Otherwise known as “political correctness.”

Not just Geert Wilders is on trial in the Netherlands for the crime of “hate speech” –

– we all are:

To quote Wilders:

All there is to say has been said.

Except maybe this: (more…)

In what can only to be described as a throwback to the seventh century, Dutch Parliamentarian and anti-jihad warrior Geert Wilders was back in court Monday on specious “hate speech” charges filed by a corrupt, criminal dhimmi court in the Netherlands.

How dare they subjugate their Western values to Islamic supremacism in this dangerous farce?

Wilders has explained what’s at really on trial in Holland in his case: “I am standing trial,” he said, “because of my opinions on Islam … and because the Dutch establishment – most of them non-Muslims – wants to silence me. I have been dragged to court because in my country freedom can no longer be fully enjoyed. In Europe the national state, and increasingly the EU, prescribes how citizens – including democratically elected politicians such as myself – should think and what we are allowed to say.”

For a moment it looked as if the Dutch might come to their senses and stop harassing this warrior for freedom. On Monday, just as his heresy trial resumed, Wilders said, “I am on trial, but on trial with me is the freedom of expression of many Dutch citizens. I can assure you, I will continue proclaiming it.” Then, according to the notoriously leftist and morally bankrupt Guardian, he “asserted his right to remain silent for the rest of the trial, prompting a comment from the presiding judge, Jan Moors, which was challenged by Wilders’s lawyer.”

Moors said, according to the Guardian, that Wilders “was known for making bold statements but avoiding discussions,” and concluded by saying: “It appears you’re doing so again.” (more…)

By now, everyone knows that Michael Savage has been banned from Britain on the grounds articulated by disgraced former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith: “Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behavior by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community violence.”

Attorney Summary–Savage Appeals U.K. Ban:

This week, we found out that the supposedly conservative government of David Cameron is upholding the ban.  Savage’s lawyers initiated a review of the ban by sending a letter to new Home Secretary Theresa May.  In it, they lay forth the full history of the case, a selective prosecution which is mind-blowing in its moral blindness and suicidal impulse to kowtow to radical Islam.

When Savage was originally banned, as the letter states, he was placed on a list alongside terrorists, racists, a child-murderer, and the alleged leader of a violent gang “that beat migrants and posted films of their attacks on the internet.”  Savage, by contrast, has said some inflammatory things on the radio.  And by inflammatory, I mean generally correct, even if the left hates his passion and willingness to articulate the zeitgeist. (more…)

The media’s reaction to the Faisal Shahzad story was quite telling.  It began with many clamoring for the idea that the would-be bomber had to be a rightwing nutjob.  It ended with many  drawing a curiously sympathetic picture of an enemy of everything we believe in.

As the narrative went, Shahzad fell on tough times due to the recession and grew ever more insular.  So he picked up the Koran and devoted himself to Islam, and then up and left for Pakistan to train with al-Qaeda.  Surely this is the natural reaction to being short the month’s mortgage payment.  I find it more plausible that it was the plight of the New York Mets that drove him to attempt to blow up a car bomb in Times Square.

Which is to say that the rationalization by the MSM for why Muslims are driven to carry out terrorist attacks is utterly incoherent.  Equally as dumbfounding is the MSM’s tortuous attempt to humanize those who would carry out the most inhuman of acts. (more…)

We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.

That was the arrogant declaration of victory from the Organization of the Islamic Conference nearly two years ago, regarding the shrewdly orchestrated Muslim mayhem around the world protesting such infidel abominations as the Danish Muhammad cartoons and Geert Wilders’ short film Fitna.

“Red lines” indeed – a phrase chillingly reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s famous observation that “Islam has bloody borders.” Except that the red lines the OIC is referring to aren’t geographical – they are the ever-tightening limits that Muslim fundamentalists are imposing to choke off our freedoms.

The influential OIC is the world’s largest Muslim assembly, consisting of 57 member states (you know, the same number of U.S. states candidate Obama campaigned in). Its primary aim is “conducting a large-scale worldwide effort to confront Islamophobia.” (As I’ve written here before, Islamophobia is a mythical beast that the OIC and collusive groups like CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, use to intimidate us into craven appeasement.) Their goal is to abridge our free speech by making criticism of Islam an international crime; their strategy works because the West has been so emasculated by multiculturalism that we’d rather embrace cultural suicide than offend the tender sensibilities of such violent barbarians as the Danish cartoon rioters. (more…)

According to many web pundits, Dutch M.P. Geert Wilder is a hater, an Islamaphobe, a supremacist. He is on trial in his own country for trying to shut down the immigration of Muslims. Here is a typical screed from the politically correct police:

Geert Wilders is among Europe’s more despicable human specimens. He is a hater. That’s his specialty. He’s also a celebrity, a sort of Paris Hilton of bile, but with the added cachet of being a member of the Dutch parliament and weird darling of the Dutch press, which voted him the 2007 politician of the year because he gives great quotes. (Good quotes are, to bad journalists, more valuable than the late Linda Lovelace’s old specialty).

Wilders appeals to voters’ basest common denominators: nativism, racism, tribalism. He compares the Koran, which he wants banned, to Mein Kampf, he has no problem including “terrorism” on his list of synonyms for Muslims, and he wants Muslim immigration to the Netherlands severely restricted. In 2008 he released a 17-minute film that does what high school sophomores do best: superimpose quotes with images for rancid irony. The quotes were from the Koran. The images were whatever gruesome images Wilders could get his hands on as long as the events portrayed were committed by the more fanatical of the sixth of the world’s population that calls itself, however slanderously in the fanatics’ case, Muslim. It was a 17-minute slander not dissimilar to the kind the Taliban would release about the decadent West, but demagogues are not known for recognizing what they see in the mirror for what it is.

With the recent collapse of the Dutch government, his Freedom Party also is gaining rapidly on its more established rivals: (more…)

Whatever you think of Pat Condell — the British internet talking head, former Roman Catholic and now committed atheist, who regularly heaps hot helpings of scorn on his favorite targets (Islam, religion in general, multiculturalism, European cultural suicide) — you have to admit the man is both brave and funny.

Here he is on the grotesque mockery of the judicial process currently going on in Holland in the Geert Wilders trial:

Let’s have your thoughts.

Free speech, open debate, “sunlight is the best disinfectant” — these concepts used to be the cornerstones of life in the Enlightenment West.  From John Milton through John Stuart Mill, from Justice Brandeis to Harvey Silverglate, a strain of intellectually libertarian thought has underpinned the very foundation of the United States of America: if your tongue is not free, then nothing is free.

Well, that was then and this is now, as the ongoing show trial of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands demonstrates. Holland, once a country of fierce Calvinists that is now so liberal that euthanasia, pot and prostitution are all openly legal, is hurtling down the path to suicidal nihilism at a breathtaking pace:

The dark spectre of illiberalism is slowly poisoning Western liberal democracies. You won’t hear about it from much of the left-liberal press. It is part of the problem and its silence only confirms that basic liberties integral to Western liberal democracies are under threat. That is why you may not have heard about the trial of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is being prosecuted under hate laws in The Netherlands for his opinions about Islam. Agree or disagree with Wilders, this is the thundering march of the thought police. And don’t for a moment imagine that Australia is immune from this menace to democracy.

Read the whole piece by Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian, and then let’s have your thoughts.

Chuck Johnson is at it again. He must be out on a weekend pass. I feel compelled to answer the Little Green Monster after I saw him go after James O’Keefe with that same tired wet noodle of a charge he has leveled at so many, calling him a white nationalist. Johnson claimed in an LGF post that “ACORN sting filmmaker James O’Keefe was photographed attending a 2006 white nationalist conference titled ‘Race and Conservatism.’”

Sounds terrible, right? Sure, until you get the facts that Johnson doesn’t tell you. When it became clear that it wasn’t a “white nationalist conference,” Johnson tried to slither out of responsibility for his words by saying in a new post: “It’s very clear that I attributed the ‘white nationalist conference’ claim to One People’s Project; that’s what the words ‘according to’ mean.”

Busted! As if it weren’t obvious that in his original post, he was approving of and endorsing what One People’s Project said. But this is typical of Johnson’s weaselly hit-and-run smear tactics.

Meanwhile, Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism uncovered the truth about O’Keefe’s supposed participation in this conference: (more…)

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.

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…)

Abe Foxman has come out against a great and wonderful friend of the Jews, Rush Limbaugh.  That is bad enough, but it is symptomatic of a deeper problem: I have for years derided Jews in America and the Jewish lay leadership for tolerating and supporting clear and present enemies of the Jewish people among our senior ranks. It is a sickness of the soul. The liberal Jew worships at the church of human secularism. These lost souls are married to their liberal dogma.

One of the most odious of the bunch, Abe Foxman, uses the might and the soapbox of the Anti-Defamation League in an attempt to destroy friends and supporters of the Jewish people, in order to garner favor with our enemies.

On Friday Norman Podhoretz, whom I rarely cite, as his capitulation on Gaza and other existential matters of grave concern to the Jewish people have been most damaging, called Foxman out on the ADL chief’s denunciation of Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite.  The author of the book Why Are Jews Liberals? (from which Rush was quoting), Podhoretz called Foxman’s attack on Rush “vile” and noted that Foxman has: (more…)