The Austrian Cassandra

Last month Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s book The Truth Is No Defense was published by the New English Review Press. It is reviewed below by Matt Bracken.

Matt is a former Navy Seal, an essayist, and the author of Enemies Foreign And Domestic.

The Truth is No Defense by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Reviewed by Matt Bracken

Cassandra was reputed to be a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. She was admired by the god Apollo, who sought to win her with the gift to see the future. She promised him her favors, but after receiving the gift, she went back on her word and refused the god. The enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, so he added to it the curse that though she would see the future, nobody would believe her prophecies. (Paraphrased from Wikipedia)

To understand how the fates conspired to turn Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff into an Austrian Cassandra for our age, you need to explore her incredible background. ESW was born in Switzerland as a self-described diplomatic brat, spending her early formative years in Vienna, New York, Iran, Iraq and finally Chicago, where her father was the Austrian Consul General. As a young adult she was working at the Austrian embassy in Kuwait during the 1990 invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army, where she was held hostage for a month along with most of the diplomatic community. A decade later she was serving at the Austrian embassy in Tripoli Libya during the 9-11-2001 terror attacks.

Throughout her life she was subjected to the entire range of religious and cultural experiences to be found in both the Shah’s and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Kuwait before, during and after the Iraqi invasion, and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. Due to the constant international travel required by her unique upbringing, Elisabeth was serially exposed to varying degrees of Western freedom and Islamic oppression. For example, as a child she watched Iranian women transformed by the Islamic revolution from westernized and independent free spirits into Shariah-bound walking ghosts hidden under black tchadors (black full-body veil). Later, while serving in Libya with a diplomatic passport, she was able to freely drive back and forth between Gaddafi’s dictatorship and the more open and tolerant Muslim nation of Tunisia.

Upon departing these Islamic nations for Austria or America, she was struck by their populations’ lack of concern for what she perceived to be the slow-motion Islamization of the West via the Trojan horse of uncontrolled mass migration.

Traumatized and fully awakened by her experiences living in the Middle East and North Africa, ESW sought ways to inform her countrymen about the risks of creeping sharia that she perceived as invading Austria by stealth. In her own words:

In early 2008, I was asked by the Austrian Freedom Party to hold a series of fully sourced seminars in Vienna on Islam, explaining to interested parties what the Qur’an and the hadith actually teach, along with the basic tenets of Islamic law. At the time, the Freedom Party was considered a right-wing extremist party. Truth be told, though, the Freedom Party was the only political party exhibiting interest in listening and learning about this challenging topic. I would gladly have held my seminars for all other political parties in Austria, including the Social Democrats and the Greens. Alas, no one was willing to listen. As I like to say: “You may choose to ignore Islam, but Islam does not ignore you.” To this day, as far as I am aware, no other party has offered seminars on Islam. The other parties merely have devout Muslims advising them, to their and their voters’ detriment. For the next year and a half, the interest in my seminars grew and attendance increased. It should not have come as a surprise that the success of my lectures drew the interest of Austrian Leftists, who are as determined as Leftists in other Western countries to discredit and destroy the work of those they view as “racists,” “fascists,” and “Islamophobes.” Unbeknownst to me, the left-wing weekly magazine NEWS sent a reporter to one of my seminars in October 2009 to make a surreptitious recording of it.

The reporter’s article quickly led to ESW being charged under Austrian law with (1) Inciting hatred (hate speech), and (2) Denigrating a legally recognized religion. Thus began her decade-long march through the Austrian and finally the European Council’s (not to be confused with the European Union, which has its own, separate court) justice systems. In February of 2011 a (female) Austrian judge found Elisabeth not guilty on the count of hate speech, but guilty on the charge of denigration of the religious teachings of a legally recognized religion. (Tapes of her secretly recorded seminars were played in court, and it was obvious to all that ESW was always calm and professorial, relying entirely upon the Koran, Hadith and other Islamic texts to make her case against allowing the expansion of Islam and Shariah law in the West, so she was fortunately acquitted on the hate speech charge.)

But ESW was not to be fully exonerated. In Leftist, multi-cultural and pro-immigration Austrian politics, she had to be punished and made an example as a right-wing hater, and so she was found guilty for denigrating Islam, which brings us to the most amazing element of her improbable story.

Living for many years in Islamic countries, both as a young girl and an adult woman, and being exposed to Islamic texts, Elisabeth had been shocked to discover that Mohammed not only had dozens of wives and concubines, but that at the age of 54, he had “married” his favorite “wife” Aisha, when she was only six years old! They “consummated” their “marriage” when little Aisha was but nine.

In one of her secretly recorded private seminars, after relating this sick and demented biographical fact about the founder of Islam, ESW made an offhanded remark that Mohammed “had a thing for little girls.” She never said that Mohammed was a pedophile, but nonetheless she was charged with denigrating a recognized religion because, according to the female judge who convicted her, “Pedophilia is factually incorrect, since pedophilia is a sexual preference which solely or mainly is directed towards children. This does not apply to Mohammad. He was still married to Aisha when she was 18.”

Again in Elisabeth’s own words:

Feeling my eyes bulging out of their sockets, I stared at the judge. Did she just argue that Mohammed married a six-year-old, consummated the marriage when she was nine years old and because she stayed with him until his death, i.e. until she was 18, this cannot be called pedophilia? The judge second-guessed the Qur’an by saying Aisha was 18. She evidently noted that Aisha was 18 years old when Mohammed died, which is factual. The implication is that because he did not divorce her after she became above legal age, he was not a pedophile. She said it’s not pedophilia, because Mohammed had no exclusive desire for underage girls; he wanted any female he could get his hands on. By implication, the child marriages so prevalent in hardcore Islamic countries cannot be legally categorized as “pedophilia” either. I remarked angrily after the verdict when I saw the judge turning the corner outside the courtroom: “This is a sad day for my daughter and all girls.” Convicted for speaking out against sex with minors. How’s that? Because I insisted that sex with minors is pedophilia, I am guilty of denigrating religious teachings. Well, that tells us all we need to know about Islam, doesn’t it?

Take a deep breath and think about the implications. I was convicted for stating the plain facts: the prophet Mohammed had sex with a nine-year-old-girl. I never used the word pedophilia; I simply described in everyday language the prophet’s… ahem… tastes. The statements I made are not considered false by observant Muslims. They are written down in Islamic scripture, and are considered correct and authoritative by virtually every Islamic scholar and theologian. These scriptural passages are not considered offensive to Muslims when they are recited in a mosque or a madrassa. Mohammed was the perfect man, so by definition his actions cannot be offensive. They are in fact exemplary. That is why Muslim men continue to marry little girls to this day. My statements are offensive because they were made by a non-Muslim in public, and brought discredit upon Islam in the eyes of other non-believers. This offense is referred to as “Islamic slander” and is a grave violation of Islamic law. Under Shariah, the penalty is death. But it is only illegal under Shariah. The verdict had nothing to do with Austrian law, or European law. It was based solely on the unwritten laws of politically correct Multiculturalism, which absolutely forbids the offending of Muslims. This entire judicial farce was necessary in order to establish a Shariah-based precedent in Austria. Whether the judge realizes it or not, her role in the case was to enforce Islamic law in the country formerly known as Austria. Welcome to the Caliphate.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff continued her legal battle, losing appeals in Austria, and finally taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. In October of 2018, the ECHR upheld her Austrian conviction. In Elisabeth’s words:

On Thursday, 25 October, 2018 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that my conviction by an Austrian court for discussing the marriage between Prophet Mohammed and a six year old girl, Aisha, did not infringe my rights of freedom of speech. I was not extended the courtesy of being told of this ruling. Like many others, I had to read it in the media. The ECHR found there had been no violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that right to expression needed to be balanced with the rights of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria. In other words, my right to speak freely is less important than protecting the religious feelings of others. This should ring warning bells for my fellow citizens across the continent. We should all be extremely concerned that the rights of Muslims in Europe NOT to be offended are greater than our own rights, and mine as a native European Christian woman, to speak freely. I am proud to be the woman who has raised this alarm.

Only when you lose your freedom do you value freedom; I have lost it many times, which is why I am fighting the fight I am — for my daughter, for her children, for the future. I will never give in to ideologies — Islam, socialism, Marxism, environmentalism, etc. — whose goal is the bondage of men and women. Never!

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff lost her surreal and Kafkaesque case in both the Austrian courts and the ECHR, but in enduring her travails and writing a book about her experiences she has scored a victory for those remaining Europeans who are attempting to resist the slow-motion Islamification of their homelands. Even though the Leftist-dominated European news media have largely ignored her case, or condemned her as a right-wing extremist, millions of people, and especially women, have probably first heard of the evil and demented “marriage” of Aisha to Islam’s perfect role model as a result of her case. And in learning the truth about the perverted prophet, millions of Europeans will have taken the first red pills on their paths to enlightenment, and their possible future survival as free people, unshackled by Islamic slavery.

I strongly recommend The Truth is No Defense. Read it, and share what you learn with those you love. Their future liberty depends on it.

For previous posts on the “hate speech” prosecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, see Elisabeth’s Voice: The Archives.

For Matt Bracken’s previous essays, see the Matthew Bracken Archives.

5 thoughts on “The Austrian Cassandra

  1. Good on all people who are out sounding the alarms. Whether it is the soon to go hot Bolshevik Revolution 2.0 in America or the replacement taking place in Europe.
    Fate and destiny has put these Paul Reveres here for a reason.
    Use the remaining time wisely and remove all distractions from your life.
    Anything not having to do with survival is a boat anchor.

  2. ESW deserves accolades for her stance, but there are “none so blind as those who cannot see”, or, more correctly, “deliberately refuse to see”. What more can I say?

  3. Bracken writes:

    “she was able to freely drive back and forth between Gaddafi’s dictatorship and the more open and tolerant Muslim nation of Tunisia.”

    Ironic how Bracken as a definite anti-Wokester uses words of pure Wokeness, “open and tolerant” and boo-hiss words like “dictatorship”. Open for what? CIA control? Tolerant of what? US interference?

    These words conceal what US paleoconservatives such as he applauded no doubt at the time: the destruction to the order of Obama-Killary Clinton of Gaddafi, an Arab leader who was proposing an African gold dinar, with the impact that would have had on the greenback. Follow the money, Bracken.

    By the way, Bracken and consorts give no sign of ever having heard of PNAC, Project for a New American Century.

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