By targeting Islam as a whole, does Wilders make the scope of the problem too large?

Jerry Gordon, a former Army intelligence officer and writer on Mideast issues, has an article in Red County recapping Geert Wilders’s appearances in New York City and Philadelphia last week. The article links videos (here and here) of the questions and answers following Wilders’s speech at the Harvard Club. I’m glad to see the video as it refreshes my memory of the event. I very much liked Wilders’s reply to the first question. A man asked him:

How do you respond to critics who say that by targeting Islam as a whole, you make the war unnecessarily large, that there are a billion Muslims, some Muslim countries have nuclear weapons, and even if you’re right about the truth of the matter, it’s impractical to make the scope of the conflict so large, it would be more practical to say, it’s just small differences, we have small matters to address….

Wilders replied:

Thank you very much for the question. I believe that the problem is not small at all. If the problem would be small, you wouldn’t have [unintelligible]. But the problem couldn’t be larger than it is today. And of course, as I said in my speech, I make a distinction between the ideology and the people. I would never advocate anything against Muslims, but I know that the growth of the population, the changes in the demography, the results of mass immigration, puts our countries in a lot of trouble.. If you would go to Europe today, if you would visit cities like Malvo, or Amsterdam, or Berlin, or Marseilles, or Rome, or Paris, you would see that there are enormous problems that we face today with Islam. You would see that there are parallel societies, where there is no rule of law. You would see that because of the immigration and the demography, like I said in my speech, the sharia is growing, and that our so-called leaders are giving in, because of political correctness, and because they want peace, and because they believe that the problem is small. But the problem is not small. The problem is huge, and we have to address it as it really is.

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October 27

Ferg writes:

The problem is huge, and like cancer it does no good to cut out just part of it. You must remove all of it. Islam has been beating at the gates of the Western world since its inception. It has only stopped when driven back by main force. Spain became a whole country in 1492 not just because the Muslims were defeated, but because they were all driven out of Iberia and sent back to North Africa. All of them. The Turks were not just defeated outside Vienna, they were driven out of Austrian Teritory, and kept out. Earlier the Moslem Turks had attacked the Byzantine Empire for hundreds of years, they never stopped until they captured Constantinople, occupied it, converted it into a Moslem city, converted its great churches into mosques, and enslaved the white Christian population, taking its women for their harems, the boys for their armies and work gangs. The problem has always been huge, and the solution has always been hard, and always been the same. Stand up to them, drive them out, keep them out.

LA replies:

Yes.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 27, 2009 01:13 AM | Send