Western Civilisation gets its day in court tomorrow - your freedom of speech hangs in the balance

The politically-motivated show trial of Geert Wilders, arguably The Netherlands’ most popular politician, begins tomorrow. Much rests on the outcome. The ‘Openbaar Ministerie’ (‘Public  Ministry’) is bringing him to court over allegations by a group including the ruling body of an Amsterdam mosque, a well-known Dutch stand-up comedian, a left-wing university professor and a lawyer, that he ‘insulted Islam’ when he compared the Qur’an to ‘Mein Kampf’ and suggested that Muslim immigration be halted in the Netherlands.

A technical court ruling last week (where, suspiciously, reporting was prohibited) prevented the prosecution’s case being derailed at the last minute by a challenge from Wilders’ legal team and he will stand trial tomorrow.

For those unfamiliar with the accused (of whom there should be very few in Europe by the end of this week, whatever the outcome of the case), Wilders is the head of the PVV (Party for Freedom), a Dutch Libertarian/Conservative political party – hardly a ‘far right’ organisation, as his leftist opponents and the liberal media often claim  - ‘far-right’ has become a convenient sobriquet applied indiscriminately by the left to those that disagree with them – and which conjures up images of despots, Nazis and facsists. Wilders is nothing of the sort.

He is, however, rather outspoken on a wide variety of issues, including the Islamisation of Europe, free speech and immigration. He is against the accession of Turkey into the EU. Somewhat controversially (and here we do not agree with him), he would like to see the Qur’an banned along with Mein Kampf, which is banned from sale in the Netherlands (but not from possession). We at Un:dhimmi do not think that any book should be banned.

Wilders was famously barred from entry into Britain in February 2009 by the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (using the outrageously disingenuous assertion that his presence would ‘threaten community harmony and therefore public safety’.This from a minister supposedly charged primarily with the protection of United Kingdom citizens, who simultaneously allowed a procession of fanatical Muslim hate preachers into the country.

He was invited by UKIP peer Lord Malcolm Pearson to a discussion and screening of Wilders’ film Fitna; a 17-minute documentary about Islamic extremism which juxtaposes acts of Islamic terrorism with the passages from the Qur’an which support them.

As might be expected by most seasoned political observers, the furore surrounding the above events has not damaged Wilders’ popularity. He has consistently polled as one of (if not the) Netherlands’ most popular politician – and would in all probability become Prime Minister if elections were held tomorrow. And herein lies the motivation to discredit him. His political opponents are running scared.

But what is at stake here? Why does the outcome of tomorrow’s trial have so much importance attached to it? Why is this mild-mannered man, with his distinctive shock of dyed blond hair and brightly-coloured ties (he has been described as the ‘Johnny Rotten of politics’) – and what he stands for – important to you and I?

Firstly, because his case highlights the salami-slicing attack on freedom of speech in the West. At national level, EU level and in most developed nations around the world, Islam and Muslims have become a kind of protected species – a religious political doctrine and a body of people which, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is presented as a ‘religion of peace and tolerance’. Simultaneously, and in Europe in particular, this has also coincided with massive, unprecedented levels of second and third-world immigration – largely consisting of Muslims from Eastern Turkey, the Horn of Africa, the Maghreb and South Asia.

Whole swathes of Europe are affected – from the Muslim-dominated Banlieues, the massive, violent,  no-go suburban housing projects that surround Paris; the heavily Islamised post-Industrial towns of Northern England, to large parts of urban Germany and Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands. Muslims have formed communities virtually unrecognisable to their former inhabitants. Mosques and minarets (from which the adhan, the nasal-sounding Islamic call-to prayer, often blasts five time a day), dominate the skylines.

Muslim dress – shalwar kameez worn by males and the face-obscuring niqab and burqa, worn by women, replace  familiar western clothes on the streets – and the influence of Sharia increasingly supplants that of national law and democracy. The culture of militant Islamism has also taken strong root in these places, and young men from these communities are not infrequently found to be fomenting Islamic terror either at home, or in the training camps of Pakistan/Afghan borders.

A culture apart - shocking revelations of extremist Islamism among British students from a survey carried out in 2008

Demographics and attitudes are often at a complete variance with those of the host countries – birth rates usually exceed local population growth by an order of magnitude. Omer Taspinar, author of Integrating Islam, a report commissioned by the US-based Council On Foreign Relations, predicts that the Muslim population of Europe will nearly double by 2015, while the non-Muslim will shrink by 3.5%, due to a much higher Muslim birth rate.

And it seems there is little in the way of permeability of western democratic values into Muslim communities there. A survey of Muslim Students in Britain by the Centre for Social Cohesion in 2008 revealed a startling gulf in values. The graphic above features them in greater detail, but a quarter, for example, did not think men and women forwere equal. 60% of students in University Islamic societies felt that killing for religion could be justified.

Yet some of these young people are third-generation immigrant stock. The question needs to be asked if representatives from a particularly privileged and highly educated sector of the British immigrant community hold such views – what hope their less-enlightened brethren would be better absorbed into British society?

And in Geert Wilders’ Netherlands home, there appears a similar picture. One-sixteenth of the Netherlands’ population is now Muslim. Some cities there could well be majority Muslim within the next decade or two if Muslim birthrates remain at their present levels. Muslims have committed several high-profile murders of Dutch public figures who angered them.

Wilders himself lives under constant police guard because of such threats.

Whatever you may think of Wilders (and generally we think highly of him – he is articulate, well-read, surprisingly moderate in tone and exhibits a rare passion for democracy and Western values), he goes into court tomorrow for all Europeans and other Westerners who value their liberal culture, extraordinarily high standards of human development and shared values. Some think he may be a Churchill for our times in the making. Let’s hope, like Churchill, that he was listened to in time (just), to galvanise opinion and political will against what is without doubt the greatest threat to Western civilisation for the last 70 years. Support him.

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