What a difference a year makes.
I say this on realizing that just over one year ago, Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders -- who has been on a multi-stop media and speaking tour of New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. -- that includes a screening of his film "Fitna," hosted by Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., in the U.S. Capitol -- was little known outside the Netherlands. 
Indeed, most of what people seemed to know about him -- and I refer to those of us irresistibly riveted on Islamization as the great, ignored, existential peril -- was that Wilders, along with then-fellow Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had lived under threat of assassination since 2004. That was when a five-page Islamic manifesto calling for Wilders' and Hirsi Ali's murder was found impaled with a knife to the stabbed and bullet-riddled corpse of Theo van Gogh, a critic of Islam and great-great-nephew of Vincent van Gogh. Theo, as some will recall, was assassinated, ritualistically, his head nearly severed from his body, on the streets of Amsterdam on the morning of Nov. 2, 2004, by Dutch-Moroccan dual-national Mohammed Bouyeri. Linked to the jihadist Hofstad group, Bouyeri is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Bouyeri's motive? Criticism of Islam. Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali had together made a very short film titled "Submission" to call attention to the plight of women abused according to Islamic law; Wilders was an outspoken critic of Islamic law in the Netherlands. Bouyeri sought retribution, taking Van Gogh's life and consigning both Hirsi Ali and Wilders to the wary existence of perpetual prey, both of them requiring armed guards to help ensure their continued survival in their own country and beyond.
Hirsi Ali would eventually leave Dutch parliament and the Netherlands, finding renown in a peripatetic if guarded exile as the author of a bestselling memoir, "Infidel," and as a couture-sheathed subject for Vogue magazine. Wilders remained in Dutch politics, his stance against Islamization reported to the wider world in shorthand briefs about the so-called Dutch firebrand with the platinum-blond hair who opposed Islamic law, and wanted to halt Islamic immigration into the Netherlands.
Then, last year, in late January, FoxNews reporter Greg Palkot conducted what was likely the first televised U.S. interview with Wilders. The "Dutch firebrand" had begun making international headlines for his upcoming documentary critique of the Bible -- I mean, the Talmud. Or was it the Bhagavad Gita? No, the 17-minute film was called "Fitna," and it was about the Koran. No matter how short, no matter how small, such critiques of Islam draw notice because Islam brooks no criticism, and responds variously, as we have seen with Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, the Danish Mohammed cartoons, the Pope's Regensburg address and other uniquely Islamic flashpoints, with boycotts, lawsuits, threats, riots, arson, attacks -- even murder.
As noted on my blog at the time (dianawest.net), Wilders appeared in that first U.S. interview as "serious, certainly forthright and articulately nonapologetic in his defense of Dutch culture and identity (and, by extension, Western culture and identity) against the Islamization process well under way in his country and the wider West." I would see these same qualities firsthand when I interviewed him last summer in The Hague.
Fox's Palkot, on the other hand, was obviously rattled by Wilders' message, and came across, I wrote, "as what you might call the Nolo Contendere Westerner whose idea of coexistence is based on self-censorship." Palkot practically begged "Wilders to soften, i.e., censor, his views so as not to inflame the Islamic world, including those `moderates' whose so-called moderation morphs into radicalism at the first barb of criticism." Wilders explained he couldn't do that "because such self-censorship would concede victory to those who would impose Islamic law on him and his country."
Continued... |