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…)

Holland today is probably the worst country in Europe, a sinkhole of social pathologies that would make Berkeley blush.  And yet, at every step, the decisions the Dutch took to liberalize their formerly straitlaced Calvinist society seemed to make sense at the time, at least to some

Today, with crime rampant, social tensions brought on by enormous, apparently unassimilable migration from the Muslim world, and the collapse of its social cohesion and cultural self-confidence, the Netherlands is the Sick Man of Europe.

I originally wrote this story for the now-defunct Mirabella Magazine, to answer the editorial question: why are the Dutch so tolerant. “Tolerant” seemed like the right word at the time; today, nearly 18 years later, “suicidal” might be a better choice.

This is what I found.

The smoke is overpowering as I climb the steep stairs and enter the tiny second-floor room at a neighborhood joint called “Balou.” A group of young men are sitting at a handful of tables, talking, listening to loud rock music, looking out the window at the street below or watching a Detroit Pistons – Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game on the television perched mutely in the corner, each puffing away contentedly. The 25-year-old owner, Jerry, is standing behind the bar and gabbing affably to some of the regulars, displaying upon request a menu of the evening’s offerings. This might be anywhere, in any bar USA. Except it’s not.

Jerry shows me the menu. Compared with competing locals like “The Grasshopper” and “The Bull Dog,” it’s rather small. This is what it says: (more…)

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.