Author: Douglas Murray
Publication: The Sunday Times
Date: February 26, 2006
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2058502,00.html
Islamists are stifling debate in what was
Europe's freest country
'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
