RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of remarks given by Geert Wilders at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2018 Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 15th-18th at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272252/geert-wilders-restoration-weekend-frontpagemagcom

Robert Spencer: It is my great honor and great pleasure to introduce to all of you tonight the great visionary who is going to be the one who turn things around for Europe and brought about its salvation as a continent upon which free people could still live, and the one man who has stood firm all these years against absolutely extraordinary and crushing pressure to give in, the great, the heroic, Geert Wilders.

Geert Wilders: Thank you. Robert, thank you so much for the most kind words. So, hello America, how are you tonight?  It’s an honor for me to be at Restoration Weekend again, and it’s a pleasure to be amongst friends. I see so many here, great people with strong convictions and love for freedom, people who supported me for so many years, like the great David Horowitz himself. Thank you David.

But also Dr. Bob Shillman, Nina Rosenwald, Daniel Pipes, all people that I will have to say thank you so much for all you did, but also please allow me to say a word of respect to a colleague of mine in your own U.S. Congress, a hero, somebody that I respect a lot and was re-elected at the mid‑terms, the congressman from Texas, Louis Gohmert, Louis rise.

Thank you. And of course, I’m not involved in your own domestic politics, but for me one of the best news was, not only that our friend Louis Gohmert, but also that our friend Steve King from Iowa was elected. Congratulations both. And of course, it’s always a pleasure for me to be in the United States, the land of the free and the home of the brave. America is a country that is not afraid to let its own national interests prevail as it should; to do what is best for its own people–the American people–where most of the leaders in my part of the world, Western Europe, cannot even spell the word national, let alone the combination national interest, your country is led by one of the strongest and bravest leaders of the free world, and I honor him from that, Donald J. Trump.

Europe desperately needs more strong leaders like Mr. Trump for we are fighting for our existence, and I’m not exaggerating. Our freedom, our way of life, our culture, our identity, our national security, are at stake and heavily under attack, and the reason for that indeed still is mass immigration and Islamization combined with the total failure, and even betrayal by weak European politicians who are unwilling to fight back.

They, those weak leaders, do not protect us but they facilitate our destruction and when political leaders become pieces of evil, the people must speak, and so we have to do that.  And that is why we do speak out and fight back. But, that comes with a price. If you dare to fight back, if you dare to speak the truth about Islam, the authorities and the Islamists will do anything to silence you. You will be taken to court.  I have myself been taken to court or threatened to be taken to court in my own country, the Netherlands, in Austria, in Pakistan, in Jordan, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in Saudi Arabia.

The biggest Muslim country in the world Indonesia declared me persona non grata for life.

I am indeed the biggest leader of the second biggest party in the Netherlands. We have 13 parties in our Dutch Parliament and I am leading the second biggest party, but still (applause), thank you. I’m looking forward to your applause when I become Prime Minister soon.

Others are even taken to court too in Europe. Recently, the European court of human rights upheld a guilty verdict of an Austrian court which sentenced a friend of mine, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolf, for speaking the truth and nothing but the truth about Mohammed when she suggested that Mohammed had pedophile tendencies. Saying that, speaking the truth is punishable by law in Europe today; or my great friend, Tommy Robinson, who was even jailed. He was jailed while reporting about Pakistan raping gangs in the United Kingdom. He deserved a medal, not a conviction.

But my friends, it is not only legal jihad.  Unfortunately, it is also real jihad.  I am on the death list of al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS.  Recently, I got another fatwa; this time from a Pakistani  clerk who called upon all Dutch Muslims to go in my house and kill me. My wife and I live in safe houses. We have 24/7 police protection for more than 14 years now.  I am driven to Parliament every day by the police in a motorcade of armored cars with sirens. The only freedom I have left today is my freedom of speech.  Why do I need this protection?  I am not president. I am not a king. I am a simple parliamentarian, but I am marked to death. Why?  Why?  For speaking the truth about Islam and fighting for the freedom of my people.

But my friends, enough about me. It is not about me. I am not the only one under attack. My country is under attack. My continent is under attack. Your country is under attack. Your continent is under attack. As a matter of fact we are all under attack. Our civilization, the whole free western world is under attack today. And my friends, I spoke here at Restoration Weekend last time in 2014, and at that time I urged you to avoid all the mistakes Europe made. I ask you to protect America against Islam, to stop the immigration from Islamic countries, and while you elected a great president who is eager to stop illegal immigration and fight Islamists, we in Europe did exactly the opposite.

My country, 70 million inhabitants, one‑quarter of the size of the state of Florida imported over the last few years alone 400,000 non‑western migrants, many from Islamic countries. In Germany, more than a million migrants arrived. Europe indeed is on the brink of cultural suicide.

We are confronted with hat scarves, with burkas, with polygamy, with honor killings, with rape, with female genital mutilation, with sharia courts in the United Kingdom. Anti-Semitism is growing rapidly. Again, the European soil is unsafe for juice.  In my own country, Moroccans are the largest ethnic group along Islamic immigrants and two‑thirds of the Moroccan boys between 12 and 23 have already been arrested at least once. Crimes, crimes like rape in many European countries are rising. In Germany last year, sex crimes with asylum seekers as suspects jumped by 91 percent in 1 year.

Europe has at the same time as you know been the victim of many terror attacks in the last few years while all over the continent, innocent people were murdered by Islamic-inspired individuals that hate us and cherish death more than life. Thousands, thousands of both home grown and imported jihadis are present in Europe today willing and motivated to kill in the name of Allah, and our governments are making it easy for them for we have no internal borders. We have no passport checks. We have open-door policies in most parts of Europe, and the Dutch, my people, increasingly feel like foreigners in their own country as many people in European countries do. Unless there are radical changes to the present policies towards immigration, over 30 percent, just an example, over 30 percent of Sweden will be Islamic in the middle of the century. Can you imagine? Over one‑third of Sweden.

The demographics are not promising either.  It will get worse if we do not act today because the population of Africa is exploding while the population of Europe is decreasing.  According to the United Nations, the population of Africa will grow from 1 billion today to 2 billion in 2050 and 4 billion at the end of the century, and needless to say that many of those people will come and want to come to Europe, and many of them come from Islamic countries with Islamic values, and it will be like an invasion.  It will be that our population will be replaced and our nations completely Islamized if we don’t act today, so we have to act today.

First, we have to elect more brave leaders like you did, and some– Robert said it correctly–some European countries already did, like Italy and Hungary.  My dear friends, Matteo Savini, of the Lega, Minister of Interior, was elected.  My friend, Prime Minister Victor Orban of Hungary are examples that it can be done. That we can fight back the unelected at least from the European Union and regain national sovereignty and close our borders for fortune seekers and terrorists and built if needed a fence at the border as the brave Hungarians already did.

We should close our borders but also, we should give a message to all those more than a million Islamic immigrants who are already on our soil today.  If you subscribe to our laws, to our constitution and to our values, you are welcome to stay and equal to anybody else. For those are our values.  But if you break a law, if you start acting according to Sharia law, we will deport you out of our country immediately and never ever let you return. For this is our land and not your land, but we should do more. If we want to stop the terror, the violence, the attack on our women, if we want to protect the freedom and the freedom of generations to come, we have to get rid of the concept, the dangerous concept of cultural relativism, the false idea that all cultures are equal.  People are equal, but cultures are not. And people and cultural relativism is weakening the west day by day even today. Government leaders, lawyers, judges, churches, trade unions, media, academia, charities, the majority of them today are still blinded by the political correctness and are condoning Islam, and as a result a little bit of freedom in the west dies each day. But the truth of course is that the cultural relativists are wrong, that our culture and identity that is based on Christianity, on Judaism and on Humanism is not equal to but far better than the Islamic culture, and we have to be proud of that.

For our civilization is based on the legacy of Jerusalem, of Athens and Rome, and it’s the best civilization on earth.  It gave us democracy, freedom, equality before the law, the separation of church and state and the notion of sovereign states to protect it all and the remedy to all this misery and terror is clear.  We have to reassert what we are. Only then, only then we will be able to ensure a future for our children. The Europe today as I said the problems indeed are existential, not economics, Islamization, terrorism, mass immigration are our main problems today because it determines who we are, what we are and if we will still exist as free people in the future. We have to support one another, and for that reason I believe that we should always, always also support our friends of the Jewish State of Israel for Israel. Israel is one of us. It’s the only democracy in the Middle East.  It’s a beacon of freedom in a very dark and unfree region. It is forced to defend itself against the dark forces of Sunni and Shia Islam and it is our duty to support Israel.  It’s a vital outpost of our western civilization.  It’s the canary in the coal mine. If Islam would conquer Israel, my friends we will be next. Let us never forget that.  Samuel Huntington was wrong. There is no clash, and the Israeli Arab conflict is the best example that Huntington was wrong. There is no clash of civilization. There is a clash between a civilization and barbarity. That is the truth.

My friends we are the free men and women of the west and those who want to deny freedom to us just do not belong to our society. It’s as simple as that. Islam is dressed up, we have to be honest like that, Islam is dressed up as a religion but in reality, it’s not so much a religion as a totalitarian ideology. It is totalitarian because it wants to dominate any society and is unwilling to integrate or to assimilate in any society. It is totalitarian because there is not one country in the world where Islam is dominant today that there is true freedom. It does not exist, and there are two more reasons why Islam is not to be considered a religion but a totalitarian violent ideology.

First, no real religion should demand that those who leave it be killed. It’s totalitarianism. It has nothing to do with religion and second, a religion should never mandate the subjugation of those who do not belong to it, but Islam does.

My friends, last month as a lawmaker, I proposed a bill into Dutch parliament unique to any parliament in the world.  My bill will be discussed and voted upon in the Dutch Parliament next year.  It is called the Ban of Islamic Manifestations Act. As one of your best presidents ever, President Ronald Reagan used to say “when you can’t make them see the light make them feel the heat.”  So, I proposed no more Islamic schools, no more burqas no more Korans, no more mosques in public space. What people do in the home is their own business, but no more in public space. According to a national poll done by one of the major polling agencies in the Netherlands this proposed bill that has not been yet voted upon in our Parliament got immediate support from 40 percent of the Dutch voters. Millions of people from Christian democrats to conservatives and even, even one‑third of the electorate of the Dutch Socialist Party were in favor of that proposal.  We have to face the facts.  Moderation in the face of evil is evil itself.  Islam indoctrinates people with hatred against our society.

Your own America’s sixth president, John Quincy Adams, was right when he said, “The precept of the Koran is perpetual raw against all who deny that Mohammed is the prophet of God.”  As was Winston Churchill the great British wartime prime minister when he called Islam “a retrograde force.”

Of course, there are many moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam.  Let nobody fool you, there is no moderate Islam. Islamic terrorists may be a minority but both suggests that they have the support of the majority.  Surveys in my own country reveal that 73 percent of the Islamic population in the Netherlands consider Muslims who went to fight to Syria to wage Jihad to be heroes. 73 percent of the 1 million Muslims in Holland and may I ask you where are the mass demonstrations of tens of thousands of Muslims in Amsterdam, New York, London, Islamabad and anywhere in the world who’d say that they do not agree with the violence committed in the name of Islam after any terror attack. Did you see it?  Did you witness this?  Where are they when radical Muslims called for the Christian Pakistani girl, Asia Bibi to be hanged for blasphemy just because she was a Christian–is a Christian.  Where are they?  They are not there.

The majority may not commit violence but they do not oppose it either.  That is the truth.  And of course, the majority of the Muslims are not committing crime or acts of terrorism.  The question is however if the silent majority allows things to happen. In second World War, in Germany too, it was only a minority that committed the atrocities, but the majority allowed it to happen.  In the Soviet Union too, it was only a minority that committed the horrible crimes, that the majority allowed to happen. So, my point is that by depriving Islam of the means to destroy our identity, we are not violating freedom, we are persevering freedom.  We are preserving and guaranteeing freedom and our identity.

It would be contradictory to sing the praise of freedom while at the same time standing idly by when Islam is eating away our freedoms. So I say, stop this charade.  We should not turn freedom into a snake eating its own tail.  Islam at the end of the day wants to dominate, wants to enslave us, wants to get Sharia law as the acting law, and fight and even kill anybody who resists or dares to reject it.

Abraham Lincoln, the American president who liberated your country from slavery said, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves” and I fully agree.  It is, it really is not wrong to discriminate between good and evil, between democracy and tyranny, between freedom and slavery.

The terrible situation that we are in today is caused by our tolerance of evil.  We are too tolerant to the intolerance.  We are too tolerant to Islam.  We think that by allowing freedom to the enemies of freedom we prove the world that we stand for freedom, but in reality, by refusing to draw the boundaries to our tolerance, we are handing away our freedom.  We are handing it away, and I do not want that.  I do not want Sharia Law in the west.  I want the west to be free of Sharia law.  Listen to what Carl Popper, the famous philosopher had to say about this, “Unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance.  If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant; if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerance, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them.”

So, we should not be tolerant that we open the door to the horror of intolerance.  It is our duty as western patriots to protect our children from slavery, to adopt a sensible view of freedom, to secure our continued existence as free individuals in a free society.  We live today in an age where people like the idea of having rights as long as they do not have to pay the price for it but when duty, when honor commands them to defend those rights, they often flee away and turn against it to do their duty.  They call it sometimes even extremists.  They drag us to court.  They try to silence us or even kill us, but my friends let us not fool ourselves; Churchill warned that when someone threatens to kill you, you had better take him seriously and you do everything you can to stop him.  Freedom has a price and we must be willing to pay that price, and the choice has to be made: the choice between Islam and freedom.  There is no middle way because there is nothing more precious than liberty and freedom.

Submission is unacceptable.  We are neither prepared to collaborate with evil nor to appease it. Defending our freedom, defending our way of life is not a task that is solely in the hands of brave men and women fighting battles in faraway lands.  Defending freedom requires constant vigilance against those who attack it right here on the soil of our homelands. The enemies of freedom will not seek to overthrow the constitution in a single day.  Instead they will try to erode it from within.  They will chip away little pieces of liberty with every attack on our freedom of speech.  They will hack and grind and chisel until the granite cathedral of our constitution is no more than a brittle and a hollow.

So, defending our freedom, defending our way of life requires all of us to be vigilant, to be courageous, to be audacious.  It requires all of us to raise our voice, to raise a voice against the enemy for freedom, against the tyranny of Islam, against everyone who tries to silence us. My friends I cannot think of a better time and place than to make this appeal than right here and right now.  Amongst all those freedom fighters that you are, and my message may be a tough one, but I’m sure that we can win if we stand together as we do today.  If we do our duty as we do today, we honor the legacy of the Founding Fathers of our great nations by preserving the freedom of our children and grandchildren, and we will never, we will never apologize for being free men.  We will never bow for the combined forces of the left and Mecca, and we will never surrender.  We stand on the shoulders of giants.  And there is no stronger, no stronger power than the force of free men fighting for the great cause of liberty.  So let us, let us do our duty, let us go forth with courage and let us save freedom.  Thank you very much.