Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. - Psalms 20:7
I report and link. You decide. - BJon
Geert Wilders has made all the right enemies. At a time when many counsel accommodation of Islamist demands, Wilders remains defiant. In an era of civilizational self-loathing, he defends the West without apology. Despite the threats to his life, he refuses to be silenced. For all this, Wilders deserves the praise of many – including the many in the West who scorn his name.
From a Front Page Mag .com article, Man of the Year: Geert Wilders more follows:
Man of the Year: Geert Wilders [/] By FrontPage Magazine [/] FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/2/2009
It’s a safe bet that Geert Wilders won’t be Time magazine’s Man of the Year any time soon. If anything, the unusually coiffed Dutch MP is a favorite hate figure of the Western media, which has spent years vilifying him as a “reactionary,” a “particularly dangerous type of demagogue,” a “racist” and an “Islamophobe.” Wilders would almost certainly plead guilty to the last charge, and with ample reason. His tireless campaign to sound the alarm about the growing threat of Islamic radicalism in the West has turned him into a target of Islamic jihadists and the object of untold assassination plots. A 2006 death threat, one of hundreds he’s received, declared that his “infidel blood will flow freely on cursed Dutch streets.” Al-Qaeda has specifically singled him out for slaughter.
Against this menacing background, it would have been no failing in his character if Wilders had decided that the price of speaking out about Islamic fundamentalism was too high; others in his prominent position would have reached just that conclusion. Instead, Wilders has persevered. Braving daily death threats and sacrificing the security that his critics take for granted, he has opted for the often-thankless task of saving Western civilization from its Islamist discontents – beginning with the valuable reminder that the demands of Islamic zealots are not only not congruent with Western values but are, in fact, in direct conflict with them. For his impressive personal courage, his steadfast political commitment, and his refreshing disdain for the suffocating pieties of political correctness, Geert Wilders is Front Page Magazine’s Man of the Year in 2008.
The steep risks involved in Wilders’s anti-Islamist campaign are tragically illustrated by the fates of two of his countrymen. Pim Fortuyn, the popular Dutch politician who warned against the Islamisation of Dutch society and railed against the “backwardness” of certain Islamic traditions, was gunned down by a crazed animal-rights activist in 2002. His killer later claimed that he had shot Fortuyn in order to defend Dutch Muslims from persecution.
Next on the hit list was Dutch provocateur and documentarian Theo Van Gogh. In 2004, Van Gogh was gruesomely murdered in Amsterdam by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-born Islamist who judged Van Gogh’s film on the mistreatment of women in Islam, Submission, to be a crime deserving of death. To Van Gogh’s butchered body, Bouyeri pinned a list of “infidels” who “deserved to be slaughtered.” Among the names singled out for execution was Geert Wilders.
The threats were all too real. Shortly after Van Gogh’s murder, Dutch authorities discovered an Islamist network with advanced plans to kill Wilders, and an internet video surfaced promising 72 virgins to anyone who carried out the deed. As police investigated, Wilders was forced into 24-hour protection, traveling from safe house to safe house to avoid his pursuers. Even today he is never without dark-suited bodyguards by his side. “There’s no freedom, no privacy,” Wilders says. “If I said I was not afraid, I would be lying.”
Yet, Wilders remains undaunted. This March, he again incensed Islamists when he released a short but explosive film called Fitna, which seeks to show that Islamic terrorism is directly inspired by the Koran. Artistically rough, the film is nevertheless effective, juxtaposing graphic footage of Islamic terrorism – including the 9/11 attacks, the Madrid train bombings, and the beheading of American contractor Nicholas Berg – with Koranic verses and clips of Islamic clerics preaching the murder of non-Muslims. If nothing else, the film makes it impossible to argue that Islamic texts have nothing at all to with the terrorist violence committed in their name.
[…] Less bloodthirsty – but more spineless – was the response in the West. Dutch television stations flinched from airing the film, forcing Wilders to release it on the video hosting site LiveLeak.com, which soon pulled it due to “threats to our staff of a very serious nature.” (LiveLeak later restored the film.) Political leaders meanwhile went out of their way to denounce Wilders. Thus Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende insisted that Fitna “serves no other purpose than to cause offense,” […] [/] But just as the tide of elite Western opinion was turning against him, Wilders was vindicated by an unlikely observer: Libyan-based jihadist cleric Omar Bakri. Not only were Fitna’s attempts to link terrorist violence with Islamic teachings not offensive, Bakri explained, but they were entirely accurate. Indeed, Bakri said, Fitna “could be a film made by the mujahedeen.” In other words, Wilders was exactly right.
[…] Given the great personal costs he has suffered, it must be asked: Has it all been worth it? It is a measure of Wilders the man that he never struggles with the question. “Speaking out boldly cost me my personal liberty, with 24-hour security and police protection for more than four years now,” Wilders told Front Page Magazine last week. “But if I and others don’t at least try, and if I would not do my modest bit, millions of westerners will lose their liberty. You see, there is so much at stake. Our liberty and freedom are being bargained away and only so few speak out against it. I am no hero but I would rather be killed for what I say and believe than submit in silence to Islamic totalitarianism. If I regret anything at all, it’s is not being too bold but not being bold enough.” […] [My ellipses and emphasis]
