Will Geert Wilders’ courage get him sent to jail?

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The above article was written by Jacob Laksin. In the photo below we see Muslims using one of their favorite arguments. Some of us might wish they had larger vocabularies, but fear of this sort of argument had the Obama administration hopping about in panic when Terry Jones threatened to burn some Korans.

Laksin refers to the Western fear of this argument when he writes, "It is . . . worth noting that much of what the popular press has derided as 'Muslim bashing' is actually a well-warranted anxiety on the part of the Dutch populace about the increasingly restive, radicalized, and unassimilated Muslim immigrants in their midst. From the killing of libertarian politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, to the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist, to the upsurge in violent attacks on gays in Amsterdam by Moroccan street thugs, to the death threats and daily harassment that have driven critics of radical Islam like Ayaan Hirsi Ali from the country, the Dutch have become acutely aware of the wages of the country’s immigration policy from the Muslim world. At the same time, the official appeasement of Islamic sensibilities, represented most recently by the Wilders trial, and the crisis of national confidence exemplified by a Dutch justice minister’s notorious assertion that Islamic Shari’a would be welcome in the Netherlands so long as it was democratically introduced, have underscored just how attenuated the country’s defenses against Muslim religious radicalism have become."

Further down Laksin writes, "France, Britain and Germany are perhaps the best known examples of European countries struggling to cope with their Muslim minorities, but they are hardly the only ones. Sweden, where one-in-seven residents is now foreign-born, has in recent years witnessed many of the same problems stemming from its unassimilated Muslim community. It has responded by making its immigration policies more restrictive and, just last month, voting into parliament an anti-Islam party for the first time. Policies to limit Muslim immigration have also been passed in Denmark, where the publication of the Mohammed cartoons by Copenhagen-based paper Jyllands Posten tragically demonstrated the gulf in values between the Western and the Islamic world. Norway, where Muslim attacks on Jews have become more common, has similarly struggled to reconcile its tolerant culture with Islam, and the creeping Islamization of the country is now a perennial election issue. Insofar as Islam is now a major political issue, much of Europe is literally going Dutch."

As to Wilders, despite optimistic references to withdrawn welcome mats, the Dutch government is still trying to shut Wilders up and the Western Liberal Press continues its attempts to marginalize Wilders as an extremist, but "the Freedom Party’s success is attributable to its platform of reducing asylum seekers from Muslim countries and cutting immigration from non-Western countries by half. An honest account of the debate taking place in the Netherlands would require acknowledging that in his alarm about the consequences of Muslim immigration and in his desire to see it reduced, Wilders is simply representing the views of a growing number of Dutch voters. The Dutch people have spoken – and they have sided with Wilders."

We might agree that Wilders wants to withdraw the Dutch welcome mat and "a growing number of Dutch voters" want to see him do it, but Dutch leaders keep trying to dust off the mat and put it back in place. Rather than side with this "growing number of Dutch voters" who agree with Wilders, they are trying to find some way to put Wilders in jail for these very anti-immigration arguments. Perhaps if Wilders had kept his position vague, all would have been well with him, but "for his troubles in calling attention to the barbarism and militancy of foundational Islamic texts – cited and acted upon by al-Qaeda and other jihadist terror groups – Geert Wilders has been roundly condemned in the international press as an “Islamophobe,” a “racist,” and an instigator, sometimes with the sinister implication that he deserves whatever punishment his Islamist enemies threaten to deal out." [As to what that punishment might be, see above photo]

"And if the media’s reporting on the grisly murders committed by Islamist fanatics (and, in Fortuyn’s case, their disgruntled apologists) is evidence of anti-Muslim incitement, it’s hard to see what at this point does not constitute an offense to Muslim sensibilities. Presumably, if everyone just kept their mouth shut about Islamic extremism, it would cease to be a problem.

Defeatist as it is, that really is the mentality that the self-appointed arbiters of political correctness in the media and beyond have embraced. The trial of Wilders, after all, is nothing more than a high-profile attempt to silence the bearer of bad news about Islamism in the Netherlands. In that sense, the more urgent question is not why the Dutch are so concerned about radical Islam, but why so many in a position of influence are not – and why they are so determined to blame everything and everyone for Islamic extremism except the source itself."

To hear the Liberal-Leftists tell it, the Western World, at least their tilt of it, is "progress." As to their method of argument about this Leftist "tilt," they have borrowed from their sometimes allies. They don't say "Kill Lawrence," for example, but they are free with more sophisticated equivalents like "Extremist, and Islamophobe. It amounts to the same thing in that they don't wish to argue, they just want to kill (in the case of the Radical Islamists) or condemn (in the case of Liberal-Leftists).

One Liberal Leftist thought it a shame there wasn't some place in the world that retained 18th century morality so that I could move there. Or, when enough people wake up to the bankruptcy of Liberal-Leftist ideas, perhaps I'll be able to stay right here.