«Jihad in the Netherlands»

«In 2003, at a conference held in Sweden, I was introduced to a member of the Netherlands parliament. She was a woman of hypnotizing beauty named Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had become a star of the Dutch Liberal Party. Originally from Somalia, she had fled her country of origin in order to escape from genital mutilation and the real possibility that her family might sell her to a strange man twice her age. Becoming fluent in English and Dutch and radiating charisma, she had soon attracted attention by criticizing the refusal of the Muslim establishment in her adopted country to adapt itself to secular democracy.
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Today, she is living under police protection. In early November 2004, her friend and colleague Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death and then mutilated on a public street, evidently by a Muslim fanatic. Mr. Van Gogh, a descendant of the celebrated painter, was a filmmaker who had made a documentary about the maltreatment by Muslim authorities of Muslim women in Holland. The film had featured Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and a letter “addressed” to her was pinned, by a heavy knife, to the chest of the ritually slaughtered Van Gogh.
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Both the open letter and the note are of extreme interest. The note speaks of Tawheed, which is the current Islamic extremist abuse of the Qur’anic word for “unity” or oneness against all heretics from Shi’a to Christian. This Salafist/bin Ladenist tendency also employs the term takfir, an approximate synonym for excommunication (and therefore slaughter) of infidels and heretics. The faction grouped behind this Qur’anic concept is the most noxious and cynical of the lot: its members allow themselves to consume pork and alcohol and consort with prostitutes if they are on a mission to deceive and destroy the infidel.
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The open letter is full of lurid and gloating accounts, lifted from the Qur’an, of the tortures that await apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in hell. It refers to her throughout as “Miss Hirshi Ali,” a mistake that has baffled some observers but which I think is obviously intended to make her sound more Jewish. The letter is obsessed with the Dutch Jews who are among the leadership of the Liberal Party and makes repeated references to anti-Gentile and racist remarks in Jewish scripture.
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One cannot emphasize enough that the victims here are not just secular artists like Theo van Gogh but people of Muslim origin who do not accept homicidal fundamentalism. This is the warning that many liberals have been overlooking or denying ever since the fatwah against Salman Rushdie in 1989.
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You cannot fight Islamic terror with Christianity, whether of the insipid or the crusader kind. The original commandment actually says “Thou shalt do no murder,” thus making it almost the only one of the ten that makes any sense. But we do not prepare for murder when we resolve to defend ourselves and when we take the side of people like Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Bousakla in the Islamic civil war that seeks to poison our society and enslave theirs.»
(Christopher Hitchens)