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The Dutch gates of Vienna

Thursday, 11th October 2007

In 1683, when Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe, the invading Muslims were repulsed at the gates of Vienna in a battle which broke the 300-year advance of the Ottoman Empire into Europe. Today, with the globalisation of the jihad, there are many fronts in this fight to defend civilisation and many ‘gates of Vienna’ where this war is to be won or lost. The Netherlands, where Islamism is rampant and claimed the life of Theo van Gogh, appears to be only too keen to open its own ‘gates of Vienna’ to the enemy. I reported here how it shamefully withdrew protection from its former MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose life has been threatened by Islamist fanatics ever since she collaborated with van Gogh on a film about the persecution of women in Islam. Hirsi Ali was driven out of the Netherlands to America until the Dutch government abruptly cancelled her protection there and said she would only be protected if she returned to the Netherlands. So she returned — but now the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, has said she should leave the country and go back to the US, and the Dutch parliament is about to debate withdrawing her protection altogether.

This is simply astounding. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not only one of the bravest people in the world but has put her life on the line to warn the west about the danger that it faces. And this is how the west now repays her. Without protection, Hirsi Ali will surely be murdered. Balkenende is effectively sending her to her death. The Netherlands has a duty to protect this woman, not simply out of common humanity, not simply because she is a Dutch citizen whose life is in acute danger, but because to abandon her is to signal to the Islamists at the gates that Europe is theirs for the taking. It is therefore an act of cultural treachery.

But we should not be surprised. Seventeenth century Europe successfully repulsed the Ottomans because it believed in itself. But as Daniel Pipes notes, in an important article about the cancer eating away at Israel’s sense of its own identity in common with the suicidal trend in European countries: