RUTHFULLY YOURS

Thank you, dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, for inviting me to the Western Conservative Summit. It is always a pleasure to come to America. I was here a few weeks ago to meet with my dear friend, congresswoman Michele Bachmann, to talk about Islam and the threat to America and Europe.

I feel honored to have been invited to address you today about the situation in Europe and in particular in my own country, the Netherlands. This situation serves as a warning to what might happen in America if you fail to be vigilant. As U.S. President Andrew Jackson said: “Remember, my fellow citizens, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.”

But first, let me start by introducing myself. I am one of the 150 members of the House of Representatives in the Netherlands, a small country of almost 17 million people in Western Europe. I am the leader of the Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid). My party is the third largest of eleven parties represented in the Dutch parliament.

Perhaps many of you think that life for this politician in the Netherlands resembles the life of the members of your own Congress. Unfortunately, that is not the case. For the past eight years I have been living under 24 hour police protection. Wherever I go, plainclothes policemen go with me. I live in a government safe house, heavily protected and bulletproof.

I am driven every day from the safe house to the Dutch parliament in armored police cars with flashing blue lights.

I have not walked the streets on my own in the past eight years. When I occasionally go to a restaurant or a movie theater, the police will have to check everything first. My wife and I have lived in army barracks and prisons cells just to be safe from assassins.

Why do I need this protection? I am not a president or a king; I am a mere parliamentarian.

I have, however, been marked for death for criticizing Islam. I was placed under police protection in early November 2004 when an Islamic fanatic murdered th Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh because he had criticized Islam. Van Gogh was slaughtered in broad daylight in the streets of Amsterdam. A few hours later, the police found a letter written by the assassin threatening to kill me as well.

What have I done, you might ask, to deserve those death threats? I have candidly expressed my views about Islam.

My views, in a nutshell, are that Islam, rather than a religion, is predominantly a totalitarian ideology striving for world dominance. I believe that Islam and freedom are incompatible.

Some people do not want to hear this message. That is why they threaten to murder everyone who states this truth.

I am not the only one who has been marked for death. The British author Salman Rushdie, the Scandinavian cartoonists Kurt Westergaard and Lars Vilks have all been victims of assassination attempts.

However, if you really love freedom, you have to speak the truth. If not, we will fall victim to Islam, like earlier the people in the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, India and Indonesia fell victim to it. That is why I spoke, why I speak and why I will continue speaking, whatever the consequences: I do not want Europe nor America to become Islamic.

Before I continue I want to make clear that I do not have a problem with Moslems. There are many moderate Moslems. I always make a distinction between the people and the ideology, between Moslems and Islam. There are many moderate Moslems, but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

There is only one Islam and it is a dangerous ideology. It is intolerant, it is violent. It should not be tolerated, but should be contained.

In Europe, we are experiencing that as Islam becomes stronger in a society – even when the majority of Moslems are moderates – a society becomes less free and more intolerant of non- Moslems.

Certain parts of our inner cities no longer look like Europe. They look like suburbs of Cairo, Rabat, Algiers, Damascus or Mecca.

As the Moslem population is concentrated in urban areas, many European cities have very large Islamic concentrations. We are confronted with headscarves and burkas, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honor-killings.

During the past three decades, Europe made a fatal mistake. It allowed millions of people from Islamic countries to immigrate into Europe. So many people rooted in a culture entirely different from our own Judeo-Christian and humanist tradition have entered Europe that our heritage, our freedoms, our prosperity and our culture are in danger.

Perhaps, many Americans still believe that Europe is the place they know from a tourist trip or from their grandparents’ stories. This Europe is on the verge of disappearing.

“In each one of our cities” wrote the 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 Moslem city, a city ruled by the Koran.”

Perhaps many Americans see immigration as something which is inherently good for a country, since it contributed so much to the United States. But while most of the former immigrants to the United States came from Europe, a continent with the same Judeo-Christian roots as America, Europe’s contemporary immigrants do not share our common roots. On the contrary, the Islamization of our society is undermining our Western Judeo-Christian values.

I am not just talking about the threat of terrorism or violence; there is also the phenomenon of non-violent jihad. Europe’s increasingly assertive Islamic lobby has successfully pressured European politicians into implementing pro-Islamic policies and adopting elements of Islamic Sharia law.

The number of people who organize their lives according to Islamic requirements is growing, especially among young people. Among 15-year-old German Moslems, 40 percent consider Islam more important than democracy. Among Moslem university students in Britain, 40 percent support Sharia. One in three of those students consider it legitimate to kill in the name of Islam.

The rise of Islam also means the rise of Sharia law in our judicial systems. In Europe we have Sharia wills, Sharia schools, Sharia banks. The introduction of elements of Sharia law in our societies creates a system of legal apartheid. Sharia law systematically discriminates groups of people. I will give you some examples.

Britain has official Sharia courts. One of these courts settled an inheritance dispute involving a man whose estate had to be divided between his children. It gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with the Koranic pronouncement that a woman is only worth half a man.

In my own country, the Netherlands, Sharia is being applied – I know that it is hard to believe but sadly it is true – by the Dutch courts.

This is a disgrace. In our civilization, men and women are treated as equals before the law.

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: Islam is also coming for America. Indeed, it has already arrived. Your country, too, is facing a stealth jihad – an Islamic attempt to introduce Sharia law bit by bit. Islam demands separate campus housing for Moslems; Islam demands that women have separate hours in gyms and swimming pools; schools are banning Christmas celebrations and are taking pork off their cafeteria menus to avoid offending Moslem students. And courts – even in America, we have seen an example in Florida – have begun to apply Sharia law.

Be aware that this is only the beginning.

If we do not stop the Islamization, we will lose everything: our identity, our culture, our democratic constitutional state, our freedom and our civilization. In Europe we are already losing the right to free speech, the right to criticize Islam.