(First published in the Vallejo Times-Herald) 

Forgive me a moment, but I’m going to wax metaphysical about a recent speech by Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician and maker of the short film “Fitna,” in which he describes America as in danger of becoming “the last man standing.”

In his New York speech last month, Wilders also announced the Facing Jihad Conference in Jerusalem in December.
Wilders said he is trying to warn the world that “we might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe,” and that the danger inherent in this is not just for Europe, but for America, as well.
“It is a threat,” he said, “to the sheer survival of the West,” and the United States is in danger of being the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe.”

Though not the first person to notice this trend, Wilders made some interesting points, among them that Israel isn’t just a modern Jewish country on the front lines of the clash of cultures, but is also a living metaphor for Western civilization.
I have suggested before that Israel, as a people, has shouldered the responsibility of being mankind’s object lesson in the past. What Wilders describes suggests another such episode.
Wilders says that in Europe, while much of the scenery is familiar, just under the surface, everything has changed. That there exists “a parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration.”

Throughout Europe, entirely Muslim neighborhoods have sprung up in which native Europeans are not welcome and not safe. They are, he says, evidence of a Muslim takeover of the Continent, “street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.”

Mosque construction and attendance outpaces those of churches, he says and in many cities, the majority of those under 18 is Muslim.
Concessions are being made in schools and other public arenas to the delicate sensibilities of Muslims, he says.
In France, school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, Wilders said, and the history of the Holocaust can in many cases no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity.
“In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system,” he said, and “many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves.” Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, he said.
Experts predict a Muslim majority in Europe by the end of the century. And these Muslims have no desire to assimilate, but see their loyalty to Islam. They demand what they call “respect,” which translates to surrender, Wilders said.
Often their demands are accompanied by violence – what he calls a Muslim intifada. And he calls the perpetrators settlers, as I call them invaders, because they “do not come to integrate into our societies, they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam.”

The crime and violence is forcing native Europeans out of their neighborhoods, their cities and their countries, Wilders said.
And the problems “cannot be explained by poverty, repression or the European colonial past, as the Left claims,” he says. “Nor does it have anything to do with Palestinians or American troops in Iraq. The problem is Islam itself.”

Wilders explains that Muslims view the Quran as the word of Allah, and nothing in it is open for discussion or interpretation. Therefore, while there are many moderate Muslims, “there is no such a thing as moderate Islam,” he said.
The Quran, an anti-Semitic document referring to Jews as monkeys and pigs, also calls for hatred, violence, submission, murder and terrorism against non-Muslims as a duty, designed to fulfill Islam’s destiny of world domination, he says.
Also, Muslims try to model their behavior after Mohammed, who, Wilders says, was no Gandhi or Mother Theresa, but a warlord, a mass murderer, a bigamist and a pedophile.
Islam, he says, is less a religion than a political ideology that seeks to dictate every aspect of life.
And because the European public has “wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative and sees Israel as the aggressor,” Wilders said the “best way for a politician in Europe to loose votes is to say something positive about Israel.”
Wilders, though, sees defending Israel as a matter of principal, since “it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.”

Situated on what Wilders calls jihad’s fault line, Israel frustrates Islam’s territorial advance, he says.
“The war against Israel is not a war against Israel,” Wilders says. “It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us.”
I would go even further and suggest that this serves the Islamists’ purposes also, in that they are able to rally the West’s own anti-Semitic proclivities, and use them to help convince people that The Jews are the problem. Their hope, I think, is to blind enough people to the truth long enough to reach the point of no return.
Wilders notes, though, that even were some politicians’ calls to abandon Israel allowed to happen, “it would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values.” It would, in fact, embolden them.  
“The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning,” Wilders said. “If they can get Israel, they can get everything. Therefore, it is not that the West has a STAKE in Israel. It IS Israel.”

Israel, therefore, is not merely a modern, democratic nation, or a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, or a Jewish homeland. It is a living symbol of the West in the war against radical Islam. As goes Israel, so goes Western civilization.
If there is hope in Europe, Wilders said, it comes not from the elite, who, for political expediency, has widely sold out to appease the Islamists, but from the people. And there have been some positive signs that Europeans won’t just lay down and die, he says.
In the Netherlands, for instance, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the worst policy mistake since World War II, Wilder said. And another 60 percent sees Islam “as the biggest threat to our national identity,” he said. 
Political parties who get the picture are growing all over Europe, he says, and for the first time are coming together in December for a conference in Jerusalem.
The event, which includes a screening of “Fitna” in the Knesset building, is being held in Israel “to emphasize the fact that we are all in the same boat together, and that Israel is part of our common heritage,” he said. No racist organizations will be allowed and only solidly democratic parties will be admitted, he says.
The conference launches an “Alliance of European patriots,” to serve as the backbone for all organizations that oppose jihad and Islamization, Wilders said.
America, he said, must recognize that rather than permit itself to be the last man standing, must help Europe turn the tide.
“The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine,” he said. “An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America” – as its allies turn into nuclear-armed enemies.
Wilders said the lessons apropos of the times should not be taken from Neville Chamberlain, but from Winston Churchill, who said “Never give in, never, never, never, never, in anything great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy”.

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