Back when George W. “Miss Me Yet?” Bush was President, liberals exercised their right of free speech ad naseum to complain about how Bush was taking away their right of free speech. So you might expect that a liberal or two would express at least a little concern when freedom of expression in the western world is threatened in reality, instead of in theory. After all it’s happened just across the border in Canada and it’s happening right now, just across the pond in the Netherlands.

geert-wilders

Try searching MSNBC or the Daily Kos for information about the Geert Wilders trial. Find anything? Me neither. Democratic Undergound, to their credit, did run a version of the story, although the fact that it was Al Jazeera’s version is disappointing, if predictable. A commenter or two even dared to suggest that perhaps Wilders should be free to criticize any religion he wants, including Islam. That kind of heresy was, of course, quickly slapped down with replies like this one:

It’s informative that your ideological hostility, towards major religions, leads you to sympathize with this rightwing European xenophobe: the fact, however, that you can patch his anti-Islamic rants into your own simplistic worldview, does not really qualify as evidence that Wilders is “on trial for telling the truth.” He is on trial because a court decided his remarks might violate the criminal law against incitement to hatred. (more…)