As Field Marshal Montgomery noted, all the greatest threats to freedom in the 20th century – Communism, Fascism, Nazism – originated in Europe and were defeated from outside Europe. But, Europe’s track record of embracing authoritarianism didn’t end there. The great European project, the EU, is riding roughshod over its member nations’ sovereignty. The Europe-based WEF is promoting the dictatorial Great Reset.
Worse, it is disastrously embracing yet another threat to liberty. One not originating in Europe, perhaps, but one being imported wholesale by European leaders apparently stupefied by virtue-signalling and blind to the disastrous consequences of their policies.
The threat, of course, is Islam. But Europe’s blindness to the consequences of coddling hardline Islamists is nothing new. In fact, it led directly to the first nuclear Islamic regime getting its paws on nukes.
How and why this has come about can be traced back to May 18, 1974. That day India tested its first atomic bomb […]
Pakistan’s reaction to India’s bomb was predictable. Pakistan would build a bomb. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Prime Minister in 1974, was on record about what he would do should India become nuclear armed: “We will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”
But how was Pakistan – not exactly one of the world’s best-regarded regimes, then or now – going to get its hands on the bomb?
With the help of Islamist moles and stupidly blind European governments.
Within days Bhutto received a letter from Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nationalist of swaggering conceit and confidence who, as luck would have it, was working in a nuclear facility in the Netherlands and married to a Dutch woman. He offered to covertly help build that bomb. A younger Khan had once described Hindus as “crooks and mischievous”. He believed they wished to destroy Pakistan making way for a “united India”.
Khan had spent the last two years working for a company called Physical Dynamic Research Laboratory, itself a contractor to a uranium enrichment consortium[…]
Khan’s grasp of idiomatic Dutch impressed his colleagues and he was sometimes asked to translate the highly confidential German parts of manuals for the staff. Unknown to his employer, Khan had been building his stock of information of nuclear components, secretly acquired diagrams […] for years with a plan to nuclear arm his homeland.
One of Khan’s colleagues was Dutch nuclear machinist and photographer Frits Veerman. Just as he cultivated friendships with others, Khan befriended Veerman.
Invited one weekend for lunch with the Khans, [Veerman] spotted copied blueprints for top secret, newly developed ultracentrifuges — these enrich uranium — in the lounge room.
Duly concerned, Veerman tried to alert executives at the nuclear consortium his company contracted for. He was given the cold shoulder – and worse.
Veerman was asked to stop talking about it and then demoted and made redundant. He was monitored on an international watchlist and the family was once intercepted by armed police while driving through Italy.
Dutch security services would visit his home to interrogate him — and to ask him to stop speaking publicly about what he knew. But, aware of his country’s commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the danger of a nuclear-armed Pakistan, he wouldn’t.
While European authorities bullied and persecuted the whistleblower, the Islamic spy set about arming his own country with Europe’s nuclear secrets. Even when finally pushed to act, Dutch authorities bollixed the case and then covered it up.
In December 1975, Khan flew to Pakistan with his cache of secrets. The CIA and others, tipped off about his intrigues, had begun to follow him and the Dutch secret service had planned to arrest him.
In 1983, he was tried in absentia in the Netherlands and sentenced to four years’ jail. On a technicality — he’d never been handed a summons — this was overturned. Then his case files went “missing”.
The rest is history. Over the next decade, Pakistan carried out many “cold tests” (testing of nuclear weapons that don’t lead to a critical mass reaction). Then, in 1998, Pakistan blew up a mountain with not one, but six nuclear bombs.
In Islamabad Khan was hailed a hero and later admitted live on television that he had also enabled the vital nuclear secrets, and parts, to be traded to Iran, North Korea and Libya. He still lives in Pakistan, aged 84, a man of unaccountable wealth in one of the poorest nations on earth.
On the other hand, the brave whistleblower who tried to expose Khan’s deadly spying was treated as a pariah by the very nation that had disastrously refused to listen to his warnings.
Veerman finally found low-paid, low-key work in a social security department, retired and only last year sought an apology and compensation […]
He was not so much embittered for his personal setbacks, but afraid of what his government had chosen not to see: “If Iran ever manages to destroy Israel, they could put on the weapons, ‘Made in Holland’,” he said last year.
The Australian
The Netherlands, like most European nations, has learned nothing and remains disastrously blind to the threat of Islamism.
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