Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (25 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Medina

We are not in politics to ignore people���s worries: we are in politics to deal with them.

—Margaret Thatcher

I
n his novel
Night,
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel conveys an important message: when people say they want to kill you, believe them.
¹

In light of the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the attempted killing of Kurt Westergaard, and countless other acts of intimidation against critics of Islam, I believe many people when they say they want to kill me—that’s why I have lived under 24-hour police protection for more than seven years. Everywhere I go I am accompanied by armed officers of the
Dienst Koninklijke en Diplomatieke Beveiliging
(The Royalty and Diplomatic Corps Protection Department, or DKDB), the special police force that protects the Dutch royal family, national politicians under threat, diplomats, and high-ranking official visitors to the Netherlands. If I want to go anywhere, even for a simple walk on the beach, I have to inform the DKDB, preferably a day in advance, so the officers can make the necessary arrangements. Sometimes, when it’s pouring rain, I go out on my prearranged walks anyway, just so all the planning won’t be in vain.

Whenever I travel abroad, DKDB officers come along with me, while a second team of officers goes in advance to liaise with the local police. I recall my first visit to Israel accompanied by the DKDB in January 2005. Upon arriving at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, I had to wait with a female Israeli border guard while the DKDB officers went to a separate room to register their weapons. The Israeli woman was shouting at me the whole time, “Stay here! Don’t move! Sit!” When I stood up to stretch my legs, she snapped, “Come back! Who do you think you are?!”

After my bodyguards reclaimed their guns, we had to show our papers to the same woman. She turned pale when she saw my diplomatic passport. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she pleaded. “I thought you were a prisoner.”

Sometimes I do feel like a prisoner; I long for the old days when I could travel by myself, without worrying about someone trying to kill me. Providing permanent protection for critics of Islam is one of the many costs a society has to pay once it allows Islam inside its borders. Britain pays the same price to protect Salman Rushdie, and Denmark and Sweden pay it to protect Muhammad cartoonists Kurt Westergaard and Lars Vilks, respectively. Undoubtedly, the list of threatened public figures will grow much larger as Islam’s reach expands throughout the West.

Since I was forced into hiding, one bright spot has been the thousands of letters and emails I’ve received from everyday Dutch people offering to hide me at their house, let me take walks on their land, or just expressing their support. An elderly lady sent me a €10 bill with a note saying, “I am the last Dutch person on my street. I have no children and my husband passed away. My life is hell. I am afraid to go out. No one speaks Dutch anymore on my street. I have a small pension, and I actually cannot do without it, but here are ten euros to help you establish your new party, because you are the only one speaking on my behalf.” I hung her letter on the wall to remind me who I am fighting for.

After I left the WD party in September 2004, I was on my own for a short period. Then, helped by many volunteers, I founded a new party, the
Partij voor de Vrijheid
(Party for Freedom, or PW). Our first campaign involved the 2005 referendum on the Constitution of the European Union—we argued for a “no” vote, opposing a pact that would erode national sovereignty in the Netherlands and throughout Europe. In contrast, most parties, from the governing Christian Democrats and the liberal VVD to the Labour Party, then in opposition, and the far-left Green Left Party, all supported the constitution.

It’s not easy to campaign when a whole army of bodyguards has to be mobilized and preparations have to be made weeks in advance just to go for a walk—in a bulletproof vest—among the people. But we campaigned hard despite the challenges, organizing a bus tour through the Netherlands. Everywhere, even in the smallest towns, hundreds of people waited to welcome me. The campaign ended in Rotterdam, where I received a tremendous welcome from members of
Leefbaar,
the late Pim Fortuyn’s party.

On June 1, 2005, the EU Constitution was rejected by an overwhelming 62 percent of the vote; only twenty-six of the Netherlands’ 467 municipalities approved it. Around the same time, the constitution was rejected in France with 55 percent of the vote. What happened next was a disgrace, though it did not surprise me: refusing to take no for an answer, the EU establishment rewrote the document as the “Treaty of Lisbon.” This time the people were not allowed a direct say, as Europe’s political class approved the Lisbon Treaty in national parliaments instead of through referenda. In other words, when the people resisted the political class, it retaliated by simply bypassing the people altogether.

By challenging the political consensus that robs Europeans of a meaningful voice on so many issues—especially on Islam, immigration, and multiculturalism—my party later gained some additional victories, but the establishment repeatedly refused to respect the will of the majority. Most notably, in December 2005, a majority in the
Tweede Kamer
supported my motion to demand that the Dutch government ban women from publicly wearing
niqabs
and
burkas,
the full-length Islamic garb covering everything except the eyes.
²
This was a popular proposal that would uphold women’s rights (most women who wear these suffocating costumes are pressured or outright forced to do so), public security (it is easier to commit robberies, fraud, and other crimes when people cannot be identified), and our national culture (
burkas
are a total negation of Western norms that hinder Muslim integration in the West). Nevertheless, because the ban challenged the assumptions of multiculturalism, the government refused to implement it. We managed to change that situation in January 2012, when a new Dutch cabinet, which needed the parliamentary support of my party, submitted to Parliament its own bill for a
burka
ban.

Islam claims that Muslims have a legal right to live according to divine Islamic law. “All the law that a Muslim needs is in the Qur’an and Hadith,” says Feisal Abdul Rauf, Manhattan’s acclaimed “moderate” imam.
³
“What Muslims want is to ensure that their secular laws are not in conflict with the Quran or the Hadith.... What Muslims want is a judiciary that ensures that the laws are not in conflict with the Quran and the Hadith.”
⁴

In Islam, the political, social, military, commercial, and personal behavior of the faithful is governed by the elaborate legal system of Sharia (Islamic law) and
Fiqh
(the written corpus of Islamic jurisprudence). Experts of Islamic law are called
ulama
(from the singular
alim,
meaning scholar). One of these
ulama
was Sam Solomon, an imam who read the Gospel, converted to Christianity, and then fled the Islamic world for Britain, where he was able to practice his faith openly.

Sam knows the whole Koran and large parts of the Hadith by heart. He has written many books about Islamic doctrine, often together with his friend, Elias Al Maqdisi, a Palestinian
alim
who also converted to Christianity. Al Maqdisi, a native of Jerusalem, was punished for his apostasy by an Islamic gang that ambushed him, beat him up, cut out one of his eyes with a broken bottle, tried to cut out the other eye, and left him for dead. (The attack comported with Muhammad’s command that renegades have their eyes branded.)
⁵
Elias, barely alive, made it to the Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem, where doctors refused to treat the apostate. He was forced to go to a Jewish hospital, where he was attended by Jewish physicians. A few years later, 80 percent blind, Elias fled to Canada.

I gave a copy of Solomon and Al Maqdisi’s book
Modern Day Trojan Horse: Al-Hijra: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration, Accepting Freedom or Imposing Islam?
to all members of the
Tweede Kamer
. In that important tome, the authors note that the Islamic calendar starts with the
hijra,
the migration of Muhammad and his small band of followers from Mecca to Yathrib, which they conquered from within and renamed Medina. Medina is where Islam became a state, and where Muhammad’s heretical Judeo-Christian mishmash transformed from a religion into an ideology. “The most important outcome of the
Hijra,
” the men write, “was the spread of Islam . . . not only as a religion but a combined, socio-religious and socio-political system. That is why
Hijra
is considered to be the most important method of spreading Islam . . . and consolidating it far beyond the Muslim countries. Hence,
Hijra,
as an example set up by the Prophet of Islam must be imitated and emulated by all Muslims as a religious obligation.”
⁶

Before the
hijra,
when Muhammad was still in Mecca and Islam was but a hodgepodge religious sect, the Muslims had no mosque because there was no Islamic state. But the first thing Muhammad did upon arriving in Yathrib was to build a mosque, erecting it before he even built his own house. The Yathrib mosque, the first ever, was the prototype of all mosques. It was the locus from which the conquest of Yathrib and its transformation into the Islamic state of Medina was planned, organized, and executed. This “mother of all mosques” was Muhammad’s propaganda center, the headquarters of his state, the base for all activities political and non-political, and the barracks of his jihad.

Thus, from Islam’s very beginning, the mosque was primarily a political institution, not a place of worship. This has grave implications for Europe, which now hosts more than 10,000 mosques.
⁷
Patrick Sookhdeo, a British Anglican canon who, like Solomon and Al Maqdisi, is a Muslim convert to Christianity, observes that some European mosques “have been used as the bases for insurgency, in particular to store weapons.”
⁸
Solomon and Al Maqdisi explain the bottom line: “Mosques are at the heart of inciting violence and the killing of the enemies of Islam.”
⁹

Westerners view mosques and minarets as religious symbols, but that is not how Islam sees them. “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers,” declares Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister.
¹⁰
Islam also invests immense political value in immigration, viewing it, like Muhammad’s
hijra,
as part of a Muslim’s duty to spread Islam to foreign lands and ultimately conquer them. “Whoever does not do hijra is ruined,” Muhammad told his followers.
¹¹
But of course, once the whole world is Islamic, the need for
hijra
stops. As Muhammad said, “There is no Hijra after the Conquest.”
¹²

In a 1974 speech at the United Nations, former Algerian President Houari Boumédienne explained the modern
hijra
’s purpose in stark, simple terms. “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere,” he proclaimed. “And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.”
¹³

Solomon and Al Maqdisi note that there are “a variety of reasons for everyday migration: economic, political, religious, social, natural disasters, wars.”
¹⁴
This should not, however, blind us to the reality that
hijra
is an intrinsic part of Islamic culture established by the Islamic prophet himself. Consequently, some Muslim immigrants refuse to adapt to their new homelands in the West—for them, Islam is meant to dominate, not to assimilate.

Turkey’s Erdogan subscribes to this view. On a 2008 visit to Germany, he told Turkish immigrants that “assimilation is a crime against humanity.”
¹⁵
In early 2010, he further denounced assimilation at a mass convention of Turks in Paris and at a conference of 1,500 European politicians of Turkish origin in Istanbul. Those 1,500 politicians, whose dual citizenship enables them to be politically active throughout Europe, had been invited to Istanbul by the Turkish government.
¹⁶