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Thoughts on Wilders’s important speech
Geert Wilders’s recent speech to the Hudson Institute in New York City is exceptional. In it, he makes statements about the Islamic threat to Europe, about the European elites’ support for the Islamization of Europe, and about the nature of Islam, that are more stark than anything I’ve seen him say before. For example, he doesn’t just say that Islam is, an addition to being a religion, a political ideology; he says that Islam is in its essence a political ideology. He doesn’t say, as he did in the movie Fitna, that certain passages in the Islamic scriptures mandate terrorism, or that the fascist parts of the Koran should be outlawed; he says that “the problem is Islam itself.” Regretfully, he does not recommend what to do about Islam, but the speech is so powerful and cogent that somehow it doesn’t matter. If Islam poses a mortal threat to Europe and the West, and if Islam is the problem, then whatever is to be done to save the West must go beyond the usual nostrums of trying harder to assimilate Muslims and to spread democracy. Of course, Wilders has elsewhere advocated the cessation of Muslim immigration into the Netherlands, and has proposed outlawing the fascist parts of the Koran. Even though it’s not clear at this point what such a law would actually consist of, it would, if enforced, make the Netherlands seem so inhospitable to Muslims that at least some of them would start to leave on their own. Also, it’s worth it to read the speech aloud to a spouse or friend. It makes a stronger impact that way. A big question I have is, how did the people at the Hudson Institute event react to the speech? I ask this because the Hudson Institute is to a large degree a neoconservative outfit, and everything Wilders says about Islam in this speech is anathema to the neoconservative view. Bernard Lewis, a neocon god, says that Islam is extreme because it was “left behind” by the West and so turned bitter. G.W. Bush, another neocon god, says that Islam is extreme because it’s been under despotic leaders and that democracy can heal the extremism. Frank Gaffney, a neocon leader, says that Islam is extreme because a tiny minority of extremists intimidate the vast moderate majority. Francis Fukuyama, a quasi or former neocon, says that Islam is extreme because of the difficulties Muslim immigrants have in assimilating to Western society. Dinesh D’Souza, another quasi or former neocon, says that Islam is extreme because extremists like Lawrence Auster say that Islam is inherently extreme. (I kid you not. He really said this.) All neocons and quasi-neocons agree that Islam itself is not the problem, and that some factor extraneous to Islam has made it a problem. Geert Wilders says that Islam itself is the problem. So, how did the neocons who presumably made up most of Wilders’s audience react to this speech? Other than his support for Israel, what do they have in common with him? If they do support him, how do they explain this support to themselves, given that his core ideas about Islam are in complete disagreement with theirs? I posed the above questions to a Hudson Institute insider, who tells me, or at least suggests, that my assumption that the audience was largely of neoconservative makeup is incorrect. He says the audience was quite impressed by Wilders’s speech.
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