by an alliance of Dutch Muslims and leftist ansars (helpers in Arabic) in an Amsterdam court on charges of racism and hate speech from which he was acquitted of all charges. We reported on the uproar created in October 2010 by the announcement of his retrial given the appointment of new judges following disclosures about a judge who had interfered with expert defense witnesses.

Radio Nederland noted the peculiar circumstances that led to his acquittal; on June 23, 2011:

The court ruled that some of Wilders' statements were insulting, shocking and on the edge of legal acceptability, but that they were made in the broad context of a political and social debate on the multi-cultural society.

The chief judge took some 20 minutes to dismiss the charges one by one, speaking in clear, non-legal language. There was applause from the public gallery when he had finished his statement.

The public prosecution department earlier joined Wilders’ legal team in calling for a not-guilty verdict, saying certain statements by the PVV party leader were insulting, but not criminal.

The department was forced to take the case by the high court after anti-racism campaigners protested at its refusal to prosecute Wilders.

Wilders raised concerns about generous immigration policies and family reunification policies that created virtual no go areas in the country’s four major cities. No go areas that have occurred with increasing frequency in the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and Italy.  Areas that are self-governed by Islamic Sharia law replete with acceptance of polygamous marriages and tolerance of female genital mutilation funded by generous Dutch welfare and absorption benefits. Areas where even police and emergency service personnel are fearful to enter.

Wilders recounts in Chapter Nine, Conquest, the deterioration in Dutch communities Kanalnieland and in Slotevaart and the perils facing the dwindling non-Muslim populations with pervasive crime, walls erected around elderly housing complexes and even assaults on local police headquarters and visiting journalists.  He noted an interview of an elderly Dutch couple forced to move from the Amsterdam suburb of Slotervaart where they had lived for four decades “enduring years of provocations, intimidation, violence and attempted arson by Moroccan youths.”

“The situation we have to live in is worse than during the war,” the old man said, bursting into tears. They kept their move a secret fearing their tormentors would follow the truck, discover their new home, and continue terrorizing them there.

Wilders notes in his book what the late Italian author Oriana Fallaci said:

In Europe we have been experiencing al-Hijra [immigration by Muslims modeled on Mohammed and followers from Mecca to Yathrib, later renamed Medina] for over 30 years now. Many of our cities have changed beyond recognition. “In each one of our cities” wrote the well-known Italian author Oriana Fallaci shortly before her death in 2006, “there is a second city, a state within the state, a government within the government. A Muslim city, a city ruled by the Koran.”

What concerns him most was evidence of Muslim contempt for host countries, their tolerant benefactors. Contempt reflected in crimes of theft, assault and rape committed by young Moroccan and Turkish immigrants against native Dutch. A pattern reflected in the research of Danish Psychologist Nicolai Sennels working with young Muslim criminals, surveys of young German Muslims, 2/5ths of whom reject integration, and other facts emphasized in the bestselling book Germany Does Itself In by former German banker, Thilo Sarrazin.

In the Netherlands, Islamic hatred was reflected in the 2002 assassination of Prof. Pim Fortuyn, the openly gay Mayor of Rotterdam by a member of the Green party. The motivation for Fortuyn’s assassination was his alleged anti-Islamic views. Fortuyn’s murder came as his newly formed party had surged in parliamentary elections. In many ways Wilders, with the formation of the PVV, has assumed the mantle of Fortuyn’s aborted quest to rein in Islamization of The Netherlands. The dramatic 2004 murder of provocative Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam by a Moroccan Dutch émigré, Mohammed al Bouyeri, spurred Wilders to leave the VVD and create his new party, the PVV. Van Gogh had produced a short film, Submission, about deprivation of women’s rights under Shariah. The film was scripted by a VVD colleague of Wilders, Somali Dutch immigrant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an avowed apostate from Islam. She had been placed under 24/7 protection of the RDPS.  Ali, an accomplished author and politician, eventually was forced to leave Holland for exile in the US and become a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.  Wilders’ visibility and espousal of controversial issues would soon place in him jeopardy and he too, would be placed in 24/7 RDPS care over the ensuing decade.

Wilders’ book is directed towards Americans, warning them of what could happen here, if Islamization is permitted to rise unchallenged. In a speech last May in Nashville Wilders bore witness to what has occurred in the Netherlands and Europe:

I am here today with an unpleasant message. I am here with a warning. I am here with a battle cry: “Wake up, Christians of Tennessee. Islam is at your gate.” Do not make the mistake which Europe made. Do not allow Islam to gain a foothold here.

Islam is dangerous. Islam wants to establish a state on earth, ruled by Islamic shariah law. Islam aims for the submission, whether by persuasion, intimidation or violence, of all non-Muslims, including Christians.

Wilders is a great admirer of the founding fathers of the American Republic, who, like him, took the opportunity to both read the Islamic doctrine and deal firsthand with covert wars against the Barbary Coast Beys in Algiers and Tripoli who had raided and enslaved American merchant and naval seamen. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson learned firsthand from the encounter with the Tripolitarian Ambassador to London in 1786 of the barbarity of Jihad replete with razzias and enslavement. Jefferson kept a copy of the Koran in his library at Monticello to apprise him of Islamic doctrine. In 1805 he was sending a US naval squadron and a few Marines to free US Navy seamen from their prison in Tripoli and spike the Bey’s guns. The irony is that same copy of Koran was used to swear a private oath by the first elected Muslim Congressman, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) upon taking office in January 2007.

Wilders channels American presidents like the Adams, Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt (TR) and Reagan in both quotes and comments throughout his book. At the head of Chapter Three on Islamofascism, Wilders quotes TR:

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

Wilders has had the advantage of traveling in the Middle East which triggered his reading of Islamic texts and history of the grand sweep of Islamic Jihad conquest. A nearly two century long Jihad, from its eruption in the Arabian peninsula, extending West across north Africa to Southern Spain, Al Andaluz, north to Syria and Persia and  east to the Indian subcontinent.  In his chapter entitled “The Yoke of Ishmael” he quotes American historian Will Durant: “The Islamic conquest of India [is] probably the bloodiest story in history.”  Wilders notes Indian historian K.S. Lal calculations that 60 to 80 million Indians died as a direct result of jihad.

Wilders recounts in his book the fury of the Mahdist fundamentalist officials of Iran. In 1994 as a representative of the VVD he went to Tehran where he gave a talk about human rights to aspiring Iranian diplomats and military officers in which he roundly criticized Iran’s human rights history. He was accused of being a friend of the Great Satan (the US) and the Little Satan (Israel) and unceremoniously upbraided in a meeting with the Director General of what passes for the Islamic Republic’s Justice Department. The Islamic Republic’s Justice Minister accused him of insulting Iran and threatened Wilders saying: “If you ever again criticize our human rights record, I will have you experience the way we deal with human rights. I will make you an Iranian human rights record!”  Wilders immediately left for his hotel and aided by Dutch Embassy officials departed the country noting: “Upon arriving in Turkey, I literally kissed the ground. . .” Undaunted, Wilders went back to Iran two more times.

Wilders has made 50 trips by his own reckoning to the Jewish State of Israel, whose vibrant democracy he fully supports. He understands why it is the “canary in the coalmines” of Islamic hatred. Islamic fundamentalist “mines” populated by terrorist groups like Iranian proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and Muslim Brotherhood groups in the Arab Spring are seeking Israel’s destruction by jihad.

Wilders referred to Israel as the only safe haven for Christians in the Middle East during a speech in Nashville last May:

The only place in the Middle East where Christians are safe is Israel.

 That is why Israel deserves our support. Israel is a safe haven for everyone, whatever their belief and opinions. Israel is a beacon of light in a region of total darkness. Israel is fighting our fight.

 The jihad against Israel is a jihad against all of us.

Wilders spent a year in Israel as a teenager working on a Moshav getting to know Israelis. He appreciates the country’s hard won freedoms and security concerns. At a conference in Jerusalem with MK Arieh Eldad in December 2010 (watch here) he expressed his view that Jordan is Palestine. He believes Israel has both an ancient and legal right to the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

Wilders’ concern for the Jewish people is further reflected in a January 2012 request that the Dutch government issue an official apology for “passivity’ in not recognizing more than 100,000 Dutch Jews murdered in Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

Wilders has often referred to America as the “last man standing” in the battle against Islamization in the West. 

Last May he was invited to speak in Nashville. Nashville is the buckle of Bible belt, the center of unbridled attempts by Muslim Brotherhood front groups to infiltrate the state by stealth and intimidation. At both private meetings sponsored by the Tennessee Freedom Coalition and before a major audience at the Madison, Tennessee Cornerstone Church, Wilders proposed a program of action:

There are five things which we must do.

First, we must defend freedom of speech.

Second, we must end cultural relativism and political correctness.

Third, we must stop the Islamization of our countries. More Islam means less freedom.

Fourth, we must take pride in our nations again. We must cherish and preserve the culture and identity of our country. Preserving our own culture and identity is the best antidote against Islamization.

And fifth, last but certainly not least, we must elect wise and courageous leaders who are brave enough to address the problems which are facing us, including the threat of Islam.

Politicians who have the courage to speak the truth about Islam.

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