Here is part of a Washington Times article by Geert Wilders, leader and hero of the contemporary Dutch Resistance against Islam and its craven apologists:

As I write these lines, there are police bodyguards at the door. No visitor can enter my office without passing through several security checks and metal detectors. I have been marked for death. I am forced to live in a heavily protected safe house. Every morning, I am driven to my office in the Dutch Parliament building in an armored car with sirens and flashing blue lights. When I go out, I am surrounded, as I have been for the past seven years, by plainclothes police officers. When I speak in public, I wear a bulletproof jacket.

Who am I? I am neither a king nor a president, nor even a government minister; I am just a simple politician in the Netherlands. But because I speak out against expanding Islamic influence in Europe, I have been marked for death. If you criticize Islam, this is the risk you run. That is why so few politicians dare to tell the truth about the greatest threat to our liberties today. The Islamic threat to the West is worse than the communist threat ever was. Think of it this way: Politicians who warned against the Soviet threat weren’t forced into hiding, as we who speak out against Islam are.

I received my first death threats in September 2003 after I asked the Dutch government to investigate a radical mosque. When the death threats became more frequent, the Dutch authorities assigned me a team of police bodyguards. In November 2004, after a Muslim fanatic murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for making a movie about the abuse of women under Islam, policemen armed with machine guns came to my house, pushed me into an armored car, and drove me off into the night. That was the last time I was in my house. Since then, I have lived in an army barracks, a prison cell and now a government-owned safe house.

I have grown accustomed to this situation. After more than seven years, the security detail has become part of my daily routine, but in a free society, no politician should have to fear for his life because he addresses issues voters care about.

Nor should special-interest groups be allowed to trump our Western rights of free speech, as Islamic and leftist organizations tried to do by dragging me to court on accusations of “hate speech.” After an almost three-year legal ordeal, I was acquitted of all charges.

I used to travel widely and frequently in the Islamic world, but now it’s no longer safe. I have read the Koran and studied the life of Muhammad. It made me realize that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology rather than a religion. I feel sorry for the Arab, Persian, Indian and Indonesian peoples who have to live under the yoke of Islam. … Without freedom, there can be no prosperity and no pursuit of happiness. More Islam means less life, less liberty and less happiness.

That is why I consider it my duty to sound the alarm about the relentless expansion of Islam. … Islam [wages] jihad – holy war – against the West … from within our borders.

Fifty-seven percent of the Dutch people say that mass immigration was the biggest single mistake in Dutch history. Many politicians, however, downplay the most dramatic sociological change of their lifetime. They ignore the worries of the people out of political correctness and cultural relativism, which insist that all cultures are equal; hence, immigrants do not need to assimilate: Islamic values are just as good as Dutch, British or American values.

If we do not oppose Islamization, we will lose everything: our freedom, our identity, our democracy, our rule of law. To preserve Western civilization, we must do four things: Defend freedom of speech, reject cultural relativism, counter Islamization, and cherish our Western national identities  …

Of all our liberties, freedom of speech is the most important. Free speech is the cornerstone of a free society. So long as we are free to speak, we can make people realize what is at stake. In Western democracies, we do not settle our disagreements with violence, but through spoken and written arguments. In the search for the truth, we allow everyone to express his or her honestly held views. That is how we outgrew barbarism and became a free and prosperous society. We must pass it on to our children.

I have written a book in defense of liberty and freedom of expression, titled “Marked for Death”. It explains the many ways in which Islam has marked for death not only me, but all of Western civilization. The book warns Americans about the danger of turning a blind eye to the true nature of Islam.

That Geert Wilders lives in fear of being murdered in his own country, while those who threaten him are protected by stupid laws against “hate speech”, should be intolerable to the conscience of all Europeans. Instead, European courts continue to prosecute those who defend freedom against the onslaught of intolerant Islam.

The Muslims who pursue him do not seem to realize that they are doing more to condemn Islam in Western eyes than anything Geert Wilders has said.  But if no one will say so, the lesson will be lost.

Islam should be marked by the West for extinction. Instead it is protected by two shields gifted to it by the West. Two shibboleths.

The shield of religion. Islam calls itself a religion, and the West upholds religious tolerance. But Islam needs to be recognized as the totalitarian ideology that it is. In any case, religious ideas should not be immune from criticism. On the contrary – being irrational, they deserve to be accorded less, not more, respect; and criticized all the more relentlessly.

The shield of (faux) victimhood. Islam is an ideology of backward peoples, and backward peoples are needed by the Left as its cause and pretext, since its first choice, the Western proletariat, disappeared into the middle class.

Neither shield is impregnable. Islam must be fought on all fronts, and words are the most powerful weapons against it.

Let’s use words against Islam in America. Let’s criticize it, ridicule it, rage against it. Doing so is forbidden in Europe, and that makes it even more vital for us to do it here.