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. The Dutch Justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin has further stated that Hirsi Ali is safe and no longer needs protection.

This is all 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, not simply because she is a hero who has tried to alert Europe to the danger it faces, 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:

…the Netherlands’ Princess Máxima, wife to the heir to the throne, announced to wide acclaim that ‘The Dutch identity does not exist.’

Well, at this rate it certainly soon will not.

Update: In Reason magazine, Hirsi Ali observes:

But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization. The Western mind-set—that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away—is delusional. The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it’s only going to get bigger.

In the Netherlands, it just did.