We should fear Holland's silence
The Sunday Times, February 26, 2006
Islamists are stifling debate in what was Europe's freest country, says Douglas
Murray
'Would you write the name you'd like to use here, and your real name there?"
asked the girl at reception. I had just been driven to a hotel in the Hague.
An hour earlier I'd been greeted at Amsterdam airport by a man holding a sign
with a pre-agreed cipher. I hadn't known where I would be staying, or where
I would be speaking. The secrecy was necessary: I had come to Holland to talk
about Islam.
Last weekend, four years after his murder, Pim Fortuyn's political party, Lijst
Pim Fortuyn, held a conference in his memory on Islam and Europe. The organisers
had assembled nearly all the writers most critical of Islam's current manifestation
in the West. The American scholars Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer were present,
as were the Egyptian- Jewish exile and scholar of dhimmitude, Bat Ye'or, and
the great Muslim apostate Ibn Warraq.
Both Ye'or and Warraq write and speak under pseudonyms. Standing at the hotel
desk I confessed to the girl that I didn't have any other name, couldn't think
of a good one fast. I was given my key and made aware that the other person
in the lobby, a tall figure in a dark suit, was my security detail. I was taken
up to my room where I changed, unpacked and headed back out - the security guard
now positioned outside my bedroom door.
I had been invited to deliver the closing speech to the memorial conference
on what would have been Fortuyn's 58th birthday. I said I would talk on the
effects of Europe's increasingly Islamicised population and advocate a tougher
European counterterror strategy. There was no overriding political agenda to
the occasion, simply a desire for frank discussion.
The event was scholarly, incisive and wide-ranging. There were no ranters or
rabble- rousers, just an invited audience of academics, writers, politicians
and sombre party members. As yet another example of Islam's violent confrontation
with the West (this time caused by cartoons) swept across the globe, we tried
to discuss Islam as openly as we could. The Dutch security service in the Hague
was among those who considered the threat to us for doing this as particularly
high. The security status of the event was put at just one level below "national
emergency".
This may seem fantastic to people in Britain. But the story of Holland - which
I have been charting for some years - should be noted by her allies. Where Holland
has gone, Britain and the rest of Europe are following. The silencing happens
bit by bit. A student paper in Britain that ran the Danish cartoons got pulped.
A London magazine withdrew the cartoons from its website after the British police
informed the editor they could not protect him, his staff, or his offices from
attack. This happened only days before the police provided 500 officers to protect
a "peaceful" Muslim protest in Trafalgar Square.
It seems the British police - who regularly provide protection for mosques (as
they did after the 7/7 bombs) - were unable to send even one policeman to protect
an organ of free speech. At the notorious London protests, Islamists were allowed
to incite murder and bloodshed on the streets, but a passer-by objecting to
these displays was threatened with detention for making trouble.
Holland - with its disproportionately high Muslim population - is the canary
in the mine. Its once open society is closing, and Europe is closing slowly
behind it. It looks, from Holland, like the twilight of liberalism - not the
"liberalism" that is actually libertarianism, but the liberalism that
is freedom. Not least freedom of expression.
All across Europe, debate on Islam is being stopped. Italy's greatest living
writer, Oriana Fallaci, soon comes up for trial in her home country, and in
Britain the government seems intent on pushing through laws that would make
truths about Islam and the conduct of its followers impossible to voice.
Those of us who write and talk on Islam thus get caught between those on our
own side who are increasingly keen to prosecute and increasing numbers of militants
threatening murder. In this situation, not only is free speech being shut down,
but our nation's security is being compromised.
Since the assassinations of Fortuyn and, in 2004, the film maker Theo van Gogh,
numerous public figures in Holland have received death threats and routine intimidation.
The heroic Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her equally outspoken colleague
Geert Wilders live under constant police protection, often forced to sleep on
army bases. Even university professors are under protection.
Europe is shuffling into darkness. It is proving incapable of standing up to
its enemies, and in an effort to accommodate the peripheral rights of a minority
is failing to protect the most basic rights of its own people.
The governments of Europe have been tricked into believing that criticism of
a belief is the same thing as criticism of a race. And so it is becoming increasingly
difficult and dangerous to criticise a growing and powerful ideology within
our midst. It may soon, in addition, be made illegal.
I had planned - the morning after my speech - to see Geert Wilders, but instead
spent the time catching up with his staff. Their leader had been called in by
the police to discuss more than 40 new death threats he had received over the
previous days.
As I left the Netherlands I once again felt terrible sorrow for a country that
is slowly being lost. A society which should be carefree and inspiring has become
dark and worried. The jihad in Europe is winning. And Holland, and our continent,
takes one step further into a dark and menacing future.
Douglas Murray is the author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It
My Comment:
Not all the Dutch people is afraid of speaking out, but our politicians are afraid to say hush words and are so damned political polluted that they run around the bushes and react as where they an Ostrich, see no evil, here no evil say no evil but they forget that this country was build by there citizens and for decades we were proud of our freedom of speech, freedom of mind and freedom of religion. But just a few criminalized looters and rapist, who do not accept our way of living are taking them and us in hostage, because our politicians are to soft and give them al the slack and benefit off the doubt that normal citizens more and more are frustrated and so they created an atmosphere of hate and suspicion, fear and misbelieve. Thanks to an so called peaceful religion named the Islam.
