Amsterdam 2012 (21 page)

“I haven’t seen anything like it since the Rodney King riots in ninety-two,” said Teagarden.
 
“A billion dollars worth of damage and nothing changed.
 
They are only going to make things worse for themselves.”
  

Copycat riots broke out in several cities.
 
In Chicago mobs rampaged through business districts, breaking windows and looting.
 
Mosques were set aflame in New Jersey and Toledo.
 
Hundreds of protestors confronted police in Los Angeles, which broke out into a skirmish.
 
St. John’s got overflow from Cedars Sinai near Beverly Hills, mostly burns and blunt trauma to the head.
 
I was told to help out in the emergency room.
 
I performed first aid on people lined up in the hallway waiting to see a doctor.
 
Screaming and crying.
 
I couldn’t believe it.

President
Gladwell
spoke to the nation, denouncing “random terror and lawlessness.”
 
He outlined federal assistance he was making available to the mayors of Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where the worst of the rioting occurred.
 
He asserted that “brutality, racism, and religious intolerance will not be tolerated,” and that he and Congress guaranteed the protection of every American’s Constitutional rights.

After nine days of riots, Detroit settled down.
 
The mayor lifted the curfew, and schools, banks, and businesses reopened.
 
Federal troops were to remain in the city for another two weeks.

The Muslim community in the Detroit/Dearborn area, estimated at 200,000 Muslims, protested that the police and military used excessive force.
 
Dearborn schools, many of which were 90 percent Muslim, held peaceful rallies.
 
Outside the
Bint
Jebail
Cultural Center in Dearborn, long suspected of Hezbollah connections, twenty thousand demonstrated in protest.
 

The mayor of Dearborn,
Samir
Marzouk
, who had previously been considered a moderate Muslim, called for a self-defense militia to protect the two largest mosques in North America—the Islamic Center of America and the Islamic House of Wisdom.
 
“Islam,” he proclaimed to a crowd of several thousand, “makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to defend the writ of Islam in every country in the world.”
 
He led a group composed of local Muslim leaders to draw up an edict declaring Dearborn an “Islamic Community” that would operate under
Sharia
law.
  

Many
Sharia
laws were illegal under U.S. law—allowing men four wives, requiring women to cover themselves outside of the home and to be accompanied by a husband or male relative, requiring women to marry other Muslims, or violated international human rights, such as whipping for public drunkenness, and stoning for adultery and apostasy—but in Dearborn, they became the law of the land.
 
Bars and movie theaters were closed.
 
Secular schools were made into Islamic schools.
 
Suspected homosexuals were arrested and whipped.
 

Anyone who did not obey
Sharia
law was subject to punishment by the
mutawas
, the morality police, a group of men elected among the local Islamic clerics.
 
They patrolled the streets in black Mercedes with dark windows, dragging violators to jail—the girl with a short skirt, the woman without a headscarf, the couple holding hands.
 
I thought of them as Hitler’s Brown Shirts.
 
Women were not allowed in an automobile with a male unless he was a close relative, and if the
mutawas
became suspicious, they had the authority to stop a vehicle and check identification.
 

There was little crime now in Dearborn, Michigan.

Non-Muslims were allowed to stay in Dearborn, but they had to pay an extra tax, a
dhimmis
tax.
 
According to Islamic law, second-class
dhimmis
were not allowed to marry Muslim women, to have Muslim employees, or to defend themselves if attacked by a Muslim.
 
In Dearborn, they also were not allowed to serve as teachers or in local government, and their children were required to attend Islamic schools, which included Islamic religious instruction and history taught from a Muslim point of view.
 
Girls were allowed in school, but no objection was made by the Islamic school superintendent if girls were kept home.
 

The most surprising thing was most non-Muslims did not leave Dearborn.
 
Just like in Holland.
 
They accepted the new government and its rules, citing the lack of crime, rising real estate values, and excellent schools as reasons for staying.

Neither state nor federal authorities intervened.
 
No elected official wanted to appear to violate any citizen’s freedom to practice his religion.

Chapter Nine

I woke the next morning to a sound prohibited in our house—a television blaring before noon.
 
I wandered into the kitchen.
 
My mother was eating breakfast watching the news.
 
My sister was making a lunch to take to school.

Cynthia looked comical with her bike shorts under her grey-plaid uniform.
 
Because of gasoline prices, the school bus no longer picked her up.
 
Cynthia biked.
 
She was making a peanut butter sandwich.
 
No baloney for her.
 
She insisted on
halal
meat—like kosher, killed and prepared according to
Sharia
law—which meant a drive for Mom to an Islamic butcher shop in Culver City, an extravagance she only occasionally indulged.
 

As I said good morning, Mother turned up the volume on the television.
 
The news reported the royal family of Saudi Arabia, our strongest ally in the Middle East, had been toppled in a bloodless coup by the radical wing of
Wahabis
.
 
An emir was selected from the clerics, and Saudi Arabia had joined the United Nations of Islam.
 

Even before the
Jenever
Theater murders, the riots in Europe, and the renewed
fatah
declared by
Qasim
bin Laden,
Wahabi
clerics had begun to impose
Salafi
radicals in Saudi Government and in the military.
 
Afraid of losing power, many royal family members joined the
Salafis
.
 
Others gave them money.
 
Political analysts had been predicting the fall of the house of Al
Sa’ud
for years.
 
Now it had happened.

Without the support of Saudi Arabia, American interests in the Persian Gulf would be impossible to defend.
 
If President
Gladwell
didn’t do something soon, Israel would, which might mean nuclear war in the Middle East.
 

“The President won’t drop the bomb on them, will he, Mother?”
 
Cynthia’s eyes welled up with tears as she dutifully continued making her sandwich.
 

Mother gave me a hard look—I suppose she wanted me to change the channel or distract Cynthia with a joke, but I stood like a zombie, surprised at my sister’s now convulsive sobs.
 

“I don’t know, honey,” Mother said, “We’ll have to wait and see.”
 
She got up from the table and put her arms around Cynthia, who held in suspension a dinner knife with a glob of peanut butter, unable to either set it down or spread it on her bread.

#

There was no lame duck session for President Elliot
Gladwell
.
 
Too much was happening.
 
Congress, which had recessed during the election, agreed to extend its session through Christmas.

In the first week of December,
Gladwell
persuaded Congress to institute a peacetime draft.
 
He arranged to send surplus weapons to Great Britain, just as Roosevelt had in 1940.
 
Greece, which the EU had chosen as the staging area for troops to fight UNI aggression in Turkey, received warplanes and other U.S. military supplies.
 
In addition
Gladwell
initiated a massive rearming campaign in all of the services, winning congressional approval for a multi-billion dollar naval construction program.
 
He proposed doubling the size of the navy and increasing troop strength to two million.
 
In an executive order,
Gladwell
transferred forty aging destroyers to the Aegean Sea in exchange for basing rights in six strategic locations in Greece.
 
“‘We must be the great arsenal of democracy,’” he said, quoting Roosevelt.
 

The president elect was unhappy with
Gladwell’s
actions, but there was nothing Warren Mullet could do until after his inauguration.
 

The map on my wall was now covered with red pins.
 
Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, and all the ‘
stan
’ countries.
 
The Islamic Republic of Holland controlled Belgium, Denmark, and many towns of northern France.

When it all seemed too unbelievable, I reminded myself Hitler took France in forty-two days.

Surely there were people in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Qatar who resented the loss of personal liberty, who did not want a culture that incited the abuse and suppression of women, who did not want a religion that mandated medieval punishments, who believed in peace and tolerance, and could see the benefits of living among people of different faiths.
 
And yet they allowed the UNI to take over their governments and impose
Sharia
law.

And there was no end in sight.
      

#

Alex peeked into my bedroom a little after noon as I was cramming for an exam on the endocrine systems.
 
He and I had hardly spoken since he got back from Berkeley.
 
In fact by working nights and studying for nursing classes during the day, I managed to avoid almost everyone in the family, except my mother, whom I bumped into while she prepared dinner and I was running out the door to work.
 

Alex was not home on Thanksgiving vacation.
 
When he arrived from Berkeley, he announced he had lost his scholarship for refusing to play tennis.

My father was livid.
 
“How can you accept a scholarship,
then
refuse to play tennis?
 
We can’t afford to send you to college without a scholarship.
 
How can you throw it all away?”

“I can’t play tennis when the world is exploding.
 
I look at the ball and some guy hopping back-and-forth in front of me—it’s stupid.
 
Besides, I don’t need college.”

“Then exactly what do you plan to do with yourself?” father demanded.

“I’m joining the Marines.”

“Absolutely not!” said my father.
 
“Do you know how many innocent Iraqis were killed in Bush’s stupid war?
 
Over one hundred thousand.
 
Did it solve anything?
 
No.”

“What about the millions Muslims have killed in Sudan?
 
In Somalia?
 
In India?
 
What about the people murdered in Holland and Germany and France?”

“We will find another way to stop them.”

“There is no other way.
 
They weren’t stopped until the First World War, and now they have oil money, they’ll never stop.”

“War is immoral.”

“Your morality is for shit, Dad.
 
You’d allow fascist Islamists to take over the world.
 
But then your job is to help people get out of paying taxes.
 
Some morality.”

“Sure, I’m immoral.
 
But my clients pay plenty of taxes.
 
If they paid more, it would just pay for war.”

“I’m joining the Marines, and there’s nothing you can say to stop me.”

Alex asked me to give him a ride to the Marine recruiting office in East Los Angeles.
 
He signed up with one of his friends.
 
That was a few weeks ago.
 
They had gone to briefing sessions.
 
And now he was reporting for duty.
 
It was my day off, so I agreed to take him.