Geert Wilders: Backgrounder, and His Thoughtful Video Discussion and Display of Pamela Geller’s Garland, TX Muhammad Exhibit

Please see my earlier commentaries on Pamela Geller’s Garland, TX Muhammad drawings exhibit. (here; here; here; here; and here).

Since 2009 I have also written at length about the featured speaker at Pamela’s event, my colleague, Geert Wilders, the extraordinary Dutch Parliamentarian. Wilders stands as the lone Western politician who has combined serious study of Islam, with sorely needed rational Western criticism of the religio-political totalitarian creed.

Below I have embedded a 2 minute 44 second video Wilders has just released, to be aired on Dutch Public television, NPO1, this Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 5:55 P.M., followed by an extended excerpt from my April 29, 2012 book review of Wilders’ autobiographical work, Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me.

From the 2012 review-essay, “Eurabia Versus Wilders Agonistes”:

Wilders Agonistes versus Sharia

Twenty years ago, upon his abrupt dismissal from the French Social Affairs Ministry, Jean-Claude Barreau denounced the uncritical treatment of Islam in Europe by both Muslim and European intellectuals.  Shattering this rigidly enforced taboo, he exposed the blatant hypocrisy of the prevailing Eurabian mentality by noting:

Today, not a single Christian will tell you that the Inquisition was acceptable. But not a single Muslim will dare to say publicly that sharia is unacceptable.

Barreau admonished Islamic scholars and the Muslim intelligentsia to repudiate the totalitarian sharia—specifically, its draconian “hadd” punishments: lethal penalties for “apostasy” and adultery—the latter applied disproportionately to women—and mutilating limb amputations for theft.  The analyses of G.-H. Bousquet (d. 1978), a preeminent 20^th-century scholar of Islamic Law, explain why Barreau’s urgent admonition—although it should have been heeded long ago—continues to be ignored by mainstream, institutional Islam.

Bousquet, in his seminal L’Ethique sexuelle de l’Islam (“The Sexual Ethics of Islam”), highlighted the “doubly totalitarian” nature of Islam — its eternal quest to impose a universal ruling order by jihad warfare and the permanently stunted “evolution” of that “order” — i.e., Islamic Law, the sharia.  Islam’s sharia, Bousquet argued, is analogous to the undifferentiated cloaca (i.e., in zoological anatomy, the posterior orifice that serves as the joint opening for both the intestinal and urinary tracts of certain animal species), which accounts for it being a “casuistic hodegepodge.”  Bousquet saw the sharia’s emergence as a retrogressive development — compared to the evolution of clear distinctions between “ritual, the law, moral doctrine, good customs in society, etc.” within Western European Christendom — which was utterly incompatible with modern Western conceptions of universal, individual human rights.

Marked for Death demonstrates that Geert Wilders fully grasps Bousquet’s elaboration of Islam’s doubly totalitarian essence.  Moreover, Wilders is inspired by great Western statesmen of the past two centuries who similarly possessed his unexpurgated knowledge of Islam and of the threat of jihadism.  These political leaders include John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who confronted North African jihad piracy in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries; John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, who recognized and denounced the mass-murdering Ottoman jihad depredations against indigenous, pre-Islamic Christian populations in the Balkans and Asia Minor during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries; Alexis de Tocqueville, who made a detailed study of the Koranic invocations for jihad war before serving as a diplomat in Algeria in the mid-19^th century; and Winston Churchill, who as a young British officer fought the fanatical jihadist followers of the Sudanese Mahdi at the end of the 19^th century.

Applying the timeless insights on Islam expressed by these astute, forthright Western statesmen to the present era, Wilders enumerates four actions required to protect our unique Western freedoms from Islamic encroachment and the imposition of sharia.  The primary step, Wilders argues, should be a vigorous defense of freedom of speech, including the repeal of all hate speech laws deliberately tailored to silence reasoned criticism of Islam, while enacting a  European equivalent to the U.S. First Amendment, to “allow the people to freely debate Islam just like any other public issue.”  Second, Wilders calls for the rejection of “all forms of cultural relativism,” and the reaffirmation of the superiority of Western culture — “based on Judeo-Christian and humanist values,” relative to Islam — to whom the West “owes nothing.”  He adds that we must also desist from the prevailing “political indoctrination of our children and proudly begin 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 by explaining Islam’s true, bloody history.”

The third and most comprehensive action Wilders describes is halting Western Islamization.  Expanding upon his first two steps, Wilders insists that we must break taboos which obfuscate the dual realities of Islamic migration, or “hijra”: its major, designed role as an instrument of Islamization, and the corollary, that across space and time, “more Islam has meant less freedom.”

Specifically, he proposes a moratorium on all immigration from Islamic nations and vigorous efforts at integrating those Muslim immigrants whom the West has already welcomed by the millions.  As the sine qua non of this integration process, Wilders demands that Muslim immigrants “assimilate to our societies, adapt to our values, and abide by our laws.”  Accordingly, Wilders vehemently opposes “the introduction of Sharia, or Islamic law, anywhere in our countries.”  He adds:

As for immigrants who insist on Sharia, we should recall British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s statement about the Ottomans: “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves.”

Wilders implores Western societies and their leaders to “stop pretending that Islam is merely a religion — it is primarily a totalitarian ideology that aims to conquer the West. A free society should not grant freedom to those who want to destroy it.”

He then argues for the closure of existing Islamic schools and radical mosques, the halting of new mosque construction, and the banning of face-covering burqas, the last because “it is our faces that give us our identity and our fundamental means of communication with others.”

Wilders conjoins these domestic recommendations to a demand that the West confront intolerant Islamic regimes.

They [Islamic regimes] should recognize that human rights exist to protect individuals, not religions and ideologies. Member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that do not denounce the Cairo Declaration [the Orwellian Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam], which elevates Sharia law over human rights, should be expelled from the United Nations. Until this happens, Western nations should refuse to make any financial contributions to the UN…Western countries should cut all development aid to OIC members that adhere to the Cairo Declaration and minimize bilateral relations.

Wilders further admonishes Western and global non-Muslim solidarity against the worldwide depredations of jihad.

Since Islam has global ambitions, we are all in danger, and we should stand with every nation and every people that is threatened by jihad. This includes Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. We should recognize that the Israelis’ conflict with the Palestinians is not about land; it is an ideological conflict between freedom and tyranny. We must also stand with all the oppressed non-Muslim groups suffering in silence throughout the Islamic world — the Christians, Zoroastrians, animists, and secularists in nations like Egypt, Iran, the Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, and elsewhere.

Finally, Wilders calls for a restoration of the Western nation-state ideal, the embodiment and safeguard of our democratic liberties and political freedoms.  Collectively, this nation-state renaissance, Wilders asserts, must “preside over a new blossoming of the Western spirit.”

During late 2010, an alarming comment by senior Dutch politician and former EU commissioner Frits Bolkestein was released publicly, excerpted from Manfred Gerstenfeld’s study “The Decay: Jews in a Rudderless Netherlands.”  Acknowledging the virulent Islamic Jew-hatred of Moroccan (and Turkish) Muslim immigrants to the Netherlands, and the Dutch government’s inability to combat this scourge, Bolkestein suggested that “recognizable Jews” advise their children to emigrate to Israel or the United States.

I see no future for recognizable Jews, in particular because of anti-Semitism, specifically in Dutch Moroccans, who continue to grow in number…I foresee no quick solution, and anti-Semitism will continue to exist. Moroccan and Turkish young people won’t care about the measures [i.e., to combat such Jew-hatred by the Dutch government].

Wilders, commenting on the remarks of his alleged mentor Bolkestein, proclaimed:

Jews shouldn’t emigrate, Antisemitic Moroccans should.

His reaction was consistent with Wilders’ eminently reasonable views on the assimilation of Muslim immigrants.

The message to all newcomers in our societies should be clear: if you subscribe to our laws and values, you are welcome to stay and enjoy all the rights our society guarantees; we will even help you to assimilate. But if you commit crimes, act against our laws, or wage jihad, you will be expelled.

Bolkestein’s passive resignation to the effects of bigoted Islamic supremacism is contrasted sharply by Wilders’ invocation of the rule of Western law to combat such violent Islamic hatred.  As Wilders observed, defiantly, in reference to the attack on cartoonist Kurt Westergaard:

Free men and women everywhere must resist this violent intimidation at all costs. Armed only with our pens, we must defy Islam’s axes and knives. We must continue to speak our minds, knowing there is nothing more powerful than the truth. This is why we write our books and speeches, draw our cartoons, and make our movies and documentaries. The truth will set us free. That is what we really believe.

Geert Wilders — informed, honest, and hopeful — has emerged as a uniquely courageous champion of Western freedom versus Islamic totalitarianism

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