THE HAGUE, 13/09/06 – Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner considers the Netherlands should give Muslims more freedoms to behave according to their traditions”¦.”For me it is clear: if two-thirds of the Dutch population should want to introduce the Sharia tomorrow, then the possibility should exist,” according to Donner. “It would be a disgrace to say: ‘That is not allowed!’.” — from this news article
The very idea that mere head-counting should be allowed to determine whether the country, people, and civilization of Holland should live or slowly be put to death sickens. But Piet Hein Donner apparently believes that numbers are everything; that numbers, voting, is what “democracy” is all about. In this respect he has some analogues — such as President Bush — who keep prating about “democracy” and “freedom” in Iraq and “in the Middle East” without having any very good idea of what democracy, in the Western sense, is or should be.
But in the case of Holland and the rest of Western Europe, and indeed in the case of other threatened countries such as Israel, only those should be considered citizens who fully accept the political, legal, and moral institutions and foundations of the country. Naturalization, citizenship, is much more than being in a certain place for a certain time and declaring, easily, phonily, on this or that oath. It has to be more. For now we understand that there is one major belief-system whose adherents do not leave behind even when they leave countries suffused with that belief-system.
They fail to recognize that the unpleasant or even hideous state of the countries from which they come (Iraq or Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Iran, Somalia or Morocco or Algeria) can be explained as arising out of that same belief-system. Unlike refugees who fled the Nazis and the Communists and the countries they controlled, these people who in essence flee the Muslim world nonetheless do not denounce that world and its belief-system, but smuggle into their mental baggage, and remain firmly committed to, the very thing that they should have been eager and certainly willing to drop.
It is ludicrous to continue to ask the peoples of the Western world to admit into their midst people who hold such beliefs, and to welcome them and supply them with every benefit that the Infidel lands now offer, and even to encourage their participation in the “system” — that is, in politics — which participation will only, can only, conceivably be exploited by Muslims to further the case and cause of Islam.
But Islam teaches that the source of a government’s legitimacy lies only in its adherence to Islam, and to the final authority, the Holy Law of Islam or Shari’a. Some countries attempt to hew closely to it — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan. Others less closely follow it — Egypt, for example, which claims absurdly to have a “secular” civil code. But a whole series of cases involving Copts shows that to be untrue.
How can those who claim that they believe firmly in a belief-system that is both religion and politics, that offers a Total Regulation of Life and a Complete Explanation of the Universe, and that in every way flatly contradicts not only the very ideas upon which democratic government has been developed, but also flatly contradicts the rights that protect individuals, accept democratic government and individual rights? For in Islam everything is collective, everything is about the Umma al-Islamiyya, and the individual does not matter. The scholar Reza Afshari had shown — and so have others — the contradictions between Islam and the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That is why no Muslim state (save for Iran under the Shah) ever ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All of them instead came up with a “Muslim” version that completely excludes all the most important rights of individuals, such as free exercise of religion, equal treatment of sects, full legal equality for women, freedom of speech, and so on. None of it is, and none of it can be, in Islam.
The comment by Piet Hein Donner of the Christian Democratic Party should be taken to heart. And citizenship should not be granted to, nor continue to be possessed by, anyone who cannot wholeheartedly and genuinely subscribe to the principles on which democratic government rests and to the individual rights which are now taken for granted all over the advanced democracies of the West.
And what if a Muslim swears he is a good Muslim but one understands, one realizes, one discovers from his comments, that he does not believe any of those things which contradict Islam? Do we nonetheless award him citizenship, so that he may vote, may agitate, may affect by sheer swelling of numbers the behavior of Infidels, already fairly fearful and willing to appease?
No. We do not.
We do not because our goal is or should be to preserve ourselves and our ways — and not on the basis of some abstract piety (“all people have a right to be believed”, “it wouldn’t be right not to believe a Muslim who swore he was ‘a good American'” and insistences at that level) or Idol of the Age, to flippantly surrender an entire civilizational legacy.
Piet Hein Donner should go. Everyone who thinks like him, who approves of him, who is not appalled by him, should go. Where should he go? Somewhere, anywhere — but not to a position where he is supposed to protect, and instruct, others.