Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide

by Paul Marshall

  Pim Fortuyn

  In 2002, Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by a non-Muslim offended by Fortuyn’s criticism of Islam. Although frequently described as a right-winger due to his concerns about Muslim immigration, Fortuyn was an openly gay former sociologist who feared that Muslim immigration would undermine the Netherlands’ liberal society, in part through crimes against gays and the repression of women. He sought to restrict immigration and called Islam a “backward religion” but vehemently rejected any comparison between himself and figures such as French National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen. His party, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, rapidly gained ground in national polls until, on May 6, 2002, Fortuyn was murdered. He was shot repeatedly in a daytime assault by thirty-three-year-old Volkert van der Graaf. During the trial, the killer claimed that he had acted in order “to protect Muslims,” whom he claimed Fortuyn used as political “scapegoats.”41

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Two prominent Dutch critics of Islam were forced into hiding after van Gogh’s slaying: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders. Both, from different perspectives, are given to sweeping declarations that Islam threatens Western freedoms, and both have been bombarded with threats by radicals who seem determined to prove them right. Hirsi Ali, van Gogh’s collaborator on Submission, was an immigrant who embraced the liberties of her adopted homeland. The daughter of a Somali opposition leader, she lived in exile with her family in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and then Kenya, for a time falling under the influence of fundamentalists. In 1992, she found asylum in the Netherlands and took menial jobs while learning Dutch. She then became a translator for Dutch social workers working with immigrants, where she encountered abundant reports of domestic abuse. She enrolled at a university to study political science and in 2001 was hired by a Labor Party think tank. After 9/11, she called for an “Islamic Voltaire” and, in 2002, declared herself an atheist. She criticized Dutch multiculturalism and particularly urged the government to protect Muslim women from violence and to stop supporting Muslim organizations that practice gender segregation.

  Before long, her father received messages from Somalis in Europe, warning that she would be killed if she continued. Radical Islamist websites also began posting death threats. She responded, “I’m talking from the inside … It’s seen as treason. I’m considered an apostate and that’s worse than an atheist.” After she said on Dutch national television that Islam could in some ways be considered a “backward religion,” the threats intensified. In 2002, she was forced to flee temporarily to the United States. In January 2003, Hirsi Ali became a member of the Dutch parliament for the free-market VVD party, where she concentrated on Muslim women’s issues, including better enforcement of laws against genital mutilation and “honor killings.” She hoped to “confront the European elite’s self-image as tolerant while under their noses women are living like slaves.” Critics called her an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” and threats against her led Parliament to adopt new security measures.42

  Shortly after the August 2004 showing of Submission, Hirsi Ali began living under around-the-clock protection. She spent six days in secret locations and then, told to leave the country for her own safety, briefly went again to the United States.43 In January 2005, authorities uncovered a plot to kill her; nonetheless, she came out of hiding and, with bodyguards, returned to Parliament.44 That month, two rappers were convicted by a Dutch court for writing a song that spoke of wishing to break her neck. In March, after being kept in hotels and on a naval base for her own protection and with her suggestions for alternative housing repeatedly turned down by officials, she was provided with a safe house.45

  She continued to raise integration issues, calling for drastic measures such as the closure of Muslim schools.46 During the peak of the Danish cartoons crisis in February 2006, she gave a lecture in Berlin, “The Right to Offend,” charging that many in Europe are afraid to criticize Islam. She decried the cynicism with which “evil governments like Saudi Arabia stage ‘grassroots’ movements to boycott Danish milk and yoghurt, while they would mercilessly crush a grassroots movement fighting for the right to vote.” She also criticized many Islamic teachings on the role of women, the execution of apostates and homosexuals, and punishments for theft and adultery, and she maintained that despite the many peaceful Muslims, it was “a hard-line Islamist movement” within Islam that threatened freedoms.

  The Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, said he didn’t “have much use” for her comments, and, despite her atheist and feminist stances, she drew heavy criticism from the multiculturalist left and was accused of fueling radicalization in a polarized political atmosphere.47 In Spring 2006, her neighbors won a court case to evict her for fear of a terrorist attack. In May, she was informed by the immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, of her own party, that her Dutch citizenship was being revoked because she had filed false information on her 1992 asylum application.48 Although Parliament voted to allow her accelerated naturalization, in September, she left for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.49 Unable to receive protection from the U.S. government as a foreign national, she began living in hiding under privately funded protection.50

  In February 2008, French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy told her that her case’s connection with freedom of opinion made her a good candidate for citizenship and protection in France. But when she traveled to Paris, Parliament rejected her application. The French Human Rights Minister, Rama Yada, with the backing of President Sarkozy, supported the creation of an EU-based protection fund for victims like Hirsi Ali. However, as of 2011, she continued to live, mainly in isolation, in the United States.51

  Geert Wilders

  Geert Wilders was a controversial—and threatened—figure in the Netherlands even before the international uproar over Fitna, discussed in chapter 10. After Wilders called Yasser Arafat a terrorist in October 2003, a man was convicted for writing on an Islamist website that “Wilders should be punished by death for his fascist statements on Islam and the Palestinian cause.” In the month following the van Gogh slaying, he received some thirty death threats and was forced into hiding. One online video promised a reward of seventy-two virgins in paradise for his beheading.52 In 2006, Wilders told an interviewer, “Videos on Islamic websites show my picture and name to the sound of what appears to be knives cutting through flesh while a voiceover says I will be beheaded.”53 However, he declared that if he went silent, “the people who use violence, bullets, and knives to get their way will win.”54

  By 2005, he was moving each night to a different safe house, under the constant protection of bodyguards. He could appear in public only at sessions of Parliament. After living in a cell at the high-security Zeist prison for several months, Wilders finally moved to a permanent safe house in early March 2005. The Dutch government, apparently anticipating a recurring problem, purchased several similar houses to accommodate politicians facing future death threats.55

  Wilders’s proposals themselves raise issues of intolerance. He issued sweeping calls to “stop the Islamization of the Netherlands. That means no more mosques, no more schools, no more imams.”56 He has sought to require imams to preach only in Dutch and to prevent foreign imams from preaching in the Netherlands at all. He has called for the government to pay Muslim immigrants to leave the country. In August 2007, he proposed an all-out ban on the sale, distribution, and use of the Qur’an—at home, in mosques, and for any purpose other than academic research. He charged that Islam’s sacred text, which he compared to Mein Kampf, “incites hatred and killing” and was to blame for attacks on the founder of an ex-Muslims’ group. Claiming to know that the proposal would never make it through the Dutch legislature, Wilders said he only intended it as a warning against using the Qur’an to legitimize violence.57

  Wilders describes Islam as a “backward religion,” “totally incompatible” with democracy, but insists that he makes “a distinction between the religion and the people.”58 He acknowledges the existence
of a “majority of moderate Muslims in the Netherlands” who “have nothing to do with terrorism” and maintains that his rage is not aimed at them but at “the growing minority of radical Muslims” who follow a “fascistic” ideology. Toward the latter, he advocates closing known jihadist mosques, revoking the Dutch citizenship of radical imams, and arresting extremists under surveillance by security personnel.59

  In a setting marked by growing Islamist radicalism and a dearth of more temperate figures willing to address the problem, Wilders has enjoyed political success. He left the liberal VVD party to form the Freedom Party, which won nine seats in the 2006 elections and the second-largest number of seats in the Netherlands’ 2009 European parliament elections. In early 2010, he was put on trial by the Dutch government for hate speech against Islam, yet in the June 2010 Dutch elections, the Freedom Party received the third-highest number of votes. He was acquitted of hate speech charges in 2011.

  Runar Sogaard

  In April 2005, Norwegian Pentecostal preacher Runar Sogaard received death threats and required police protection after the distribution of CDs of one of his sermons, in which he criticized the Islamic prophet. Preaching in March in Stockholm, he made fun of several religions, including Christianity, and called Muhammad “a confused pedophile.” Hundreds of Muslims demonstrated outside the church. The leader of Sweden’s imam council, in an apparent threat, “demanded that Christian communities repudiate Sogaard’s remarks, and promised that Sweden would avoid the ugly scenes experienced in Holland.” One Islamist stated to a Swedish paper that “even if I see Runar while he has major police protection I will shoot him to death.”60 An Islamist website of “the Army of Ansar Al-Sunnah in Sweden,” which claimed to have established a local terror training camp, vowed to “capture and punish” Sogaard.61

  Alain Finkielkraut

  Far milder comments than Wilders’s or Sogaard’s have evoked violent responses. During the French urban riots of 2005, French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut was threatened for stating that the violence had an “ethno-religious character.” In a November 18 interview with the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, he pointed out that immigrants of religious backgrounds other than Muslim, who faced similar socioeconomic difficulties, were not rioting. He argued that the riots were not a mere response to French racism or simply targeted at “a former colonial power” but were rather “against France, with its Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition.”

  On November 23, Le Monde published an article that cast Finkielkraut as a bigot against Arabs and Muslims. The Movement Against Racism (MRAP) brought racism charges against him, and he received threats of physical harm. The following day, Le Monde quoted him saying: “The person portrayed by the [Le Monde] article would cause me to feel disdain and even disgust for him.” MRAP interpreted this as an apology, and the legal action was dropped. Nonetheless he was “forced to remain cloistered at home.” France’s then–Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, stood by Finkielkraut, noting, “If there is so much criticism of him, it might be because he says things that are correct.”62

  Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali

  In January 2008, the mere mention of Muslim violence led to threats of yet more violence. The Anglican bishop of Rochester, the Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that isolation and extremism in immigrant communities had created “no-go areas” for non-Muslims. He called this intimidation “the other side of the coin to far-Right intimidation” and criticized secularist and multiculturalist policies that had undermined the establishment of the Church of England and called for Britain to turn back to its Christian heritage.63 Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain denounced the bishop’s comments, which he called “irresponsible for a man of (the bishop’s) position.”64

  The son of a Pakistani convert from Islam to Christianity, Nazir-Ali became a bishop in Pakistan but fled that country after receiving death threats. Now in the United Kingdom, also due to death threats, he and his family require police protection: “It was a threat not just to me, but to my family. I took it seriously, so did the police.”65 He has also spoken out on the predicament of Muslim converts to Christianity in the United Kingdom and left his bishopric in 2009 to work full time on defending religious freedom.

  Other Examples

  Some actual or threatened violence over religious disputes involves a group of Middle Eastern (mainly Egyptian) Islamists who maintain an Arabic website, Barsomyat.com, dedicated to tracking Christian participants in religious arguments with Muslims via PalTalk, an Internet chat service. The site has featured pictures, street addresses, and death threats, all under a banner that showed a sheep’s throat being cut.66

  In March 2009, the Rev. Noble Samuel, a U.K. Christian minister who hosts an Asian gospel TV show, was assaulted in his car by three men who tore his cross off, seized his laptop and Bible, and attempted to smash his head against the steering wheel. Samuel said they threatened to break his legs if he continued broadcasting, which he did nonetheless. Although he emphasized that his show was not “confrontational,” Samuel reported having arguments with angry Muslim callers before the attack. The Muslim owner of Samuel’s television station condemned the attack on air while Samuel broadcast, and police ruled the attack a case of “faith hate.”67

  Scholars face dangers for doing historical research on Islamic texts. One scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany argues that the Qur’an has been mistranslated for centuries and is derived from Christian Aramaic texts misinterpreted by Islamic scholars. Even for such scholarship in obscure journals, for his own protection, he now publishes under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg.68

  Muslim Reformers

  Intimidation is a factor within Muslim communities. Some who have merely made a simple remark, and others who have advocated social, political, or theological change have been threatened by extremists. Many of those most threatened are women working in their own communities.

  Ahmed Subhy Mansour, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, and Others

  On April 10, 2006, a manifesto against Muslim reformers and their families in the West was published online by an Egyptian group, giving them three days to “announce their repentance and disavow their writings … and to repent their support of the countries of unbelief and their rulers.” Otherwise, “[W]e will hunt them in every place and every time. They are not far from the swords of the righteous, they are closer to our swords than we to our shoes, they are under our eyes and ears (surveillance) day and night, we are totally aware of their hiding places, residences, schools of their sons, and the times when their wives are alone at home …”69 Targets included the exiled cleric Ahmed Subhy Mansour of the Quranist group, whose imprisonment in his native Egypt is described in chapter 4; his former colleague, noted Egyptian human rights and democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim; and outspoken Syrian-American ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan, described below. These and many others have continued to speak out, despite a steady stream of anonymous threats. One topic particularly fraught with danger for individuals born into Muslim communities is the position of women. Efforts to defend the human rights of Muslim women are frequently denounced as a form of “insulting Islam,” as the following cases demonstrate.

  Seyran Ates

  In September 2006, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-German lawyer who worked with Muslim women suffering abuse, gave up her Berlin practice after repeated threats. She had been the target of a vilification campaign in a Turkish newspaper in 2005 and has requested, but was denied, police protection. In June 2006, the ex-husband of a client attacked both the client and Ates outside the court. Ates, herself born into a family of Muslim extremists, has criticized ethnic Germans who, in the name of multiculturalism, turn a blind eye to domestic violence and forced marriages. She stated, “We must finally stop allowing human rights violations in Muslim parallel societies to be shrugged off with appeals to German history.” Her resignation came after threats left her aware “how dangerous my work as a lawyer is and how little I was and am being protected.” The German magazine D
er Spiegel added, “Those familiar with the Islamic scene doubt whether people fighting for the rights of Muslim women and girls in Germany—lawyers, writers, social workers—receive adequate protection.”70

  Necla Kelek

  Another German women’s rights activist of Turkish origin, sociologist Necla Kelek, fled her home after being threatened with an axe by her father. She requires police protection to appear publicly.71 In her book The Foreign Bride, she drew attention to the condition of Turkish women and girls imported into Germany for forced marriages to immigrant men and treated “as modern slaves,” estimating that 15,000 women annually entered Germany in this manner, and called for a minimum age for foreign brides and harsher punishment for “honor killings.”72 Several Turkish newspapers in Germany denounced her: “They said I was insulting Turkey and Islam.” Like Ates, Kelek also criticized German attitudes on women’s issues: “Educated Turks, just like many Germans, close their eyes and say that imported brides are a private issue. It isn’t. It undermines the values of our own democracy.”73

  Ekin Deligoz

  In October 2006, Turkish-born Green Party MP Ekin Deligoz, the first Muslim member of Germany’s Parliament, received death threats and had to be placed under police protection after she called, in a newspaper interview, for Muslim women to “take off the head scarf … Show that you have the same civil and human rights as men.” The German interior minister, Wolfgang Schauble, defended Deligoz, stressing that “what we as legislators assert with all determination is that this opinion can be expressed, and that one should not need police protection for it.”74 Some Turkish papers responded to Deligoz’s statement by vilifying her, even comparing her to the Nazis. Local Muslim leaders, while often criticizing Deligoz’s comments, firmly opposed the death threats and affirmed freedom of expression.75