Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (22 page)

That is the only way to stop the
Amerikabombers
once and for all.

CHAPTER NINE

Conquest

In matters of principle, stand like a rock.

—Thomas Jefferson

I
knew I was in trouble as soon as I noticed the three Arab youths following me. I wanted to cross the street, but there was another group of them waiting on the other side. Like predators tracking their prey, they had probably been following me for a while, assuming from my suit that I had money. When they caught up with me, they sprayed some sort of gas in my face, causing intense pain and blinding me. I fell on the pavement as they beat me, grabbed my wallet, and ran off.

As I lay on the ground, three young women rushed to me and asked if I was okay. “I can’t see anything,” I cried out, my throbbing eyes already swelling up. I gave them the address of a friend who lived nearby. They found him, and he took me to get medical attention. It was not the first time I had been robbed, nor would it be the last, but it was the only time I ended up in the hospital.

A few weeks later, a colleague picked me up at my home. “My God, Geert, why the hell do you stay in this neighborhood?” he asked. “I’ve been living here longer than they have,” I replied. “They won’t drive me out.” I confess—I am stubborn. The harder people make it for me, the more I persist. That’s how I survived in Kanaleneiland for twenty years.

I moved to Kanaleneiland (Canal Island), a borough of Utrecht, in early 1985. From there, it is a short commute to Amsterdam as well as to The Hague, where in 1990 I began working as a staff assistant for the
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie
(People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, or WD) in the Dutch Parliament.

In 1997, I became a WD member of the Utrecht city council. The following year, I was elected as a WD representative to the
Tweede Kamer,
the Dutch House of Representatives. I represented my native province of Limburg, so I moved back to Venlo. But I still spent half my time at the Kanaleneiland apartment because it was an easy commute to The Hague. Those were my living circumstances until November 2004, when the police began putting me in safe houses for my own protection.

Kanaleneiland was built up in the 1960s to accommodate 30,000 people in modern and relatively cheap housing. When I first moved to the district, it was predominantly populated by native-born, blue-collar and middle-class Dutch residents. The locals initially welcomed immigrants, and this was expected; Dutchmen, whether lower class or middle class, are famously tolerant of newcomers and of alternative lifestyles. But as they began arriving in greater numbers, it became clear that many Islamic immigrants, unlike previous immigrant groups, adamantly refused to assimilate. Some of the newcomers, mostly of Moroccan origin, demanded that the non-Muslim natives adapt to
their
culture, not the other way around.

As Islam expanded, crime spread throughout the district—cars were vandalized, people were robbed, and eventually Dutch women no longer felt safe in the streets. Marxists claim poverty causes crime, but I noticed the opposite: crime reduced the area to poverty. When I moved to Kanaleneiland, it was a safe and clean lower-middle class neighborhood. As lawlessness spread, Dutch residents began moving out and Dutch shops closed down. The district developed a Middle Eastern feel, with the streets full of Arabic or Turkish shop signs and women wearing headscarves. By 2004, Kanaleneiland had become much poorer and had transformed into one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Utrecht—at least for non-Muslims. In January 2012, the Dutch authorities revealed that 65 percent of youths of Moroccan origin between twelve and twenty-three years old have been detained at least once by the police.
¹

The indigenous Dutch came to me, as a parliamentarian, for help—but what could I do? I had frequently tried to open a dialogue with the young Moroccans, but to no avail—to them, I was just another
kafir,
an infidel. I was somewhat surprised to learn they still remembered me years later. In 2008, a newspaper reporter asked a group of Kanaleneiland youths about me. “He often came to chat with us,” 20-yeard-old Khalid told the journalist. “How are you doing, he used to ask.” That was a nice thing to say, unlike what came next: “But since he moved out, he shouts dangerous slogans. He was a nice guy, but now he is filth, a dirty bastard.” His friend, 20-year-old Rachid, added, “He must be thrown out of Parliament. If there are riots here, it will be his fault.”
²

Whenever I talked with other parliamentarians about the situation in Kanaleneiland, they looked at me as if I was talking about another planet. The most dramatic sociological change of our lifetime was unfolding before our very eyes, but neither the Dutch media nor the political class wanted to acknowledge it.

Eventually, one man forced the topic into the public realm—Pim Fortuyn, a sociologist, university professor, and former member of the Dutch Labour Party. The flamboyant Fortuyn, an outspoken defender of traditionalist Catholicism but also an open homosexual, was a magazine columnist who audaciously criticized multiculturalism, the Dutch welfare state, and the “backward culture” of Islam. “I have traveled much in the world. And wherever Islam rules, it’s just terrible,”
³
he said, confirming my own observations. Advocating a halt to immigration to the Netherlands,
⁴
Fortuyn warned that “mosques should be seen as front organizations... In the mosques martyrs are bred.”
⁵
He also claimed that Islam is “the main threat to world peace.... Communism has almost finished; it has been replaced by Islam.”
⁶
Therefore, he argued, “I am in favor of a cold war with Islam. I see Islam as an extraordinary threat.”
⁷

Professor Pim, as some called him, wanted to abolish the first article of the Dutch Constitution, which forbids discrimination. He claimed the clause violates free speech and, more provocatively, that preferential policies should be adopted for Christianity. “Christian inhabitants of the Netherlands... are morally entitled to more rights than Islamic newcomers, because for centuries Christians have contributed to the development of our country,” he proclaimed.
⁸
Along the same lines, he favored banning Islamic schools but not Christian ones, which he considered beneficial to Dutch society.
⁹
His politically incorrect writings sparked severe criticism from the media and political establishment; after Fortuyn published his book
Tegen de islamisering van onze cultuur
(Against the Islamization of Our Culture) in 1997, a former Labour Party politician and government minister called him “an extremely inferior human being.”
¹⁰

In the early 2000s Professor Pim became politically active in his hometown of Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second largest city, which had a growing Islamic community comprising more than 10 percent of its population.
¹¹
In early March 2002, Fortuyn’s party
Leefbaar Rotterdam
(Livable Rotterdam) gained 35 percent of the vote in the city’s local elections, enough to seize power from the Labour Party, which had governed Rotterdam for thirty years. The Rotterdam victory encouraged Fortuyn to run for Parliament that May. He was predicted to do well, but his life was tragically cut short on May 6, 2002, a week before the elections, when Fortuyn was shot and killed by Volkert van der Graaf, an animal rights activist. The assassin claimed he murdered Fortuyn to “prevent much harm to vulnerable groups such as Muslims and illegal aliens.”
¹²

Fortuyn’s funeral in Rotterdam became a mass event, attended by tens of thousands of mourners stunned by the murder of a fearless man who gave voice to the alienation, desperation, and concern for the future of those who increasingly felt like foreigners in their own land. Despite Fortuyn’s death, the
Lijst Pim Fortuyn
(Pim Fortuyn List) went on to win 17 percent of the national vote—the strongest showing ever for a new Dutch party. Gaining twenty-six of the 150 seats in the
Tweede Kamer,
it instantly became the nation’s second biggest party, after the Christian Democrats. The death of its leader, however, dealt a mortal blow to the party, which soon disintegrated into quarrelling factions.

My party at the time, the WD, did poorly in those elections, dropping to twenty-four seats, a loss of fourteen. Clearly, our party leadership was out of touch with the issues that most concerned the Dutch people. During the following two years, I tried to draw my colleagues’ attention to the severe problems plaguing our urban neighborhoods, which were rapidly turning into no-go areas for non-Muslims and even for the police.

Upon reentering the
Tweede Kamer
in July 2002, I began to publicly criticize Islam. My warnings were not well received by many of my WD colleagues; I was denounced for fear-mongering, isolated within the party, and ostracized by party leaders. Since the VVD was part of the governing coalition, some party members were particularly infuriated by my criticism of the government’s weak policy toward the threat of Islamic terrorism.

In July 2004, I wrote a memo for VVD members in my constituency listing ten policies I felt the party should adopt, including the expulsion of radical Muslims from the Netherlands and opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union. This sparked a major conflict with outraged VVD leaders. In late August, the party leadership demanded that I endorse the official VVD position supporting Turkey’s accession to the EU. I refused, and on September 2 I left the party. In my first speech in the
Tweede Kamer
as an independent parliamentarian, I warned against the “extremist sermons of radical imams in radical mosques.”
¹³

One month later, when jihadists released an internet video threatening to behead me, my wife and I still slept in our Kanaleneiland apartment or at our home in Venlo, though the police intensified my personal security. After the gruesome ritual murder of Theo van Gogh on November 2, however, the police felt I had to go into hiding. I have lived under police protection at safe houses ever since. It is the price for speaking the truth about Islam.

Since I left Kanaleneiland, conditions there have continued to deteriorate for the dwindling non-Muslim population. In fact, by September 2007, crime had become so pervasive in the district that the mayor of Utrecht banned youths from assembling together. Municipal authorities also erected fences around a housing complex for elderly people in order to block the escape routes used by thieves. In August 2009, a van was driven into the fence around the Kanaleneiland police headquarters. The police, fearing the van was filled with explosives, called in the bomb squad. Luckily, the vehicle turned out to be empty.
¹⁴

The press still doesn’t like to report on the collapse of towns like Kanaleneiland, and even when journalists want to, they’re not always successful. A television crew came to Kanaleneiland to report on the situation but gave up after three failed attempts. On the first occasion, the reporters fled after being assaulted and having their car vandalized. On the second try, they were attacked again and their cameras were stolen. On the third attempt, they had rocks thrown at them.
¹⁵

These problems affect many other parts of the Netherlands as well. In March 2010, an elderly couple who lived for forty years in the Amsterdam borough of Slotervaart described to a journalist how they had endured years of provocations, intimidation, violence, and even arson attempts by Moroccan youths. “The situation we have to live in is worse than during the war,” the old man said, bursting into tears. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the couple revealed they were quietly moving out. They kept their move a secret and did not even order a moving truck, fearing their tormentors would follow the truck, discover their new home, and continue terrorizing them there.
¹⁶

The couple, like many other Dutch, were effectively abandoned by the authorities in January 2006, when riots erupted in Slotervaart due to the death of a Moroccan thief who drove his scooter into a pillar while trying to flee from the police. In response to the violence, Amsterdam officials instructed uniformed police to stop entering “sensitive” neighborhoods—that is, areas with a large Islamic presence. “The presence of large numbers of uniformed personnel is often perceived by the youths as a cause for confrontation,” stated an internal police memo that was leaked to me by indignant police officers.
¹⁷
Trying to justify the new policy, an Amsterdam police spokesman exclaimed, “If you see a bull in the meadow, you do not approach it with red trousers either, do you?” He added, “We were not afraid to enter the neighborhood, but we most certainly did not want to provoke anything.”
¹⁸
The Dutch press hardly reported on the authorities’ abdication of the most basic responsibility of any government—to protect the public.