Former US Ambassador to The Netherlands Pete Hoekstra: More Islamic Death Threats in Europe: Dutch MP Targeted Twice
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Geert Wilders has dedicated his life to supporting freedom of speech and religious tolerance...
What seems to have earned him these death threats is his unrelenting passion for freedom. To others, it seems, this commitment, is not a plus. Radical cleric Muhammad Abdullah Ahsan, for instance, recently proclaimed: "The rascals like Geert Wilders can't be stopped by mere condemnation. He must be handed over to Muslims for public execution to ensure world peace."
"It is no use threatening me, Muslims in Pakistan, Netherlands or anywhere else. Fatwas won't stop me.... Freedom is my ideology. And no one will stop me." — Geert Wilders, Twitter, April 15, 2022.
"An Imam who wants a politician dead is—however reprehensible—allowed to say so." — Geert Wilders, NIS News Bulletin. March 15, 2005.
Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe." — Geert Wilders, speech in the Dutch Parliament, September 6, 2007.
"There is no such thing as 'moderate Islam'. As Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said the other day, and I quote, 'There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it."' — Geert Wilders, speech in the Dutch Parliament, September 6, 2007.
"We must never give a free hand to those who want to subjugate us." — Geert Wilders, Middle East Online, May 31, 2011.
"'I feel that the more Islam that we get in our societies the less freedom we get.' He opened the press conference with a quote from George Orwell's preface to Animal Farm: 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear'". — Margaret Davis, quoting Geert Wilders, in The Independent, October 16, 2009.
The American version [of George Orwell's Ministry of Truth, the US Disinformation Governance Board] is to be headed by a supposed "expert" on disinformation, Nina Jankowicz, who already has a record of unexpertly dismissing Hunter Biden's easily verifiable laptop as a "Trump Campaign product;" supporting the notoriously false "Steele Dossier;" saying on National Public Radio: "I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms," and, while discussing "online abuse" against women, she actually recommended deploying the police...
"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power.... Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker." — Frederick Douglass, freed slave, December 9, 1860.
Freedom of speech in free nations should supersede imposing even more limitations on freedom.
As the powers that be continue clamping down on the free speech we all should cherish, we must recognize the value and strength that people like Wilders, and even those who burn flags, bring to the public square. We may or may not agree with their views, but should recognize that through their freedom of expression they enrich the debate and discourse. They make us stronger, not weaker.
Last month, a Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders -- the leader of the Party for Freedom, which is the largest opposition party in the Netherlands' Parliament -- received two fatwas. Fatwas, officially, are Islamic religious opinions; they sometimes contain calls, however, to kill whomever might be considered insufficiently supportive of Islam or its prophet, Mohammad.
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