In the last week of 2004, the Dutch security services decided on an absolutely unprecedented action. For the first time in a country previously considered a bastion and symbol of European tolerance, a document that was horrifying in its political incorrectness was published. “From ‘dawa’ to Jihad” is the name of the report issued by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior based on data provided by AVID – the Dutch intelligence service. According to it, the country currently has a huge number of Islamists – radicals ready for “active actions.” Such as the elimination of “enemies of Islam,” like Theo Van Gogh and others whose names were on the note pinned by the killer of the Dutch director to the victim’s body.
Warning of the need to avoid generalizations, the report’s authors note that of the one million Dutch Muslims, 95% are moderate. Well, as for the remaining five percent – 50,000 – they are Islamists capable of inflaming the situation in the country at any moment. By the way, this number is almost double the number of “radicals ready for jihad” in neighboring Germany, which is home to 4 million Muslims!
Who then is to blame for these weeds having sprouted in such numbers in the “garden of many cultures,” as the Dutch like to call their country? The Americans who invaded Iraq, or the Israelis fighting the Palestinians? The report from the Dutch Ministry of the Interior gives a clear answer: the blame lies with Dutch society itself, with its liberal views and burning desire to please everyone under any circumstances. Even those who are bearers of an ideology calling for the destruction of the West and its values.
But the worst thing is that Dutch society, while already aware of the threat, does not want to defend itself. For example, the proposal by the chairman of the largest Dutch party, the Christian Democrats, Maxime Verhagen, to allow judges to deprive Muslim radicals of freedom of speech and assembly, was indignantly rejected by the other parties as racist. The head of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, Johan Remkes, recently looked into the possibility of “lawful isolation of Muslim radicals,” but very quickly realized that under current conditions it would be impossible to push through such restrictions in parliament.
And this is not at all a problem of legislators who are “far from the people,” as one might assume. Judging by the data collected for AVID, for the ordinary Dutchman, gedoogcultuur – the “culture of permission” – is a sacred cow. The permitted use of soft drugs, the mildest immigration laws, freedom from control over financial transactions, and a very broadly understood freedom of religion seem to be more important to the Dutch than even personal safety. And they simply will not support drastic changes in the country’s legislation.
It is precisely this gedoogcultuur that Islamic radicals have exploited. The word “dawa,” which appears in the title of the Dutch security services’ document, is one of the commandments in Islam, often simplified as “missionary work.” “Dawa” is “the call of people to the religion of Allah,” theologians explain. The goals of “dawa” are “to prepare true Muslims and establish a righteous society,” “to testify against those who deviate from Islam or oppose the religion,” and “to exalt the Word of Allah on Earth.”
At first, all of this looked quite innocent. However, according to AVID data, it was precisely this “missionary work” that led to the appearance of tens of thousands of Islamists in the country. The vast majority of them are... children of immigrants from Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Children who grew up on Dutch soil, on Dutch cultural values, were drawn through “dawa” into Islamist structures. Moreover, it was precisely with the help of these new “recruits” that drastic changes took place in the Muslim community of the Netherlands. Moderate, law-abiding imams lost all influence – and in their place came young foreign preachers.
Within the framework of “dawa,” which allows “forming groups or organizations for the call to Islam,” small Islamist groups began to appear in various localities in the Netherlands. What their participants did was of little interest to the security services for a long time. After all, as recently as 2002, the talk was of only a few dozen extremists scattered across the country.
What accounts for such a sharp leap now? AVID specialists do not know for sure. However, their previous report already mentioned large financial injections into the Muslim community of the Netherlands coming from Saudi Arabia. For example, one of the central mosques in Amsterdam was simply supported by the infamous Al-Haramain foundation.
Now additional details are emerging – the “ears” of the Wahhabi kingdom “stick out” behind most of the Islamic preacher-recruiters who have arrived in the country. They come to Holland from Egypt, Syria, Somalia, and Sudan, but they undergo training precisely in Saudi Arabia. Training that allows them to say anything in mosques without fear of being prosecuted. Instead of direct calls for jihad – reminders that all enemies of Islam must die. Hints that the reward for carrying out “dawa” – as with jihad – is “Allah’s pleasure and His paradise.” Glorification of those who heroically died in battles with the infidels outside Holland – “martyrs” in Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya. However, now it is no longer the Arabian kingdom that pays for the radicalization of Dutch Muslims, but private individuals and organizations registered in various countries of the Persian Gulf.
Conclusions of the report's authors, "From 'dawa' to jihad," alas, are unlikely to help prevent the further Islamization of a country that was once one of the bastions of Western values. They recommend introducing a huge number of restrictive amendments to laws that no one in the Dutch parliament would risk lobbying for. The recommendation to create new structures for oversight and control in the Muslim community is also unfeasible – there is neither money nor political and electoral support for it. And the "brilliant" idea of artificially creating role models for Muslim youth capable of overshadowing today's "heroes of jihad" is better left uncommented...
The only thing feasible at the moment is establishing closer contacts with moderate religious leaders in the Muslim community in the Netherlands, which may allow for better gathering of information about extremists' plans.
In the conclusions section, the report's authors make another interesting point: apparently, no social integration, no growth in prosperity in Muslim communities can stop radicalization; rather the opposite – they too will be used by Islamists for their own purposes. It is quite possible that AVID is thus hinting that the funds going toward these goals should be redirected to something more useful – but they do not want to say it directly.
In the meantime, a new and rather unpleasant trend is already being observed in the Netherlands. Even before the alarming report was published, middle-income Dutch people began "voting with their feet" against the continuation of the multicultural experiment in their country. Not wanting to change the rules of the game in the Netherlands itself, they are leaving for Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and other countries where the level of freedom is close to that of the Netherlands. They do not believe in the ability of the Dutch security services and authorities to protect them. And most emigrants, when choosing a country to live in, are primarily guided by... the low percentage of Muslims there.
This flight began, true, on a very small scale, already after the murder of the right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn. The death of the film director Theo van Gogh at the hands of Islamic radicals led to 13,000 people downloading the required forms from the website of just one emigration consulting company in November 2004. Very many Dutch people are leaving Rotterdam, where 47% of recently arrived foreigners currently live – mainly people of Moroccan origin.
Most of those leaving are fairly well-off people with jobs and good social status. Practically none of them indicate that their departure is linked to economic problems. People leaving their homeland say they are not leaving the Netherlands but another country, because the real, free Netherlands simply no longer exists.