.

Videos

The National Debt Clock.

Related Posts with Thumbnails

Pim Fortuyn - 5 years on.


The below article can be found here

Thanks to whatwouldcharlesmarteldo

Sunday, May 6, marks the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn was nine days away from an election from which he was expected to emerge as Dutch prime minister. As he walked out of a radio studio near Amsterdam, a left-wing activist named Volker van der Graaf pumped five bullets into his back. Fortuyn died almost instantly.

The killer would later explain that Fortuyn's views on Muslim immigration made him a "danger." It was the Netherlands's first political assassination in over 300 years.

Fortuyn had been an active politician for only a few months but had already shaken things up dramatically. Before him, Dutch politics had been essentially a closed club whose members shared broadly similar views on major issues and abhorred open conflict.

Then along came Fortuyn, a writer and sociology professor who'd grown increasingly concerned about the rapid Muslim influx into the Netherlands — and about the fact that while the Dutch government lavishly subsidized immigrant families, schools, mosques, and community centers, it made little effort to integrate newcomers and refused to challenge the patriarchal, often brutal values that held sway in Muslim enclaves

Fortuyn recognized the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Europe as a menace to democracy. And he said it straight out — eloquently, forcefully, fearlessly. Back in 1997 he'd published one of the first books anywhere to sound the alarm. Only days before September 11, 2001, he wrote that communism's role as a threat to Western freedom "has been taken over by Islam."

But instead of recognizing him as a prophet, Dutch leaders saw him as a threat. On September 11, Dutch Moroccans gathered in the streets to cheer. But the interior minister, Zaken De Vries, ignoring these enemies within, warned instead that counterintelligence services would "pay sharp attention to persons who want to … conduct a cold war against Islam." Meaning Fortuyn.

In November 2001, Fortuyn became head of a new party, Livable Netherlands, only to be tossed out three months later for being too outspoken. So he started another party. The more he spoke out, the more journalists and politicians smeared him — an openly gay man and life-long liberal — as a right-wing extremist, a racist, a new Mussolini or Hitler.

Yet millions of his countrymen knew better. Accustomed to leaders who shunned controversy and spoke in empty formulas, Dutchmen were stunned and delighted to hear Fortuyn say things they'd long been thinking themselves. Voters from all over the political map became his ardent supporters. He seemed poised not only to transform the Netherlands but also to lead the way for all of Western Europe.

And then, suddenly, he was dead. Van der Graaf's explanation of his motives read like a précis of every lie that had ever been told about Fortuyn. Dutch citizens were justifiably outraged at the journalists and politicians who'd told those lies. Feeling the heat, the Dutch parliament reformed immigration law — to an extent. It overhauled integration policies — somewhat.


eading the way in advocating these policy changes were two admirers of Fortuyn's — filmmaker Theo van Gogh and Parliament member Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But by early 2007 they, too, were out of the picture.

In November 2004, an Islamist murdered van Gogh. In 2006, in a crisis that brought down the government, Ms. Hirsi Ali was hounded out of Parliament by colleagues desperate to unload this troublemaker. When she moved to Washington, D.C., last year, polls showed that many Dutchmen wouldn't miss her. The elite, it seemed, had reasserted its power, and the Dutch people, tired of conflict, had embraced the status quo ante.

This was confirmed by the March 2006 elections, in which immigration — incredibly — was a minor issue. Five years ago, Fortuyn inspired widespread hope and determination. Today, all too many Dutch citizens seem confused, fearful, and resigned to gradual Islamization. No wonder many of them — especially the young and educated — are emigrating to places like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Yes, some politicians, notably Parliament member Geert Wilders, are carrying on Fortuyn's battle. But momentum has given way to malaise. Politicians and journalists who once kept mum on Islamization now openly defend it as preferable to culture clash: Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen has called for "accommodation with the Muslims," including toleration "of orthodox Muslims who consciously discriminate against their women."

Only last week, Mr. Wilders was called in by Dutch intelligence and security officials who, he said, "intimidated" him by pressuring him to tone down his rhetoric on Islam. Fortuyn's brief shining moment seems very long ago.

Many political assassinations leave behind haunting questions. How would Reconstruction have gone under Lincoln? Could the Vietnam debacle have been avoided if President Kennedy had lived? Five years after Fortuyn's murder, it can feel as if Volkert van der Graaf robbed Europe not only of a brilliant champion of liberty, but of its one great chance to save itself before it's too late.

Mr. Bawer is the author of "While Europe Slept" and lives in Oslo, Norway.

**Some five years on from this murder Europe still has not learned the lessons of this, Spain has been hit, London has been. Critics of radical islam are threated and democratic governments sit still not daring to speak out for fear of seeming racist.

As the protests over the cartoons show, our values in the west do not match those of radical islam, the weak way our governments behaved over this was apalling. Most recently we have the farce of a collage, a place of free expression cow towing to radical islamists when the cartoons were re printed.

These cartoons are a sign of their intolerance, their desire to rule and have things their way and their way only.

Time and time again we back away from racial profiling, lapses in security are exposed again and again and more and more islamic extremists are caught whilst others use our freedom of speech knowing that little will be done to curb their calls for jihad against the societys they live in. A quick scan of the papers had some six articles about radical clerics, terror plots, lunatics like Yvonne Ridley & Trevor Brooks etc etc(and I probably missed some other asshat looney tune banging on about the glories of blowing themselves up as well.)

As the recent bombing trial in the UK shows we as a civilization still have a lot more to do if we are to protect the values we hold over those of alien values that would remove our society if it could. If we don't wise up soon many more civilised people will die like Pym Fortuyn at the hands of jihadist moslems and their dhimmi agents.


Tags:

.

2 people have spoken:

Anonymous said...

I think it is a terrible thing that Mr. Fortuyn and Mr. Van Gogh were killed, and that Ms. Ali must live in fear of her life. I am not a Muslim (or a Christian, or a Jew, or a Buddhist, or any other convenient label.) I am simply trying to reason my way through the situation in a way that makes sense in terms of ethical behaviour. It seems to me that a fundamental human problem is our capacity to pick fairly random attributes, glorify them, and then declare that anyone who does not have them or does not agree on their absolute and exclusive "right-ness" is evil and must be killed. There are several things wrong with this, but surely the most terrible must be a commitment to an automatic killing of other human beings based on some abstract idea of them. I do not know who you mean by IslamoNazis, although I can guess. Nor do I know what you mean exactly by socialists, although again I can guess. My guess supposes that you mean those Muslims with a burning desire to kill Westerners and to mutilate women for example, in the first instance, and in the second instance, people like those who operated Stalinist regimes that killed millions, impoverished others, and caused massive destruction and disenfranchisement in their wake. This makes sense to me. However, it doesn't make sense to also condemn people who a)pray five times a day b)don't eat pork c)believe that the prophet Muhammad was charged with a holy message for humanity d) celebrate Eid, etc. etc. Nor does it make sense to condemn people who believe that it is a problem in the world that we can pay someone twenty million dollars to act in a movie and step over a homeless, hungry person on the way to the movie house. This is just common sense, and even self-interest. If you are minding your own business, you can pray to whoever you want whenever you want: it doesn't bother me, as long as you don't bother me. If my stopping to give a dollar to you on my way to the movie means (as long as other people do so as well)that you can get yourself off the streets and maybe have a meal, then, frankly, my movie watching experience will be more enjoyable. If that dollar also means that I don't need to worry about you breaking into my house while I am away at the movies, all the better. I am making two points here: one, there isn't anything about Islam that is very special frankly. Sure, the text is full of kill this one and that one, destroy this one and that etc., but so is the Bible, and so is the Torah. Really, as texts, all three are rather full of bloodshed, hatred, wars, sacrifices and a slew of you shalt nots. The point is that the proportion of people who take the Torah or the Bible literally, as in supposing that God really intends for you to seriously slit the throat of your son in a sacrifice because that is what Abraham did, is vastly outnumbered by those who understand it to mandate a certain world view of humility, care and concern for your neighbours, generosity and etc. Many Muslims believe that this is what the Koran means. Simply because there is a rash of pyschotic fanatics who think that no, God really intended all Westerners to be killed does not make it so. I do not think that it helps for you to lump them all into one group and condemn them; that would be as crazy and idiotic as they are, and hardly an improvement. To oppose fanatics with an equal fanaticism doesn't really help to solve the problem--and the problem is fanaticism. The inability to see the humanity of others, and the inability to even consider the possibility that one is wrong, or that there are different kinds of right is what we should be trying to get rid of. If the problem is merely reduced to the specific contents of such random categories as "Islam" or "Socialism," we are actually leaving the fundamental source of danger unchanged. It isn't going to make me any less dead if the person killing me is a rabid Jew instead of a rabid Muslim. Or any less mutilated if the person scooping out my genitalia with a spoon is following ancient African traditions, instead of stringent Islamic law. Or any less devastated if my sister is married off to some old man with three other wives if my community believes itself to be a faithful Mormon one instead of a faithful Muslim one. All of it is wrong, for our age and for the needs of our world. Or any less oppressed if I am kept away from learning opportunities because the school is a racist one and does not accept black people rather than because the school is a sexist one and does not accept women. If I am a black woman, the distinction is not helpful. The mindless distinctions are the problem (if the black woman is short, an unjustifiable height requirement will still mess her up as comprehensively as the other two distinctions.) Clearly, mindless distinctions are the problem, with an emphasis on the "mindless."

Acharya S said...

Very well said indeed. Much of the world is in immediate danger of being slowly cooked in the Islamist pot, as has apparently already happened in Holland.

Acharya S
Truth Be Known