STEVE KOGAN writes:

Commenting on the general clamor among “thousands of little groups” in Germany in the 1920s, each one hawking its own “set notion of life,” the novelist Robert Musil foresaw a time in the near future when “a genuine paranoiac” would no longer “be able to resist competing with the amateurs.” I have recalled this exquisite prediction many times since I read it years ago. On May 1, it came to mind again.

After a day in which the Occupy movement marked the old socialist-communist “workers’ holiday” of May Day with the usual Occupy slogans of class warfare and scattered outbreaks of lawless behavior, Geert Wilders’s interview that night by Sean Hannity was a sobering reminder of the discipline with which militant Islam exploits the decaying authority of our institutions and channels its ancient drive against the unbeliever, a word that confronts us throughout the Koran. The title of Wilders’s new book, Marked for Death: Islam’s War against the West and Me, sums up this drive both in historical and personal terms. The reader should note that there is no vanity in his identification with the West, since Wilders has not only been arguing in defense of its democratic values for decades but is also a long-time member of the Dutch parliament, whose origins date back to Europe’s late middle ages. Wilders is also justifiably proud of Holland’s history of religious tolerance, which is an underlying theme of a fascinating book I recently came across by Steven Nadler titled Rembrandt’s Jews. Among his many critiques of Islam, Wilders has argued that it resembles 20th-century totalitarian ideologies in brooking no opposition. Since church and state are one in the Koranic world view, one could properly conclude that the only legitimate expression of nationhood in Islamic doctrine is Islam itself. Wilders’s recoil from such aggressive beliefs also has a visceral quality that suggests some deep-rooted awareness of their consequences; and, from the little I have gleaned of his background, the phenomenon of Hitlerism might well have entered his consciousness at an early age. In a recent review of his book in American Thinker (April 29), Andrew Bostom writes that his father “aided the anti-Nazi Dutch resistance during World War II,” and Wikipedia notes that he “became so traumatised” by the Nazi occupation “that he refused to physically enter Germany even forty years later.” As Wilders knows, Hitler’s Mein Kampf remains a best-seller in the Arab middle east, where the title is translated as “My Jihad.”

Having read several articles on Wilders over the years, I looked forward with anticipation to the interview, and he did not disappoint; for in all that he said I did not hear a single false note of inflated rhetoric, and there was not an observation or feeling of his that did not register on my mind with its clarity and force. And it all poured out of him in less than seven minutes, from his trial over his outspoken critiques of Islam (he was acquitted of all charges) to his years of enforced hiding and government protection long before the trial and continuing to the present day, plus commentary on the growing displacement of western values in Europe by a combination of multicultural dogma and sharia law, the consequent erosion of national pride, the high detention rates of Muslim youth by Dutch police, the fatwa against the life of Salman Rushdie, ongoing threats to book sellers, newspaper cartoonists, himself and other political figures, and jihadist assassinations of two prominent critics of Islam in Holland alone, one a politician (openly gay to boot), the other a filmmaker whose very name is a reminder of one luminous corner of the Dutch national heritage (Theo van Gogh, the great-grandson of his namesake, the devoted brother of Vincent). In his closing observation, Wilders underscored the singular fact that Israel not only shares our democratic values but is also targeted for extermination by every surrounding link to Islamic extremism, which means that Israel stands, as he said, “exactly” on the border between the west and jihad. A few moments after he concluded, I turned to my wife and said that the reality of his words was such that he might just as well have come directly to the interview from early Nazi Germany to warn us of a nightmare growing in our midst.

Please follow and like us: