The Speck in Your Brother’s Eye – The Alleged War of Islam Against the West – Ideology

Wilders regards Islam as an ideology: ‘…Islam is not just a religion, as many Americans believe, but primarily a political ideology in the guise of a religion’ (p. 25). ‘(T)the political ideology of Islam is not moderate – it is a totalitarian cult with global ambitions’ (p. 26). If Islam is an ideology, its followers cannot be said to be believers. Still Wilders never refers to Muslims as being adherents of an ideology. He does not give them a new name like ‘Islam ideologists’ for instance. He goes on calling them Muslims but obviously for him the term Muslim has a different meaning than it has for the average reader, who regards Muslims as adherents of a religion.

The confusion only grows when we learn that Wilders makes a weird distinction between Islam on the one hand and its followers, the Muslims, on the other. He states that ‘there are many moderate Muslims, but that does not change the fact that the political ideology of Islam is not moderate’ (p. 26). ‘We are fortunate that the majority of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims do not act according to the Koran…’ (p. 26). Islam is evil; Muslims who do not fully implement Islamic ideology are not necessarily evil. Could this mean then that Muslims can be good? This is not what Wilders is saying here but it is what he is implying, either intentionally or not. In the end, making a distinction between the ideology and its followers can only lead to disaster. Because, ultimately, the followers are all potential instruments of this evil ideology and as such a danger to world peace. If Wilders’ view of evil Islam and its potentially evil adherents were to become part of mainstream political thinking and acting, would that not create a huge risk of these followers becoming the objects of violence? Would it not create a situation where the people, or even the authorities, convinced of the risk Muslims constitute, will act accordingly and start oppressing and chasing them? It is for this reason that I find Wilders’ artificial distinction between ideology and its followers a highly dangerous one. And in fact, reading Wilders’ book, in particular chapters 5 and 6 on the history of Islam, and the last chapter where he presents his view on the (future) path to follow in respect to Islam one notices that where he speaks of ‘Islam’, he cannot but mean ‘Muslims’. When he claims that Islam with its jihad caused the deaths of millions of people in India (p. 89), my question to him would be: ‘Who, in your opinion, was it that killed in India? Was it Islam? Or was it Muslims?’ The distinction proposed by Wilders is ultimately untenable. Ideologies do not kill. It is people who kill. His hatred is not directed at an ideology, it is directed at people, at Muslims.

Following Wilders’ view that Islam is an ideology we are not surprised to find that he considers it an ideology like communism or fascism. Islam should therefore not be treated ‘more leniently’ than the other two, ‘just because it claims to be a religion’ (p. 26). At the end of his second chapter, he refers to methods, described later in this pamphlet, to ‘stop the Islamization of Western civilization’ (p. 27). In my chapter called Solution, I will go into the details of the proposed methods. In the present chapter, I will continue by giving an overview of how Wilders sees Islam and its history as an ideology that seeks to conquer the world.

Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party is not known in the Netherlands as a party that cherishes the values of multiculturalism or the multicultural society. In his book, party-ideologue Martin Bosma states that in multicultural societies neighbors no longer care for each other, while monocultural societies are characterized by social stability (p. 187-189). In fact, monoculturalism has given mankind the best it has ever had and in this regard Mr. Bosma specifies the values that characterize it, such as hard work, discipline, honesty and efficiency (p. 187). In his view, multiculturalism is a whip that Leftist parties have lashed our society with, and the cause of many conflicts and social problems in the Netherlands today. Is it not remarkable then, to say the least, to learn that Wilders looks very favorably on another multicultural society: that of the Arab cities of Mecca and Yathrib, later Medina, in the period just before Islam was born. When he talks about the birth of Islam he describes the Meccans as ‘multiculturalists avant la lettre’ (Wilders’ italics). They were pluralistic and tolerant, willing to accommodate new religious groups’ (p.34), and ‘peace-loving’ (p. 38). In 622, the prophet Mohammed left for Yathrib (Medina), ‘that was just as tolerant as Mecca’. ‘Yathrib was a tolerant, pluralist, multicultural oasis where Jewish, Christian, and pagan tribes lived together peacefully’ (p. 165). Then both cities regrettably came under the tyranny of the prophet and his followers. Their inhabitants thought that by accommodating the Muslims, they would be able to integrate them into their pluralistic societies: it did not work out that way. They lost their freedom forever. The message is that this will happen to us as well if we do not stop the Islamization of the world.

Islam subsequently spread over the world and in the end conquered an area stretching from Spain to the borders of China. All of the conquered peoples became the victims of the aggressive ideology of Islam and its destructive influence. Wilders also refers to the fall of Alexandria in 640 AD. ‘Islam had little consideration for science’ and thus ‘the Arabs … deliberately burned down its 900-year-old library’ (p. 55). Wilders here quotes the Arab leader, Caliph Omar: ‘They (the books) will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous’ (p. 55). There are some interesting observations to be made with regard to the example of the book burning in Alexandria. Wilders starts by saying that ‘Islam had little consideration for science’, but he subsequently uses the word ‘Arabs’, i.e., Muslims, to refer to the persons who executed the actual burning, instead of opting for a passive construction like ‘and the […] library was deliberately burned down’. Here we once again encounter the consequences of the artificial distinction Wilders makes between Islam and Muslims. Islam is evil, Muslims not necessarily, but in fact it was Muslims that spread the evil ideology of Islam and it was Muslims that apparently burned the books in the Library, not Islam as Islam is not a living person. If you are out to find blame, it is impossible to blame Islam and not blame the bearers of Islam, the Muslims. Even though not all 1.5 billion of them act in accordance with the ‘aggressive’ Koran, they can, if they want to. Does it not therefore make more sense to be outspoken and to point not to Islam, but to its adherents, the Muslims? Do not get me wrong here. I am not in favor of blaming all Muslims for all the crimes that have been committed by Muslims. On the contrary. But what Wilders is doing here is blatantly hypocritical. He fabricates this confusing distinction between Islam and Muslims, while, basically, what he really wants to say is that in the end all Muslims are evil. Why not simply do away with this artificial barricade and speak out on the issue? In the last chapter of his book he puts a definite end to this embarrassing charade when he says, that, in the end, all Muslims, both the extreme ones and, surprisingly enough but perhaps not so surprising after all, the moderate ones as well, should renounce their Islamic identity. If that were realized, the whole ‘Islam-Muslim’ distinction dissolves and will have become useless, but only after having fulfilled a very useful purpose in the path toward it.

Having established the anti intellectual nature of Muslims while dealing with the burning of the Library of Alexandria, Wilders continues by presenting his views on the contribution of Islam to history. Historical studies show that Muslim scholars passed on –parts of- the classical Greek Byzantine heritage to Western Europe. After Islam came to Egypt, Syria and Iraq, scholars set out to translate the works of Greek scientists and philosophers into Arabic, which later on were translated into Latin in cities like Toledo in Spain, and in Italy. But Wilders’ version of what happened is quite different. He states that ‘comprehensive translations of Aristotle, and other ancient Greek philosophers were made at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in Normandy half a century before Arabic versions of the same texts appeared in Islam-occupied Moorish Spain’ (p. 56). In his opinion, the only science that Islam actually contributed to was that of astronomy. This would have had everything to do with the importance of the establishment of time and place because of the Islamic requirement to perform prayers and fasting at particular times and ‘for determining the Qibla, the direction toward the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, which Muslims must face when they pray’ (p. 57). As an example of Western voices claiming that it was Muslims that passed on the Greek Byzantine intellectual heritage, Wilders chooses to single out the name of Nazi scientist Sigrid Hunke, member of the SS think tank, the Germanistischer Wissenschaftseinsatz (German Science Service), who claimed that ‘the West owes its development to a “pioneering, civilizing Islam” that supposedly transmitted Greek philosophy back to Europe’ (p. 56). Wilders does not fail to mention as well that Mrs. Hunke was made an honorary member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, although he does not supply us with the source of this information. He is not surprised that Mrs. Hunke expressed these views, given her Nazi background. Mrs. Hunke wrote a book called Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland (Allah’s sun over the Occident) and Nazis, so Wilders maintains, were fascinated by Islam (see below as well). He therefore ‘regrets’ the fact that Mrs. Hunke’s ‘flawed thesis has become widely accepted by Western leaders anxious to pander to Islam’s grandiose pretensions’ (p. 57). Here Wilders is discrediting an important aspect of Islamic-Western relations. To him, the classical Greek Byzantine heritage was passed on to us by Christian monks and not by Muslim scholars and translators. The only people defending the latter interpretation of history were Nazi ‘intellectuals’ and later on contemporary Western leaders apparently followed the Nazi interpretation of history.

One of Wilders’ favorite cards obviously is the Nazi one. In the arguments concerning our classical heritage, Wilders links Islam as well as ‘Western leaders’ to National Socialism. He does not specify who these leaders are or were and to what political affiliation they belong(ed), but one can imagine that he is aiming in particular at leaders with a leftist political background, Wilders generally being very critical of the Left, which, in his perception, has opened our borders to Islam and to ‘mass immigration’. Nazism and Islam to him are thus closely related and in his view present-day socialism is deeply influenced by both. These are important lines of thinking both with Mr. Bosma, the Freedom Party’s ideologue, and with Wilders. Connecting Islam and socialism with Nazism is a strategic move to discredit both and to add substance to their claim that we are heading for an ‘Islamization of the world’. How did they (manage to) put all this together?

In his chapter three, called Islamofascism, Wilders claims that the Nazis recognized in Islam ‘a kindred soul’ (p. 42). Albert Speer, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Armament, and Hitler’s ‘Reichsarchitect’ supposedly wrote in his diaries that Hitler regretted that the prophet Mohammed had not come to the Germans and he quoted Adolf Hitler as saying: ‘It ‘s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?’ (Speer, 1969, p. 42; translation by Wilders). It is true, that Adolf Hitler in his inner circle condemned Christianity for its meekness. In his politics, however, he did not go so far as to ban Christianity from society. He himself never formally renounced Catholicism, the religion of his ancestors. In his book, Mr. Bosma, the Freedom Party-ideologue, also refers to the Hitler quote on Christianity (p. 251). What is interesting is that neither Wilders nor Mr. Bosma quotes Mr. Speer in full. Mr. Bosma presents the quote as follows (original German quote followed by English translation): ‘Wir haben eben überhaupt das Unglück, eine falsche Religion zu besitzen. (…) Auch die mohammedanische Religion wäre für uns viel geeigneter als ausgerechnet das Christentum mit seiner schlappen Duldsamkeit (p.110).’ ‘It ‘s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more suitable than Christianity of all religions, with its meekness and flabbiness.’

Mr. Bosma put some dots (…) in the quote to indicate to the reader that he left out part of it, obviously because he does not deem that part important for his argumentation. This way, quoted out of context as it were, it can be interpreted as Hitler preferring Islam and wanting to get rid of Christianity. The point has been made: Nazism and Islam are two of a kind. But the full quote puts quite a different angle on things, when we read the part that has been left out: ‘Warum haben wir nicht wie die der Japaner, die das Opfer für das Vaterland als das Höchste ansieht?’ ‘Why don’t we have that (the religion) of the Japanese, who consider sacrificing themselves for their country as the ultimate honor?’

The full quote then reads as follows: ‘Wir haben eben überhaupt das Unglück, eine falsche Religion zu besitzen. ‘Warum haben wir nicht wie die der Japaner, die das Opfer für das Vaterland als das Höchste ansieht? Auch die mohammedanische Religion wäre für uns viel geeigneter als ausgerechnet das Christentum mit seiner schlappen Duldsamkeit (p. 110)’. ‘It ‘s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. ‘Why don’t we have that (the religion) of the Japanese, who consider sacrificing themselves for their country as the ultimate honor? The Mohammadan religion too would have been much more suitable than Christianity of all religions, with its meekness and flabbiness (feeble meekness).’

Hitler supposedly implied that any religion would have been better than Christianity: the Japanese religion or Islam. The correct interpretation of Hitler’s’ quote would therefore first of all be that he felt Christianity was too soft and weak, and not so much that he admires Islam but rather that he would have preferred it or any other ‘heroic’ religion to Christianity. Now, I also put this argument forward in the first version of my publication The Ideology of the Freedom Party. The evil good and the good evil (2012), which first appeared as a series of articles published on the Internet (www.nieuwwij.nl) from May to November 2011. As Wilders published his book in April 2012 I would venture to assume that he took notice of my criticism on his party ideologue’s crippled quotation and decided to use the same quote in a way less susceptible to criticism. The parts of the passage that he quotes neither contain the part referring to Islam nor the one about the religion of the Japanese. He refers to Speer’s diary in general terms. He uses what he needs to use to make his point, and the point has been made: the link between Islam and Nazism. In the next few pages, Wilders continues in the same vein. The message is clear: Islam and Nazism are natural friends. Nazism has been beaten, Islam has not yet.

The relationship between Islam and leftist parties today is of a different nature than the one between Islam and Nazism. While describing the fall of the city of Yathrib (later Medina) to the prophet Mohammed and his followers in 622, Wilders refers to the so-called Ansar, the (Arabic word for) helpers, Yathribians, who became allies of Islam. ‘Today, Islam finds its ansar in Western leftist and other fellow travelers who ferociously attack Islam’s critics and other defenders of Western civilization’ (p. 176). In Wilders’ eyes, the Western Left has been subdued by Islam and is being used as its instrument to Islamize the world. This view is expressed in Mr. Bosma’s book as well. To top it all off, Mr. Bosma claims that the present Left is the actual heir of Hitler’s’ political party, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Worker’s Party).

Consequently, a modern political party like the Dutch Labor Party, led between April 2010 and February 2012 by Jewish ex-mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, stands in the same line as Hitler’s NSDAP. For those who can hardly believe that this is seriously being asserted, I refer to the Freedom Party Election Program of 2010, where it says that each year on the fourth of May the Netherlands commemorate ‘the liberation of the (national) socialist occupation’ (1940-1945). The site puts the word national in parentheses, implying that the Netherlands suffered from five years of socialist occupation and terror. It is remarkable that Wilders does not explicitly mention this particular line of thought in his book, but this can easily be explained. Surely, if modern Western labor parties and thus Western labor governments as well, are to be considered Hitler’s heirs, this would imply that the Israeli Labor governments from the late forties to the seventies and Mr. Tony Blair’s’ British Labor administration should be seen as Hitler’s soul mates, which not only is a ridiculous thought but also quite a risky claim to put in a book published in the United States, a loyal ally of both countries mentioned.

Once he has established that Islam is a reprehensible ideology, and closely allied to Nazism besides, we are not surprised to find that Wilders elaborately discusses its violent past and present. I would like to pick out a number of instructive examples. In his fifth chapter, called The Yoke of Ishmael, Wilders enumerates the multiple genocides ‘Islam’ has committed in the course of its history. He claims that, based on the calculations in Indian historian Lal’s (1973) work, ‘the population of India dropped from 200 million in 1000 AD to 170 million in 1500, with 60 to 80 million Indians dying as a direct result of jihad’ (p. 89). Wilders gives a vivid description of all of the massacres that took place during the jihad in India, and subsequently adds cynically that ‘Islam still burns with indignation over the Crusaders’ attacks’ (p. 89), the idea being that Islam does not regret the millions it killed, but is still whining over the relatively insignificant events that took place during the Crusader raids in the Middle East. Note that the subject of the sentence quoted is once again Islam, an ideology that apparently manages to experience and show the human feeling of indignation. Of course, what we should really read here instead is another grammatical subject: Muslims, flesh-and-blood humans, for only humans can burn with indignation.

In his treatment of what happened in India, Wilders refers to the Crusades. In doing so, he tackles a thorny issue. After all, the Crusades were an initiative of the Christians, and one that cannot exactly be characterized as being a conquest through the word and the pen. On the contrary. But of course Wilders knows he can expect comments like the following: Aren’t the Crusaders guilty of killing and plundering as well? Well yes, they are indeed, Wilders concedes when he writes: ‘While Islam committed innumerable massacres as it swept through Asia and the Middle East, it should be noted that the Crusaders committed their own excesses in Palestine’ (p 90-91). But, he hastens to add, there is a difference though: ‘Christians did not find sanction for their atrocities in Christian scripture; neither the Bible nor the example of Christ’s life command Christians to kill unbelievers. The Koran and the example of Muhammad’s life, however, do’ (p. 91). Wilders is realistic enough to acknowledge that ‘most people today, even most Christians, will acknowledge that many Christians throughout history committed terrible crimes in the name of Christ’ (p. 19), but the line of thought is that Christians know that this ‘violates Christian doctrine’ (p. 19). ‘A Christian who proclaims hatred to any group of people violates Christian principles. Not so with the Muslims’ (p. 20). In short: Muslims (not: Islam) kill because their ideology tells them to; Christians kill too, but they are not instructed to do so by their religion. What a relief!

An interesting turning point in the description of the violent history and nature of Islam is the following. While discussing the upcoming European supremacy over the world in the seventeenth century and after, with Islamic countries falling into the hands of Russia, Britain, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, Wilders comes up with the following insights: ‘when all seemed lost… Allah saved Islam, orchestrating what in Islamic eyes must look like two miraculous events: the outbreak of the French Revolution and the West’s development of an unquenchable thirst for oil’ (p. 112). Allah paradoxically was the driving force behind the French Revolution. It was this Revolution that destroyed confessional structures in France and elsewhere in Europe. It was Maximilien Robespierre who replaced the Catholic faith and God by a metaphysical deism. In Wilders’ words, this is the same Revolution that ‘revamped Islam at a crucial moment when its resources were diminishing due to its lack of innovation, the decline of its dhimmi population, (i.e. Jews and Christians, my italics), and dwindling influxes of new slaves’ (p. 113). Wilders’ line of reasoning is that Islam by itself does not stimulate development and creativeness. It relies on dhimmis and slaves to live and survive. Now that at the end of the eighteenth century dhimmis and slaves had been exploited to the bone, Islam needed new resources and innovations: the French Revolution supplied them. One of the dogmas of the French revolutionaries was the complete submission of all the people to the all-powerful state. The French showed the Muslims how they had been capable of submitting their own people and virtually all the European nations on the Continent to the principles of their ideology. It rang a bell and stimulated the Muslims to once again become aware of their glorious past, or in Wilders’ words: ‘In a sense, Islam encountered a “kindred soul” in Western totalitarian revolutionary thinking’ (p. 113). The line of reasoning is complex. Wilders is convinced of the aggressive nature of Islam. Islam had somehow, paradoxically, and against its nature, fallen asleep in the ages preceding the French Revolution. God saved Islam by, paradoxically again, allowing the anti-religious French Revolution to take place. The French, coming to Egypt in 1798, made the lethargic Muslims recall their glorious past. They felt newly inspired and rose in order to try to restore their once so magnificent empire.

Wilders rejects the French Revolution. He reproaches French Revolution-inspired and Enlightenment thinking elsewhere in his book for its totalitarian character. The French Revolution may have given birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the basis of the present Charter of the United Nations, Wilders still condemns it for its totalitarian character, which resulted in terror. He calls Revolutionary France an ‘ideocratic state’ and groups it together with other ‘ideocratic’ states: ‘… such states –whether revolutionary France, the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany – exterminated their perceived enemies with guillotines, gulags and gas chambers’ (p. 32). Not a word in his book on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the principle of the equality of man, which were fruits of this revolution as well.

The French Revolution was nothing but evil and it is this evil that woke up that other sleeping evil. ‘Islam began from the nineteenth century onward parroting Western revolutionary jargon, adopting Western technological and scientific innovations, and embracing the belated industrial revolution that Western colonial administration was bringing to the Islamic world – all with the goal of advancing jihad and world domination’ (p. 114). This sounds like a paradox again for a religion that for the first 1200 years developed itself quite independently, but apparently that situation had changed. The key issue for Wilders is that ‘ exposure to Islam is ultimately fatal to us, but for Islam, contact with the West is a vital lifeline. Without the West, Islam cannot survive’ (p. 116). This last element gives the West an unexpected dominant position over Islam. All it needs to do is cut its ties with Islamic countries and Muslims in general and Islam will not survive. But then again, one may wonder what ‘West’ exactly Wilders is talking about. Is it the secular, liberal West, the West as it developed itself from the principles of the French revolution, and thus in Wilders’ terms, the despicable West? Or is it the West as created by the Jewish-Christian tradition, so dearly cherished by the author? But can the secular West and the Jewish-Christian West be regarded as two separate entities? More on this in the final chapter of this pamphlet.

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