SOEREN KERN: REVIEW OF GEERT WILDERS “MARKED FOR DEATH: ISLAM’S WAR AGAINST THE WEST AND ME”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3041/geert-wilders-marked-for-death
“[I am] imprisoned in my own country for the mere fact that I have spoken out against the enemies of the West.”
Islam is waging an aggressive war against the West; nothing less than the future of individual liberty is at stake.
The conflict is civilizational in scope and is being fought on two primary fronts: Europe and America.
The Islamization of the West is being aided and abetted by multiculturalists in Europe and America who are enforcing politically correct curbs on free speech designed to silence all criticism of Islam.
Islam’s war on the West has reached a decisive phase. Europe may already be a lost cause, leaving America as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe.
These are just a few of the conclusions of an insightful and highly readable new book about Islam, Marked for Death: Islam’s War against the West and Me, authored by Geert Wilders, the Dutch lawmaker who has devoted his life to fighting for free speech and stopping the Islamization of Europe.
Wilders — one of a growing number of Westerners who have been marked for death for criticizing Islam — opens the book by briefly describing his life under round-the-clock guard because of explicit threats to murder him by Muslim extremists.
Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me by Geert Wilders (Hardcover – May 1, 2012)
“I have a panic room in my house,” Wilders writes, “where I am supposed to take refuge if one of the adherents of the ‘religion of peace’ makes it past my permanent security detail and into my home. In fact, it’s not really my home at all—I live in a government safe house, heavily protected and bulletproof….I have been surrounded by police guards and stripped of nearly all personal privacy…. I am driven every day from the safe house to my office in the Dutch Parliament building in armored police cars….I wear a bulletproof jacket….Always surrounded by plainclothes police officers, I have not walked the streets on my own in more than seven years…. [I am] imprisoned in my own country for the mere fact that I have spoken out against enemies of the West.”
Wilders continues: “Leading a life like that got me thinking about some big questions. Western societies guarantee their citizens something that no other civilizations grant them: privacy. It’s one of those things you tend to take for granted unless you lose it. The importance of privacy is unique to Western society with its notion of the sovereign individual. In stark contrast to Western norms, Islam robs people of their privacy. Islamic societies—including Islamic enclaves in the West—exert tight social control that is indicative of the totalitarian character of Islam.”
Wilders dedicates several well-referenced chapters to demonstrate how “Islam is not just a religion, as many Americans believe, but primarily a political ideology in the guise of a religion.” Among other sources, he uses verses from the Koran itself to show how “the political ideology of Islam is not moderate—it is totalitarian…with global ambitions.”
In one chapter, Wilders provides an extensive survey of well-known experts on Islam who show why Islam is far more than just a religion. According to the Egyptian-born ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish, for example, Islam as a whole is “a political and legal system of totalitarian control….The most glaring evidence that Islam is hardly a ‘religion’ is in its apostasy law—the order to kill those who leave it. That immediately moved Islam from the realm of religion to the realm of totalitarian political ideology.”
Other experts quoted by Wilders have this to say about Islam: “one of our greatest mistakes is to think of Islam as just another one of the world’s great religions.”; “In my view, Islam is primarily a legal system, a law.”; “In Islam you can’t eat à la carte, you have to take the whole menu.”; and “Islam is unique in demanding that it alone must rule the political sphere.”
In another chapter, Wilders provides an historical survey of non-Muslims living under Islamic rule over the past 1,400 years. He also shows how one of the big consequences of the so-called Arab Spring is that Christian communities across the Middle East are being decimated as radical Islam becomes empowered.
Wilders takes issue with President Barack Obama’s June 2009 speech at al-Azhar University in Cairo, in which he proclaimed that “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
According to Wilders, “for the first time in America’s 233-year history, a U.S. president offered a pact to the followers of one particular religion” in which he “bestowed upon Islam a privileged position above all other religions and ideologies.”
Wilders also quotes Teddy Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States, who wrote: “Wherever the Mohammedans have had a complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of [King of Poland John III] Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.”
Roosevelt also wrote: “To make a statement that all religions are the same is as naïve as saying that all political parties are the same. Some religions and belief systems give a higher value to each human life and some religions and belief systems give a lower value. As generations of Americans past, our time has come to defend the beliefs and values that made this nation great, such as equality before the law….There are such ‘social values’ today in Europe, America and Australia only because during those thousand years the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do—that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.”
In Britain, Winston Churchill had this to say about Islam: “Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science….the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
And, in the words of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan: “If history teaches us anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.”
After surveying other commentators on Islam who lived in an era before the tyranny of political correctness, Wilders concludes: “Defenders of Western civilization should not sugarcoat Islam.”
Marked for Death dedicates considerable space to discussing the “conspiracy of silence that surrounds” the question of Islam. He describes how “naïve politicians, journalists, and so-called intellectuals in the West who refuse to admit…how fundamentally incompatible it is with our Western values and ideals.”
Wilders also explains the growing use of euphemisms and self-censorship to avoid direct criticism of Islam. He shows how many European governments are censoring discussion of Islam and multiculturalism through the use of legal warfare known as “lawfare.” Wilders discusses at length the proliferation of hate-speech laws in Europe to “condemn and combat Islamophobia.”
Although some of the reality-avoiding appeasement of Islam is motivated by fear, Wilders blames the rapid Islamization of Europe mostly on “cultural relativism” which “dictates that all cultures are equally moral and valuable—although in practice, Western culture is often presented as inferior to all others, stained as it supposedly is by racism and imperialism.”
Cultural relativism, he writes, the ruling ethos of Europe’s political establishment, “is gradually destroying our traditions and cultural identity. The so-called multicultural society tells newcomers who settle in our cities and villages: you are free to violate our norms and values, since your culture is just as good, and perhaps even better, than ours.”
Wilders believes that part of the public apathy regarding spread of Islam in the West stems from the fact that many citizens in Europe and America have forgotten the “nature of totalitarianism.” He argues that the West made a big mistake by failing to have a “Nuremburg trial” after the fall of communism to “expose the evil committed by the system.”
Although defeated Nazi Germany was subject to de-Nazification, there was no de-Marxification after the fall of communism. Instead, many former communists simply renamed themselves “Social Democrats” and managed to retain or regain power. “And without the public accounting of a trial, people tend to forget how… communism was.”
Wilders asks: “How is all this relevant to Islam? Our failure to come clean with communism has prevented us from standing up to Islam, trapped as we are in the old communist habit of deceit and doublespeak that used to haunt Eastern Europe and that now haunts all of us.”
Wilders provides his readers with several concrete proposals and political solutions which he believes can turn the tide on the Islamization of the West.
He writes: “To preserve our freedom from the encroachments of Islam, we must do four things: defend freedom of speech, reject cultural relativism, counter Islamization and cherish our national identity.”
Says Wilders: “Freedom of speech is the most important of our liberties. So long as we are free to speak, we can tell people the truth and make them realize what’s at stake. The truth is our only weapon—we must use it. The West’s political, academic and media establishment are concealing the true scope of the Islamic threat. But the people sense they are not getting the whole story, and they are eager to know more. We must spread the message.”
The West, he says, should also “stop the political indoctrination of our children and begin proudly teaching them the real history of the West instead of multiculturalist lies designed to instill shame in our own heritage. We must also prepare the coming generation for the difficult times ahead.”
Wilders concludes: “We can still prevail. We begin the struggle by standing up for our values and telling the truth about Islam. Even when we are insulted, even when we are harassed and intimidated, even when we are marked for death just for stating an opinion—we must never be silenced.”
Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.
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