From Eric Dondero:

Today we are running a three-part series over at our sister site Worldwide Liberty, of a recent interview conducted by American journalist Bruce Bawer with Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders.

Bruce is a former liberal reporter for the NY Times, who turned right-libertarian after 9/11. He authored the best seller, "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within." (Which I have read 5 times over, and is one of my all-time top 5 if not my number one favorite book). The book chronicles what life was like in Western Europe (Denmark, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Norway), immediately after 9/11. He goes into detail about the deep predjudice European Muslims have against Gays, and the violence they've committed against Homosexuals throughout Europe. He also describes the murders at the hands of Islamist assassins of film maker Theo van Gogh (photo - left), and Dutch MP and Presidential candidate Pym Fortuyn (photo - right).

Writes Bawer in the book's intro:

The European political and media establishment turned a blind eye to all this, selling out women, Jews, gays, and democratic principles -- even criminalizing free speech -- in order to pacify the radical Islamists and preserve the illusion of multicultural harmony.

Pym Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh murdered by Muslims on the Streets of Holland

Pym Fortuyn was the longtime Dutch MP, and leader of the Livable Netherlands Party (the forerunner of Wilder's Party of Freedom). An open homosexual, Fortuyn was a former leftwinger who turned rightwing libertarian after watching his beloved Netherlands being taken over by an increasingly radical Islamist element. He was considered the frontrunner for Dutch President in 2002. He was assassinated in the city of Hilversum, in North Holland by Volkert van der Graaf. Van der Graaf was described by the Euro-media as a "radical environmentalist." Yet covered up by the Euro-media was his conversion to Islam, months before the assasination.

Theo van Gogh, great-grand nephew of the famous Dutch painter, was assasinated in 2005 on the streets of Amsterdam. He was a friend of Pym Fortuyn and a member of the Dutch Republican Society. Van Gogh was a radical atheist, who despised all religion. In 2005, he produced a short film titled "Submission," which criticized Islam for its treatment of women. He was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan citizen. As he pleaded for his life, Bouyeri stuck a long knife in his chest and twisted it, to the horror of passers-by.

Wilders was originally aligned with Fortuyn in the Dutch Parliament. Today he is widely considered the heir to the Fortuyn legacy.

Bawer, one of America's great libertarian authors, ignored by the official Libertarian Movement

His current work "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom" (available at Amazon) continues in the same vain as his previous work. From Booklist:

Narrowing his scope from While Europe Slept (2005) but retaining its theme of radical Islamic assault on Western civil liberties, Bawer files a hefty brief of case reports on Muslim campaigns against free speech, primarily in western Europe but also in Canada and the U.S. Official infatuation with political correctness (PC), the determination that no one ever be offended, and multiculturalism, the dogma that all cultural perspectives are equally and universally valid...

Amazingly and very dissapointedly, Bruce, who lives in The Netherlands and part-time in Norway, is shunned by the American libertarian movement; No feature write-ups at Reason, no invites to address the Cato Institute, no meetings with top leaders of the Libertarian Party. This despite the fact that he's a self-avowed "libertarian." But his views, that Islam represents the greatest of threats to the liberties of Americans, don't fit the template of the left-leaning on foreign policy Libertarian establishment. To give credence to Bawer (or Wilders for that matter), would put these Left-Libertarians in the uncomfortable position of acknowledging the threat to our Liberties from Radical Islamism.

But Bruce is an absolute hero to Right libertarians. His activism, and certainly the activism of Geert Wilders, serve as a great inspiration to this website, and our movement of pro-defense libertarianism.

Geert Wilders: The World's Greatest Defender of Liberty

From Bruce Bawer (Intro to Video series):

Geert Wilders, a member of the Tweede Kamer and head of the Freedom Party, is a target for countless individuals in the Netherlands who would murder him in the name of Islam, and is obliged to spend his life behind all these layers of protection in order to avoid the unthinkable. In the last decade, after all, there have already been two assassinations of famous Dutch critics of Islam, Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Theo van Gogh in 2004. And yet Wilders’s opponents in parliament, whose lives are shaped by the impact of the high-level security procedures that have become an everyday routine at their workplace, act as if the very threat that makes these procedures vitally necessary is a chimera. Indeed, to listen to them, and to the media, and to the great majority of the professors and commentators and business leaders who make up the Dutch establishment, is to acquire the distinct impression that it is Wilders himself, and not his Islamic would-be murderers, who represents a danger to Dutch society.

In the interview that follows, I cite an opinion piece that appeared on Thursday in Trouw, a major Dutch newspaper (I mistakenly refer to it as having been in De Volkskrant), in which Thomas Mertens, a law professor at universities in Nijmegen and Leiden, argues that Wilders, by seeking so urgently to clarify for the general public the truth about Islam, is actually undermining the central precept that underlies the Dutch social contract which has been in place for centuries: namely, the agreement among members of different faith traditions to tolerate their theological differences – to close their eyes, as it were, to one another’s truth claims. What Mertens and others like him refuse to acknowledge is that the willingness of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans, and others to agree to disagree about theological abstractions has no relevance whatsoever to the present situation, in which the Netherlands, and the West generally, are confronting a faith tradition for whose most committed adherents theological abstractions have calamitous real-world consequences – not only terrorist attacks but such appalling practices as polygamy, forced marriage, honor killing, and the execution of apostates, gays, and adulteresses.

Indeed, what we are speaking of when we speak about Islam is a religion whose holy book calls for the conquest of infidel-run territories in the name of Allah – a religion, that is, whose guiding beliefs leave no room for the kind of live-and-let-live mentality that Mertens and his ilk think, or pretend to think, can still be relevant in a country whose largest cities will soon have Muslim majorities. In a nation whose guiding philosophy for centuries has been “don’t rock the boat,” Wilders has dared to challenge this traditional attitude and address these terrible realities, and it is for having done so that he is now on trial for speaking his mind – and speaking the truth.

For more information on Bawer's books and activities as well as links to the European right libertarian movement visit: BruceBawer.com