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Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > On The Edge Of Oblivion - Geert Wilders arrest and deportation signal end of democracy in UK

On The Edge Of Oblivion - Geert Wilders arrest and deportation signal end of democracy in UK

February 16, 2009

On The Edge Of Oblivion

By WILLIAM MAYER

February 16, 2009 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Last Thursday Dutch MP Geert Wilders was arrested at Heathrow Airport, guilty in the eyes of Downing Street of saying uncomplimentary things about Islam, an act which has been largely criminalized throughout Europe, though selectively in the sense that similar actions would be unthinkable if applied to critics of Christianity and/or Judaism.

Perpwalked off the plane, then held in confinement for hours, Wilders was eventually freed and then unceremoniously deported back to Holland.

Many in the West, especially those not on the Continent were rightly horrified at the gleefulness with which government officials [with full approval of Justice Minister Shahid Malik, a Muslim] were willing to throw Britain's once hallowed right of political freedom of expression under the bus.

In order to justify the Brown government's unprecedented action, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith stood the culture on its head, morally equating Wilders' criticism of Islam with terrorism. A less obvious but possibly farther reaching aspect of this action was its effect in bringing British society into full compliance with the Shari'a concept of sacrilege - "insulting Islam" - enforcement of which is a high ranking priority of the Islamists.

"The Secretary of State is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK."

Though it appears that this matter materialized nearly overnight, that is not the case. These Euro-government types, appeasers all, have been gaining ground for twenty years, at least since they demonstrated a need to understand the "cause of the rage" leading to the Ayatollah Khomeini's infamous fatwa against iconoclast writer Salmon Rushdie, calling for his murder.

This crowd had friends in high places even in America where at the height of the controversy, former President Carter penned a painfully nuanced op-ed piece which only served to countenance the very point that the Islamists were making regarding "insulting" their religion. It's hard to read Carter's words and not get the impression that in his opinion Rushdie was guilty of committing a serious offense and that addressing that harm was of elemental importance.

"While Rushdie's First Amendment freedoms are important, we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah's irresponsibility." [source, Jimmy Carter, "Rushdie's Book Is An Insult ," March 5, 1989, http://www.cartercenter.org/news/documents/doc1381.html]

Carter's weasel-words, aside from equating solicitation for murder by the Ayatollah with "an embarrassment," grants to those whom he deemed in this piece rightly offended, the power to apply their exogenous theological positions - a constitutionally troubling religious test - as a standard upon which domestic issues should be adjudicated.

Paradoxically, this line of reasoning is offered despite the fact that it stands completely out of phase with the sacred liberal cannon of multiculturalism which holds that a society must be judged within its own boundaries, by its own standards. Though this disingenuous intellectual gamesmanship is usually employed by the left to place as off limits for criticism even the most horrendous violations of basic rights by Third World countries, in this case it is being used for exactly the opposite purpose, to subject an ethically aware culture to the dominating ideology of a totalitarian theocracy.

It's difficult to understand how Europe's elite ruling class can entertain such harmful ideas while at the same time expecting to shield the ruled from their effect. One might suggest that given a two decade drift in this direction the response has now become Pavlovian with culturally suicidal policies being quickly ushered into the political sphere.

Why the danger is perceived by so relatively few seems to indicate there is some pathology at work, perhaps something akin to Stockholm syndrome in which the captive eventually starts to identify with his captors, blaming himself for his predicament.

Legislators like Wilders are so far out of the norm that one wonders at what point he will grow tired of fighting a losing rear-guard action and flee the rotting corpse for more hospitable climes and a more defensible perimeter.

At a time when incidents of Islamic jihad are exploding across Holland and Europe's Jewry is under unprecedented violent attack by radical Muslims, it certainly can't be reassuring for Wilders to hear his PM Balkenende taking the same line as the Brits, stating that, "Geert Wilders must be able to understand that he was forbidden to travel to Great Britain. Wilders himself has always pleaded to keep people out who could endanger security." [source, http://www.ad.nl/binnenland/3000762/Wilders_wil_zelf_ook_mensen_weren.html, translation from the Dutch by Beila Rabinowitz]


Premier Balkenende makes a gesture in the direction of the Muslim community. "Chicken is halal." [cartoon © Gregorius Nekschot]

In 2005 Tony Blankley wrote a book entitled The West's Last Chance in which Shari'a came to fruition in the UK through a series of developments no less believable than the events which are playing out today.

At the time such a scenario seemed rather outlandish, a literary contrivance...given the events of the last week, this author is no longer laughing. http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=wildersid=2.16.09%2Ehtm

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