Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (29 page)

Even democracy and human rights are sometimes made subservient to the elites’ cultural relativism

In November 2009, the Swiss people approved the referendum banning the construction of new minarets. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the Green group in the European Parliament, responded in the Swiss newspaper
Le Temps
by declaring that the Swiss would “have to vote again.” “But the Swiss people have spoken,” the paper objected. Cohn-Bendit replied succinctly: “So what?”
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A similar attitude is found in the Council of Europe (CoE), a supranational human rights institution. CoE Resolution 1605, accepted in 2008 by the CoE Parliamentary Assembly, states that the forty-seven CoE member states must “condemn and combat Islamophobia” and ensure “that school textbooks do not portray Islam as a hostile or threatening religion.”
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Demonstrating the CoE’s determination to re-engineer people to think correctly, at a September 2009 human rights conference in Paris, Catherine Lalumière, a former French Cabinet Minister and former CoE Secretary General, said that “there really is a problem at the level of the mass of the population. Ordinary citizens do not really support human rights. It is here that we really need to go on the attack.”
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The overwhelming pressure to accommodate and appease Islam has eroded not just democracy, but freedom of speech as well. There are two main threats to free speech. First, there is censorship and self-censorship stemming from the constant threat of violence against those who criticize or offend Islam. One example is the decision by Random House publishing group not to publish
The Jewel of Medina
, a novel about Muhammad’s wife Aisha.
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Another case is the refusal by Yale University Press to publish the Danish Muhammad cartoons, or any other depictions of Muhammad, in a book about the cartoon controversy. As Yale University Press Director John Donatich said, he had published other controversial books and “I’ve never blinked.” However, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question”—and so the Muhammad images were censored.
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The second threat to free speech is “legal jihad” or “lawfare”—a process in which litigants, particularly Islamic sympathizers, exploit Western laws and legal systems to attack their critics and threaten them with suppression or other forms of retribution. Lawfare, says Brooke Goldstein, an American human rights attorney, is “the use of the law as a weapon of war” and “the wrongful manipulation of the legal system.”
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Shockingly, our Western legal apparatus, which used to guarantee and defend our basic liberties, is now being manipulated to erode these very liberties.

One type of lawfare, sometimes called “libel lawfare” or “libel tourism,”
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consists of intimidating people into silence through malicious lawsuits. A favorite weapon used by Arab plutocrats against Western authors and publishers, these suits can impose huge costs on their targets even if courts ultimately dismiss the complaints. “The cumulative effect of these lawsuits is a culture of fear, and a detrimental chilling effect” on the expression of opinions, says Goldstein.
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In recent years, Islamic apologists in Canada have turned quasi-judicial bodies called Human Rights Commissions into weapons of lawfare. One case involved complaints submitted by various Islamic apologists against conservative commentator Ezra Levant and his defunct magazine, the
Western Standard,
for having the audacity to publish the Danish Muhammad cartoons. The complaints were eventually dropped or dismissed, but not before Levant had been put through a 900-day investigation and racked up more than $100,000 in legal fees. Levant observed, “The process I was put through was a punishment in itself—and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.”
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In a similar case, Canadian weekly news magazine
Maclean’s
faced a long legal ordeal when it was sued by proponents of Islam in numerous jurisdictions for publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book
America Alone
. Characterizing Steyn’s writing as “flagrantly Islamophobic,” these charges, too, were eventually dismissed, but Steyn noted that poorer defendants surely could not have withstood the legal onslaught. “If you have the wherewithal to stand up to these totalitarian bullies, they stampede for the exits,” he noted. “But, if you’re just an obscure Alberta pastor or a guy with a widely unread website or a fellow who writes a letter to his local newspaper, they’ll destroy your life.”
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British courts, known for their strict libel laws and for awarding high libel damages, are a common venue for these suits—so common that a 2010 British parliamentary report found that “the reputation of the UK is being damaged” by the embarrassing parade of such cases.
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A case in point: in 2004, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, an American academic and terrorism expert, published the book
Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It.
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Ehrenfeld was sued in London by a Saudi tycoon whom Ehrenfeld had accused of supporting terrorist organizations. Though Ehrenfeld’s book had not even been published in Britain, the Saudi billionaire turned to a British court ostensibly because twenty-three copies of the book had been sold there.
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A British judge ordered Ehrenfeld to apologize, destroy all copies of her book, and pay the sheikh $230,000 in damages.
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Ehrenfeld countersued in a New York court to keep the judgment from being enforced in the United States, but the court dismissed the case. Fortunately, action was taken by the New York state senate, which in 2008 unanimously approved the “Libel Terrorism Reform Act,” dubbed “Rachel’s Law”—a bill that protects New York citizens and publishers from abusive libel judgments in foreign countries. “New Yorkers must be able to speak out on issues of public concern without living in fear that they will be sued outside the United States, under legal standards inconsistent with our First Amendment rights,” then-New York Governor David Paterson declared.
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In 2010, the U.S. Congress passed, and President Obama signed, the Speech Act, which granted similar protections on the federal level.

In his address to the Continental Army before the 1776 Battle of Long Island, George Washington told his men, “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves.... Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission.”
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Indeed, in light of the steady diminution of national sovereignty in Europe, America seems to stand alone in safeguarding its dominion over its own laws.

In the controversy over libel tourism, New Yorkers used the political process to resist Islam’s encroachments. In Europe, this kind of resistance is becoming more difficult as Islam becomes an increasingly powerful political force.

In Britain, for example, the Labour Party not only enabled mass Islamic immigration, but also allowed Islamic radicals to infiltrate the party itself. In 2010, Labour Party member and then-Environment Minister Jim Fitzpatrick warned that a fundamentalist Islamic group had wormed its way into the Labour Party and secretly taken over local Labour groups.
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“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” Fitzpatrick said.
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In her book
Londonistan,
journalist Melanie Phillips explains how some Labour members have helped to empower Islam. For example, the Pakistani-born Bishop of Rochester, Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, told Phillips that numerous Labour politicians with large Islamic constituencies have become electorally dependent on Islamic leaders in Pakistan who tell their followers in Britain how to vote. One such leader, an Islamic fundamentalist, was welcomed to Britain by the Labour government. When the Bishop asked the Foreign Office why this extremist was given the red carpet treatment, he was simply told that “he had a very strong following in Britain.”
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Throughout Europe, the Islamic electorate is pushing European politics to the Left. In the 2002 general elections in Germany, the Socialist Gerhard Schröder beat the conservatives by less than 9,000 votes. At the time, Germany had 700,000 Turkish-Germans who voted overwhelmingly for Schröder, providing him with the margin of victory.
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Likewise, in the Netherlands’ 2010 local elections in Amsterdam, Labour got 59 percent of the Turkish vote, the Green Left Party got 15 percent, and Democrats 66, a progressive-liberal party, got 14 percent. Turks voted along ethnic lines, overwhelmingly supporting the Turkish candidates from these three leftist parties. The Moroccans voted in a similar way, giving 74 percent of their vote to Labour and 10 percent to the progressive liberals.
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Labour politicians in the Dutch town of Helmond were surprised when that same election produced a municipal council in which five of the six Labour councilors were Islamic.
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“When you see this you begin to wonder whether Wilders isn’t right after all,” a Labour candidate in Rotterdam exclaimed after Turkish candidates secured superior positions on the party list for municipal elections.
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Some Labour members in Rotterdam’s Feijenoord district even complain that district councilors are speaking Turkish with each other and are intimidating their native Dutch colleagues.
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As Islam has spread in the Netherlands, Dutch political culture has begun to Islamize. “We are bound to run into trouble with our new immigrant councilors,” Labour leader Wouter Bos remarked in 2006, adding that they “conduct politics according to the culture of their home countries, where clientelism is the norm.”
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Nevertheless, Bos’ party continues to court the Islamic vote; for the European Left, Islam has become its electoral life insurance.

Islam has also created an avenue for foreign influence in Europe. During the Dutch 2006 general elections, for example, emails were sent directly from the Turkish government’s offices in Ankara to Turkish organizations and individuals in the Netherlands, instructing Turkish-born Dutch citizens to vote for Democrats 66 and its Turkish-born candidate Fatma Koşer Kaya.
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As a result of her large number of preferential votes, Koşer-Kaya became one of the party’s three representatives in the
Tweede Kamer.

When the Dutch secret service AIVD investigated Islamic interference in the Dutch democratic process, it found that in 2006 some Islamic leaders advised Muslims to vote for the non-Muslim leader of Democrats 66, arguing that he was the “least hostile towards Islam” of all the native Dutch politicians.
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In the 2010 British general elections, the British Muslim Initiative (BMI) emailed its supporters a list of recommended candidates, emphasizing that “Muslims need to vote responsibly and tactically, which may require supporting a candidate with whom we may not agree on every political view.” In some constituencies where the BMI considered an Islamic candidate too Westernized, the organization recommended voting for a non-Muslim
ansar.
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The president of the BMI, incidentally, is Mohammed Sawalha, a man described by the BBC’s John Ware as a “fugitive Hamas commander” who “is said to have master minded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” from London.
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In America, too, Islamic activists are organizing themselves in lobbying groups in order to enhance Islam’s political influence. Unsurprisingly, some of the leading Islamic organizations were named by the U.S. Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial, a landmark terrorism funding case.
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For now, America’s Islamic lobby remains small and marginalized. But Europe offers a cautionary tale, as it often does in matters related to Islam, of what the future could hold if America’s vigilance falters.