With nary a peep from the august solons of the MSM (ie, a search of the New York Times website), a major assault against the foundation of Western democracy is taking place in the Netherlands:
... the cruel and stupid notion that those who mock people’s deeply held spiritual beliefs deserve censure is with us still. It has even found its way into the legal system of western democracies. This week, a Dutch court ordered prosecutors to indict Geert Wilders, leader of the right-wing Freedom Party, on charges of ‘inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs’. The court thereby reversed a decision of the public prosecutor’s office last year not to pursue charges against Wilders.
Wilders’s populist and nativist politics are exactly opposed to my own views, and entirely beside the point. In a constitutional state, with liberal political rights and the rule of law, a man is being prosecuted for causing offence by expressing his views. Wilders’s protest that the judgement is ‘an attack of freedom of expression’ is scarcely adequate to the infringement on liberty. These proceedings are a monstrous abuse of power. Wilders must be supported.
I mention the absence of the story in the New York Times because they present themselves as being civil rights absolutists and citizens of the world. The front page of the Times, at this moment, reports that Obama Issues Directive to Shut Guantánamo, and that (Dennis) Blair Pledges New Approach to Counterterrorism. Both stories concern the roll back of Bush administration assaults on civil liberties (to paraphrase the typical comment of those who oppose Gitmo and various other aspects of the war on whatever it is we are fighting.) Nowhere in the times is there a story about the escalating attempts to silence Geert Wilders for his often intemperate verbal attacks on radical Islam.
Baron Bodissey posts a compendium of quotes from Wilders that form the basis of the complaint against him in The Case Against Geert Wilders; judge for yourself their accuracy.
Mark Steyn, who has been the victim of official attempts to silence and intimidate him from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, notes in his own inimitable way, what is at stake:
The Dutch, like the Canadians, think they can maintain social peace by shriveling the bounds of public discourse and bringing what little remains under state regulation. But one notices that the coercive urge, which comes so naturally to Euro-progressives, only goes in one direction. The Swedish Chancellor of Justice shuts down the investigation into the Grand Mosque of Stockholm for selling tapes urging believers to kill "the brothers of pigs and apes" (ie, Jews) because that's simply "the everyday climate in the rhetoric". The masked men marching through the streets of London with placards threatening to rain down another 9/11 on the infidels are protected by a phalanx of Metropolitan Police officers. The PC nellies of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, happy to hound the last neo-Nazi in Saskatchewan posting to the Internet from his mum's basement, won't go anywhere near Abou Hammaad Sulaiman Dameus al-Hayitia, the big-time Montreal imam whose book says infidels are "evil people", Jews "spread corruption and chaos", and homosexuals should be "exterminated".
Instead, the state's response to explicit Islamic intimidation is to punish those foolish enough to point out that intimidation. You don't have to be as intemperate as Minheer Wilders can sometimes be: In the Netherlands even the most innocuous statement can get you into trouble. To express his disgust at Theo van Gogh's murder, the artist Chris Ripke put up a mural outside his studio showing an angel and the words "Thou shalt not kill". But the cops thought this was somehow a dig at the local mosque and so came round, destroyed the mural, arrested the TV news crew filming it, and wiped their tape. The Dutch have determined to commit societal euthanasia, and dislike fellows pointing out it might not be as painless as they've assumed.
If the West gives up its free speech rights in order to accommodate the wishes of the most violent and sensitive of our enemies, it is indeed the beginning of the end for Western Civilization.
[What follows is extremely speculative but proposed for your consideration.]
Broadly speaking, our mental apparatus contains a multitude of impulses, defenses, wishes, fantasies, etc some of which can be thought of as an admixture that is on balance positive (ie, promoting our health and success) and some negative (risking our health and success.) Freud described the root of all impulses as libido (life affirming) and thanatos (death seeking.) For each of us there are occasions when one or the other tendency gains ascendancy, usually a temporary triumph. We may desire an "A" on our exam yet spend the night before the test drinking and partying, which increases the risk that we will fail. The partying and drinking may have some positive aspects (perhaps drinking decreases our social anxiety and makes it easier to talk tot he woman with whom we have been infatuated from afar.) Yet drinking to excess the night before an exam (not to mention the fact that it ultimately decreases our chances of success with the young woman of our fancy) is self defeating in the short and long term. If we learn from the experience that we can't go drinking the night before an exam we have gained some valuable maturity. Those who never learn tend to do poorly in life.
Maturity involves gaining a decent appreciation for how our behavior impacts upon our long term health and success. Societies, too, must balance positive and negative trends. Liberal capitalism depends upon the greed of some of its members to succeed, yet when their greed becomes overwhelming it eventually becomes self-defeating and a danger to the greater society. (Cf the current crisis in our financial institutions.)
In the late 1960s throughout the West, the balance shifted. Short term gratification of instinctual drives became idealized (in part through a misapplication of psychoanalytic concepts) to the detriment of long term concerns. "Just do it" is a more recent reflection of this ethos. The legalization of abortion on demand codified the idea that the desires of the present had primacy over the needs of the future. (A culture that does not reproduce is a culture that will become extinct; note the demographic collapse in large parts of the world where abortion on demand is the law of the land, ranging from Western Europe to Russia.)
Now we are engaged in a struggle with a perversion of religion that boasts that its adherents love death while ours love life. This is not merely lip service. The radicals of Islam who are the apotheosis of their death cult willingly sacrifice their children to kill the children of others.
The Dutch courts are now offering obeisance to the Islamic death cult. By allowing them to control the public square, they are powerfully strengthening the forces that work against life and the future. They can only promise to bring the Dutch back to a state of 7th century nature where the strong prey on the weak and "the boot on the neck forever" belongs to an Imam with a long beard.
Geert Wilders should go on trial. If he wins the case, it may well represent the beginning of a slow turn by the European ship(s) of state. If he loses in court, Europe as a member of Western civilization will be finished. This could well become the most important political trial since the Nuremberg trials. And, make no mistake, there are those in the United States who woudl like nothing more than to silence people in the name of controlling "hate speech." If they succeed, we will have surrendered our freedom for an illusion of peace and will guarantee ourselves neither peace nor freedom.
[Pamela Geller has information on how to assist Geert Wilders in his defense: SUPPORT GEERT WILDERS!]
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