ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (25 page)

Also problematic is the fact that Cameron, like President Obama, likes to play armchair imam, refusing to honestly identify the enemy Britain faces and choosing rather to say, laughably, that ISIS jihadists are “not Muslims.” He’s also fond of repeating the standard “Islam is a religion of peace” platitude that has become so depressingly commonplace among clueless Western leaders who have never picked up a Koran, let alone read one.
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Then, there is this gem, courtesy of Al Jazeera: “Britain is set to the [sic] become the first non-Muslim nation to raise money by issuing a government bond-style ‘Sukuk’ compliant with Sharia law as part of a bid to transform London into a global capital of the Islamic finance industry.”

Cameron “unveiled the scheme along with plans to launch an Islamic market index at the London Stock Exchange.” As he told the World Islamic Economic Forum (WIEF),
“Already London is the biggest centre of Islamic finance outside the Islamic world, but today our ambition is to go further still. . . . I want London to stand alongside Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world
[emphasis added].”
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Does this sound like a leader—or a nation—that is truly prepared to confront the Islamist threat, in all its nefarious forms?

“If we can’t count on the Brits anymore, who can we count on?” discouraged American audiences ask me.

Other than the obvious answer, Israel, that is becoming an increasingly tough call. Unfortunately, Britain’s suicidal obsession with multiculturalism, with tolerating the intolerant, and with distancing itself from its Judeo-Christian heritage, is far from an isolated case. Europe’s elites have promoted policies that have led to isolated, self-segregating Muslim communities springing up across the Old Continent. Many disaffected young European Muslims living in these areas have noticed ISIS and the new caliphate it is building with interest.

And ISIS has noticed them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

AMSTERDAMNED: ISIS OVER EUROPE

“THE SITUATION HERE IS VERY GRIM.”

Wim Kortenoeven was calling from The Hague, but the urgency in his voice made it seem like he was right beside me. I felt like I was standing next to him at his window, looking out over the carcass of an Islamicized Netherlands.

“We have reached the point of no return,” he said of his country’s struggle with Islamism. “And when you reach the point of no return, you withdraw. People are moving out of cities, leaving the country. And the political elites are ignoring the problem—because they made it happen through their policies.”

Kortenoeven has been grappling with those same left-wing elites for decades, first as a journalist and activist and then as a member of the Dutch Parliament from 2010 to 2012. A longtime leader in Holland’s counter-jihad and pro-Israel movements, he has been a tireless defender of Judeo-Christian values in one of the world’s most liberal societies. Even
by the libertine standards of today’s Western Europe, the Netherlands—which in 2001 became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage—is infamously permissive, with marijuana, prostitution, and euthanasia all lawful and laissez-faire immigration policies that have seen its Muslim population approaching 1 million, or 6 percent of the overall population of 17 million.
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But Dutch uber-tolerance has created an atmosphere where the intolerant have run rampant. In July 2014, radical Islamists held Europe’s first public pro-ISIS rallies in The Hague, which is the seat of the Dutch government. Twice—on July 4 and then again on July 24—at least fifty ISIS supporters waved black Islamic State flags amid shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and calls for “death to the Jews” as they marched through the Dutch capital.
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The left-wing mayor of The Hague, Jozias van Aartsen, was on vacation during the rallies, and his deputy apparently saw no need to take action in his absence. The stunning inaction by van Aartsen’s office prompted calls for his resignation. Upon his return from vacation, the mayor responded to the criticism not by taking action against the city’s genocidal ISIS supporters, but by banning a planned
anti-ISIS
rally, deeming it “too provocative.” Van Aartsen’s decree added insult to injury: an earlier anti-ISIS rally had been broken up by Islamic State supporters who threw stones and punches at the marchers.
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When most Americans think of the Netherlands, they envision windmills and clogs, not burqas and hijabs. You’d think Amsterdam, with its red-light districts and marijuana cafés, would be about as far from sharia law as you can possibly get. But in October 2014, as reports continued to surface about Dutch Muslims either traveling to Syria to join ISIS or agitating for the caliphate on Dutch soil, I reached out to Kortenoeven to get a sense of what was happening on the ground in ultra-liberal Holland. The former Dutch parliamentarian painted a bleak picture.

“The Hague incidents were very serious,” he explained. “Gradually, people are moving from all sorts of Islamist movements to the most
successful: ISIS. They will support the only movement that gets things done.”

As of this writing, at least 130 Dutch Muslims have traveled to Syria to join ISIS.
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Kortenoeven pointed out that most of these ISIS recruits were criminals, and that Dutch prisons are filled with Muslim men from Morocco, Egypt, Somalia, and other Islamic countries. His comments echoed those of another former Dutch politician, Mustapha Abbou, who told Dutch Public Radio 1 that many of the Netherlands’ Moroccan youths have “no education, no prospects and are barely supervised. They are a ticking time bomb.”
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Given that the Netherlands is home to nearly four hundred thousand Moroccan immigrants, the Dutch may have a slight problem on their hands. One 2011 study found that in Dutch neighborhoods where Moroccans were a majority, the youth crime rate was 50 percent.
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“The caliphate gives them a chance at success,” Kortenoeven said of the Netherlands’ ever-expanding Muslim population. “With the Islamic State, they can go from being a pauper to a prince. The disenfranchised gain power . . . people will commit unthinkable atrocities because they want to be a part of something successful, something larger.”

One ISIS fighter who goes by the name “Abudurahman” collected welfare benefits from the Dutch government for years before making his way to Syria, where he has appeared in YouTube videos posing proudly in front of severed heads.
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Another Holland-bred jihadist, “Yilmaz,” served in the Dutch army before quitting and relocating to Syria, where he has boasted on social media of training young British ISIS recruits in the finer points of jihad.
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Yilmaz is apparently the charismatic sort. A nineteen-year-old Dutch woman named Aicha who had converted to Islam saw him interviewed on TV and fell in love. She decided to travel to Syria and marry the terrorist, whom she saw “as a sort of Robin Hood.” Quickly discovering that life in the Islamic State was a far cry from Sherwood Forest, Aicha contacted her
mother and told her she wanted to come home. In a daring rescue mission straight out of a Hollywood movie (and against the advice of Dutch authorities), the mother donned a burqa and entered Syria to find her daughter.

Thankfully, the pair escaped over the Syrian border into Turkey and made their way back to the Netherlands.
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As we saw in
chapter four
, however, there is no shortage of young Western women ready and willing to take Aicha’s place in the Islamic State.

The Netherlands’ struggle with Islamism is not a new one. In 2004, in an act foreshadowing the “one-man jihad” strategy of ISIS in the West today, an Islamic terrorist named Mohammed Bouyeri murdered filmmaker and TV host Theo van Gogh in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street. Van Gogh had recently directed a short film called
Submission
that highlighted Islam’s oppression of women. On the morning of November 2, 2004, he was bicycling to work when Bouyeri emerged and shot him several times with a handgun. Van Gogh, seriously wounded, staggered across the street and fell to the ground, pursued by Bouyeri. He reportedly pleaded, “Can’t we talk about this?” before Bouyeri shot him at close range and then slit his throat, nearly decapitating him. Bouyeri then plunged a large knife deep into van Gogh’s chest and attached a note to the filmmaker’s lifeless body threatening Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim and Dutch politician who wrote the script for
Submission
and is known for her courageous public stand against Islamic supremacism.

Bouyeri, who is serving life in a Dutch prison for slaughtering van Gogh, was part of a terror cell called the Hofstad Network that planned to conduct additional attacks inside the Netherlands. Dutch authorities broke up the cell in 2006 and several of its members were sent to prison like Bouyeri. But according to an eye-opening report released by the Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD, the jihadist movement in the Netherlands is experiencing stunning growth once again today thanks in large part to the inspiration to jihad that is the Syrian Civil War. The
report compares Dutch jihadism to a “swarm”—a network of loosely affiliated independent yet like-minded individuals that are all working toward the same end, and to great effect: “The increasing momentum of Dutch jihadism poses an unprecedented threat to the democratic legal order of the Netherlands. . . . Dutch jihadists are convinced that the caliphate is not some utopian dream but an achievable reality for Syria and other Muslim nations—and even for the Netherlands.” Predictably, many are being drawn to the ISIS cause through social media, which the report says, “has changed the structure and cohesions of the jihadist movement.”
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As of December 2014, the AIVD estimated that close to thirty Dutch jihadists had already returned home to Holland from the battlefields of Syria. It’s unlikely that these newly returned veterans of Syria’s hellish killing fields will spend their days lounging at cannabis cafés or paddling amiably along Amsterdam’s canals. It is entirely likely that they will attempt to carry out attacks on Dutch soil. If they are successful, the simmering culture clash in the Netherlands could boil over in a nasty way.

“People are talking about civil war,” Kortenoeven said. “The general population—and I’m not only talking about the Netherlands, but all over Europe—is fed up.”

A major reason for their frustration is the glaring shortage of rational, forthright voices in the European political realm that are willing to take a stand against Islamist encroachment. Those who are, such as Dutch MP Geert Wilders, are branded as bigots and Islamophobes and in some cases even brought to trial for supposed “hate speech” against Islam. Like the rest of the Western world, the Netherlands’ elite class and opinion shapers in government, media, and academia are overwhelmingly leftists who have enshrined politically correct multiculturalism as a virtual religion. This new religion is totalitarian to its core: ultra-secular, atheistic, socialistic, and openly hostile to Judeo-Christian Western civilization, yet fiercely protective of Islam and damning of its critics. Witness the aforementioned
pro-ISIS rallies in The Hague getting a pass from the city’s leadership while anti-ISIS rallies were deemed too incendiary.

When average citizens begin to feel like society is slipping out of their grasp—thanks largely to weak, out-of-touch leadership—desperation can creep in. With that sense of desperation comes a hunger for a voice—any voice—that articulates the frustrations of the people. History shows that the rush to embrace a political savior often ends in disaster: witness the rise of Hitler in post-Versailles Germany and the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascension in Egypt in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. Kortenoeven is concerned that a similar scenario could develop today if European governments, including that of the Netherlands, continue to appease their restless, radicalized Muslim communities.

“If right-wing extremists and Neo-Nazis are the only voices speaking out against Islamism, and the governments won’t, then people will drift towards the extremists,” he told me. “So, we have people who can destroy our countries from two sides—Islamists on one side and neo-Nazis on the other.”

In the meantime, the Islamization of tiny Holland continues unabated, particularly in its largest cities. The Muslim population of Amsterdam is 24 percent, while Rotterdam—Holland’s second-largest city—is 25 percent Islamic. The Hague boasts a Muslim population of 14 percent and Utrecht, 13 percent.
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These communities are fertile ground for ISIS recruitment. One 2014 study found “tremendous support” for the Islamic State among young Dutch Muslims of Turkish background. According to the study, 87 percent of Turkish-Dutch between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five believe that ISIS creates positive change in the Middle East, and 80 percent have no problem with Dutch jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq. Another study reportedly found that three quarters of Dutch Muslims regard those who have gone to fight in Syria as “heroes.” The Dutch minister of social affairs called the results of these studies “alarming.”
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During our conversation, Kortenoeven recounted a meeting he had during his days in Parliament with a former colleague who is now a Dutch government official. Kortenoeven warned him about the growing Islamist threat, only to be waved off as an alarmist. “‘They are just a few idiots,’” Koretenoeven recalled the official saying. “‘We are too strong for them. You are exaggerating.’” But what a difference a caliphate makes. Today, Kortenoeven said, that same politician says ISIS must be destroyed.