Who is Geert Wilders and why should we care what happens to him? He’s a member of the Dutch parliament and a vehement critic of Islam who really knows how to rouse the rabble. A kind of George Wallace with intellectual and artistic gifts. In short, an agitator par excellence. Naturally his political party has grown in popularity as his countrymen react to the crimes committed in Islam’s name, and to the general wave of Muslim immigrants throughout Europe. But rather than trust to the marketplace of ideas to counter those Mr. Wilders promotes—like a Europe without mosques—Dutch prosecutors have accused him of “hate speech,” a relatively new and conveniently elastic category of the criminal code. Shut up, they explain. The same mischievous concept has spread to this country, too, despite the First Amendment. The thought police are everywhere these days. This is what freedom of speech has come to in the West, as in the Decline of. Geert Wilders risks being imprisoned for up to 16 months in his home country for, among other heinous offenses, making a movie. His is called Fitna, which is Arabic for strife, and in it he traces Islamist terror to various verses of the Koran, in much the way no doubt the Devil can quote Scripture for his own purposes. An ardent advocate of free speech for himself, Geert Wilders would ban the Koran in the Netherlands. But since when has inconsistency been a crime? Apparently since countries began enacting hate-speech laws. Result: Mr. Wilders could be jailed in Holland, traditionally a refuge for Europe’s persecuted minorities and freethinkers in general. The Dutch, lest we forget, sheltered the Pilgrims before those wayfarers set sail for their promised land and shaped the whole American ethos. They even tolerated Spinoza when his own people cast him out. Now Dutch prosecutors seem bent on making Geert Wilders a martyr. How the free have fallen. As if the news from Holland weren’t bad enough, Mr. Wilders has been denied entrance to England as an “undesirable person.” That’s right: England, the original land of the free and home of the brave. Now it can’t tolerate a little verbal bile from a Dutch agitator. Never mind that this visitor had been invited to London to show his 17-minute film to the House of Lords. Never mind that Muslim crazies are routinely allowed to say the most vile things in Great Britain, so long as they do not incite violence directly—any more than Mr. Wilders does. It is routine for placards at hate rallies in England to call for the death of cartoonists who dare picture The Prophet in their work. (“Behead those who insult Islam!” “Butcher those who mock Islam!”) Naturally Jews are subject to the same threats. (“Jews: Your children
will pay with their lives!”) This kind of public discourse the British have no problem with. They object only to Geert Wilders, who dares criticize it. So when Mr. Wilders showed up at Heathrow, he was put back on the first flight to Amsterdam. It seems Britain’s Home Secretary, one Jacqui Smith, has decided he’s a danger to the public safety—and “a genuine, present and sufficient threat to the fundamental interests of society.” Who knew British society is now so fragile it can’t stand a little free speech, however hateful, from a Dutch parliamentarian? In a better and freer England, Geert Wilders would have been told to get himself a soapbox in Hyde Park and rage to his heart’s and liver’s content. Along with the likes of a Sir Oswald Mosley of the fascist right and a Bertrand Russell of the peacenik left—and every stemwinder of a speaker in between. But now Her Majesty’s government has decided that the fabric of British society is so weak it would be threatened by a Geert Wilders. Yes, how the free have fallen. Maybe there won’t always be an England after all. My heart sinks at the thought. For something deep within says that if England—the England of the Magna Carta, of Milton’s defense of freedom of speech, of the Glorious Revolution whose Bill of Rights anticipated our own—joins what Orwell called the smelly little orthodoxies of the world, the West itself can never be the same. Something of its very essence will have been lost. That’s more than sad, it’s disturbing. Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
