"Michael Laudahn" <ml@worldimprover.net> wrote in message
news:1141059190.726189.30860@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
We should fear Holland's silence
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
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2058502,00.html
--
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