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MP Wilders: Islam 'a clear and present danger'

By Seth Mandel

October 10, 2008
 

On a mission, he came with a message.

"All is not well in the Old World," a sober Geert Wilders told his audience. "There is a tremendous danger looming, and it's very difficult to be optimistic. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe, it's a threat to your country -- it's a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West."

Wilders, a Dutch parliamentarian and outspoken critic of Muslim mass immigration and the incorporation of Shariah doctrine into Europe's legal system, is no spectator to the threats about which he warned. He travels with a round-the-clock security escort, having been marked for assassination by Europe's Muslim leaders.

'Who lost Europe?'

"The Europe you know is changing," Wilders told an audience Sept. 25 at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, hosted by the Hudson New York Briefing Council, the N.Y. arm of the futurist think-tank. His address was preceded by a screening of his film about Islamic violence, "Fitna".

Wilders began by describing Europe's changing landscape: the historic monuments of Europe still stand augustly against the skyline, but emerging among their shadows below are satellites of a foreign world.

"It's a world of headscarves, where women walk around in figureless tents," Wilders said. You would be hard-pressed to find any economic activity beyond shops with signs you can't read, he said. These are the Muslim ghettos.

"These are building blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger proportions in Europe, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city," Wilders said.

In many elementary schools in Amsterdam, he said, they can't talk about the farm, because that would entail mentioning the pig, which would offend the Muslim youth. Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal foods. Gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. In France, schoolteachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, like Voltaire.

"In my own country, in the Netherlands, the history of the Holocaust in many cases is no longer taught because of Muslim sensitivity," Wilders said.

In a couple of generations, he added, Americans will ask themselves "Who lost Europe?"

There are currently 54 million Muslims in Europe. Integration into European society is almost nonexistent among them. Wilders quoted a Pew research poll that found that half of Muslims in France see their loyalty to Islam greater than their loyalty to France; one-third of French Muslims don't object to suicide attacks; the British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favor of the establishment of a worldwide caliphate; and a Dutch study reported that half of Dutch Muslims admit they understand the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

"They do not come to integrate into our societies, they come to integrate us into their dar al-Islam," he said.

Europe's political elites are eager to appease, he said. It's a telling symptom of what Wilders called "the most prominent lethal disease in Europe today": multiculturalism and the cultural relativism that comes with it.

The conflict between Islam and the West cannot be traced to the Arab-Israeli conflict, he said, nor to American troops in Iraq. The problem, he said, is rooted at the source.

The Quran is all gospel

According to belief, the Quran was revealed through prophecy to Mohammad. The Quran's edicts are therefore not questioned, nor are the words of Mohammad. To Wilders, this is central to the conflict -- the Quran and Mohammad are not to be questioned. The Quran, Wilders said, calls for murder, hatred, submission, violence, terrorism. Waging violent jihad, he said, is the duty of every Muslim.

"There is no such thing as moderate Islam," Wilders said. "Sure, there are a lot of moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam."

Not only is Mohammad not to be questioned, he is to be emulated. Mohammad was not a man of peace, however, Wilders said.

"But Mohammad, ladies and gentlemen, was a warlord, a mass murderer, a sick pedophile, and he had several marriages at the same time," Wilders said, adding that Mohammad advised slavery, but never to liberate slaves. "If it's good for Islam then it's good, if it's bad for Islam then it's bad -- there is no gray area."

Islam, he said, is inherently anti-Semitic and incompatible with freedom and democracy.

'Fitna'

Wilders released "Fitna" in March of this year. The 15-minute film blends video and pictures of Muslim terrorism, death threats, and anti-Semitic rants with passages from the Quran advocating violence. The film was released on the Web site Liveleak, only to be taken down immediately because of death threats to the company's staff.

Wilders, as well, received death threats, but said he felt a moral duty to educate the public about Islam.

"I wanted to show that the problems of Islam are at the core of Islam, and are do not belong to its fringes," Wilders said.

But the reaction helped Wilders prove his message. The movie was about Islam's violent tendencies, and in response the Muslim community and various Islamist terror groups threatened to kill Wilders, commit terrorist attacks in the Netherlands, and increase attacks on Dutch troops in Afghanistan. Dutch flags were burned around the Muslim world, and Wilders is currently being sued by the Kingdom of Jordan.

'Defending Israel as a matter of principle'

The final part of Wilders' talk was about Israel. Wilders takes a political risk by defending Israel, but believes it is a risk he must take.

"The best way for a politician in Europe to lose votes is to say something positive about Israel," Wilders said. "The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative and sees Israel as the aggressor. I, however, will continue to speak up for Israel."

Wilders sees three reasons to support Israel: It is the Jewish homeland regained after 2,000 years of exile; it's a bastion of freedom and democracy in a region of tyranny; and it is the West's first line of defense.

He dismissed claims that Israel's existence is at fault for Muslim imperialism.

"If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for its conquest," Wilders said. "Thanks to Israeli parents, who sent their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming."

Wilders said that many in Europe would like to see Israel defeated. But that would only encourage more violence against the West, since it would cast the West as weak in the eyes of Muslim leaders.

The end of Israel would only be the beginning of the West's problems with Islam, he said.

"If they can get Israel, they can get everything," he said. "Therefore, it is not that the West has a stake in Israel, it is Israel."

Reagan and Churchill, not Chamberlain

 The medicine for the disease of cultural relativism is the power of the people, Wilders said, who have been abandoned by their leaders. Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, churches -- the entire political establishment has bought wholesale into the appeasement strategy.

"So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as right-wing extremists or racists," Wilders said. "The entire establishment has sided with the enemy -- Leftists, liberals, even social democrats in my country are now in bed with Islam."

Our leaders are supposed defend our heritage, culture, and values, he said. They are instead participating in what former President Ronald Reagan warned against: the betrayal of our past and the squandering of our future.

"If there is hope in Europe, it comes from the people, not the elites," Wilders said. "Change can only come from the grassroots level. It has to come from the citizens themselves. Yes, the patriots will have to take on the entire political, legal, and media establishment."

This year in Jerusalem

And there are encouraging signs, he said. Polls in the Netherlands show that the people are coming around to the dangers of Muslim mass immigration. Wilders' own party, the Party for Freedom, debuted at five percent in the polls, but is now at 10.

"And now, for the first time, these patriotic parties will come together and exchange experiences," Wilders said. "It may be the start of something big. Something that might change the map of Europe for decades to come. It might be Europe's last chance."

And it will take place in Jerusalem.

Wilders and Israeli MK Aryeh Eldad are working to screen "Fitna" for the Knesset in December, during a conference for like-minded parties interested in defending freedom.

"This conference will be the start of an alliance of European patriots," he said. "This alliance will serve as the backbone for all organizations and political parties that oppose jihad and the Islamization of our societies."

Liberty is the most precious gift, he said, but his generation never had to fight for it, and have a responsibility to those that did.

"My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians," he said. "We can only hand it over to Europe's children in the same state in which it was offered to me, in which it was offered to us."

And that freedom was given to Europe and the West by men like Winston Churchill, instrumental in reversing the elitist tendency toward appeasing enemies and declaring defeat rather than fighting, he said.

"We have seen dangers before, we have been betrayed by our elites before, they have sided with our enemies before, and yet then freedom prevailed," Wilders said. "And these are not times for which we take lessons from appeasement, from capitulation, from giving away, from giving up or giving in. These are not times at which to draw lessons from Chamberlain."

Wilders closed by quoting Churchill's famous declaration of hope and strength, a motto he believes should drive the West's determination to stand up in the face of this existential threat: "Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."