Review of Geert Wilders’ Book "Marked For Death”

British Freedom 1 June 2012
By Tim Phillips

I read Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me during the hot Pentecost weekend of 26 and 27th May. When I started the book I was prepared to be disappointed because it’s not often that a book launched with such hype manages to reach the standards expected. But from the first pages of Mark Steyn’s excellent foreword to the last page of the book I found it as nearly as non-put-downable as any bestselling thriller.

As I read I started to mark off interesting facts and insights as I went along, thinking that they would be useful to me when writing my review. A typical amateur’s approach I suppose. I stopped with this endeavour however after only the first chapter because there is simply so much there. To include all the things that I found interesting or were salient or fall in the category ‘things you really ought to know’ would mean reproducing the book page for page in its entirety.

That‘s the first thing about the book that makes its mark. Its pages offer an unrelenting and on occasions overwhelming indictment of political Islam. It’s sometimes difficult to keep up with the flood of information. Quite literally every paragraph is packed with snippets that separately are enough to damn but collectively offer a powerful and savage condemnation of what has become the greatest threat to our freedoms since 1939. Blink and you will have missed something. When you read this book, be prepared to re-read bits over and over again. Be prepared to be challenged.

The second thing that strikes is how easily readable it is. Political books are often dowdy and full of technical issues which make them more often than not inaccessible. Not so this book from Wilders. This is a book for all open minded people who are prepared to accept that not all is well with our precious liberal democracy.

This does not entirely surprise me. As one of the relatively few people who can also follow Wilders in his native Dutch tongue I am aware of the easy way Wilders makes information available for the general public. At great danger to himself he dares speak of things that intrinsically most of us understand to be true, but are not spoken of by most politicians.

Marked for Death manages to be succinct without resorting to crudity or loss of subtly; the book is only 217 pages long but packs a knockout size punch. Wilders reduces down one-and-a-half thousand years of history to the bare necessities, answering criticisms as he goes along. The end result is an overwhelmingly powerful and somewhat terrifying warning.

"We are at the eleventh hour my friends: Satan is in our midst.”

The words of the Koran are the words of Allah and therefore perfect and unalterable. Not open to interpretation based on more modern liberal moral values or amendment based on academic research. To do so results in the severest of punishments. Islam is a political ideology dressed up as a religion. It is uncompromising, intolerant, inherently backwards, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and anti-innovation.

Islam requires forced subjugation: by the sword if necessary. It’s in our midst, in accordance with the Islamic doctrine of immigration*, welcomed by cultural relativists and the politically correct. And these people go to great lengths so deny us our freedom to react. That is the message of this book.

In a book that itself sticks out as brilliantly argued and eminently readable, one chapter, chapter seven: "Survival”, shines out even brighter than the rest. If you only read one chapter of one book about one political issue in your entire life, make it this one. The revelations in this chapter about the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Cairo Declaration are on their own enough to make you realise the extreme danger we face. But then there’s the rest. And that’s just one chapter.

About Wilders himself there is relatively little. The glimpse that you do get is of a very human person. The situation he’s been forced to put up with is intolerable, yet few of his political enemies will realise that the same thing that forces him to require armed guards 24/7 can also, eventually, get them. It reminds me of Churchill’s remark about an appeaser being one who feeds the crocodile hoping that it’ll eat him last.

Wilders has had to endure what for most people would be unbearable. The loss of freedom and privacy due to the security requirements are shocking. Despite this, his own comment about having the most protected pee in his life offers a rare glimpse of the humour that he must have to endure what he does.

The supreme irony here is that he is that he is being protected from the adherents of a ‘religion’ that says it need not be protected against — the religion of peace proving beyond any reasonable doubt that it is anything but!

The outrage from other Dutch politicians is missing (in fact some have stated that it might be best if he was killed) as is the outrage of moderate Muslims against their more fundamentalist brethren. The victim is guilty, a theme that occurs in Islam time and again, for example the rape victim and not the rapist being the guilty party.

In Marked for Death Wilders brilliantly explains the evil that is political Islam. By the time you get to the penultimate chapter you might conclude that there is no point in resisting, that we have already lost. But like all the best authors, Wilders leaves the best to last.

Chapter 13 "How to turn the tide” offers hope. He offers four basic points on which the fight back can be based: defend freedom of speech, reject all forms of cultural relativism, stop the Islamification of the West and cherish our national identities.

Above all the pen is our sword: it is a weapon that will defeat Political Islam as it defeats all tyrannies — if only we’d be prepared to wield it.

*An excellent book on this subject is Al-Hijra: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration by Sam Solomon and E Al Maqdisi, ISBN 978-1-905950-01-0