A Chamberlain Moment

By Stephen Brown
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Friday, February 13, 2009


Dutch politician Geert Wilders, centre, is escorted to an Amsterdam-bound aircraft by police officers at London's Heathrow Airport, Thursday Feb. 12, 2009, after being stopped from entering the Britain. The British government banned Wilders from visiting the Britain to show his anti-Islam film 'Fitna' at the Houses of Parliament.
(AP Photo/Steve Parsons-pa)


It was a watershed moment of capitulation.

On Thursday, February 12, visiting Dutch politician Geert Wilders was humiliatingly bundled back on to a plane to his native Holland shortly after arriving in London. Wilders had been invited to show his controversial, 17-minute documentary film, Fitna, in Britain’s House of Lords but was warned in a letter from the British Home Office last Tuesday he would be denied entry to the country. As reasons for his being declared persona non grata, Wilders was told in the letter he would “threaten community harmony and therefore public security.” The directive never stated, however, that the statements Wilders made in Fitna are false or misleading in any way.

A Muslim lord, Nazir Ahmed, and other Muslim leaders had vigorously protested Wilders’ visit, causing an initial invitation to be rescinded. It was reported that Ahmed had even threatened to mobilize 10,000 fellow Muslims to block Wilders from entering Westminster, a report Ahmed now denies. A cooler-headed peer, Lord Pearson, appalled at this attack on free speech, reissued the invitation to Wilders.

Daring the British government to put him in handcuffs, Wilders defiantly flew to Heathrow airport with the new invitation in his pocket. During the flight, Wilders expressed his opinion of Britain’s Labour government and its attempt to block his entry, telling the TimesOnline that it was now “more Chamberlain than Churchill.”

“I am a democrat, I am serving free speech,” said Wilders. “They are not only being nasty to me, they are being nasty to freedom of speech.”

But even Chamberlain would have been dismayed to see an elected democrat like Wilders, the leader of Holland’s liberal Freedom Party and the first European Union politician ever denied access to Great Britain, escorted by two plain-clothed guards across the tarmac to the border agency office. According to the Times story, the British security men were holding Wilders so tightly, one of Wilders’ personal bodyguards asked them to relax their grips. Wilders was subsequently put into a detention center for two hours before being unceremoniously deported back to Holland.

Many people in Britain, among them those who disagree with Fitna, are outraged that a democratically elected member of European parliament was refused admittance to their country after having been invited by the House of Lords. If free speech does not exist there, in Britain’s highest democratic institution, some have asked, then where does it exist in Great Britain?

Those opposing the Labour government’s decision to ban Wilders also believe it is not the Dutch politician who represents a threat to “community harmony” and “public safety” in Great Britain. Wilders, after all, is a peaceful man who never has broken any laws but instead must have 24-hour protection himself due to death threats from Muslim radicals. Rather, the danger to “public safety” exists in the crowd(s) that would take to the streets in response to Wilders’ presence. As a result, the Dutch politician’s supporters regard his banning as rewarding the thugs and aggressors like Lord Ahmed and others of his ilk and punishing those who would stand up for free speech and democracy.

What disturbs Wilders supporters even more is the hypocrisy surrounding the Dutch filmmaker’s expulsion. In the past, Great Britain has allowed in true preachers of hate like Muslim Brotherhood personage Yusuf al-Qaradawi, invited by London mayor Ken Livingstone in 2004. Al-Qaradawi has justified suicide bombings and condoned the killing of Israeli women and children because they are “militarised.” A more recent example is Ibrahim Moussawi, who was allowed to enter England last November despite his describing suicide bombers as martyrs and his having broadcast a 30-part series on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the television station he heads.

British columnist Melanie Phillips also points out the British government also allows huge, pro-Hamas demonstrations and does not prevent Hizb ut Tahrir from recruiting on British campuses for the jihad against the West.

Many in Britain are disheartened and angry at their government’s unwillingness to stand up to the Muslim extremists who threaten mass, anti-democratic intimidation. Rather than stare down that threat, the Labour government has tried to appease it, causing one British observer to comment he now knows what it was like in the mid-1930s when Nazism was on the rise.

One reason for such disgraceful appeasement is that London is regarded as the headquarters for Europe’s jihadists. The Labour Party’s Home Secretary, whose department issued Wilders the persona non grata letter last Tuesday, said there are so many Islamist terrorist plots in preparation in Great Britain, the security services are having difficulties in keeping tabs on them all. It is feared a Wilders visit would have provoked the extremists at a time the Labour government is trying to “reach out” to Muslims to the point where it is even running television ads in Pakistan, essentially asking young Muslims not to hate Britain and the West.

Another is that Muslim voters now form large constituencies in Labour ridings. Few politicians, as everyone knows, are willing to take tough stands when votes are at stake. And besides losing votes, it is believed the British government is also afraid of losing Muslim money. Great Britain now has five “sharia-compliant” banks that contain $18 billion in assets, more than Muslim states like Pakistan. Prime Minister Gordon Brown once said his goal was to make London the center of world Islamic banking. Allowing Wilders into the country would not have helped in this respect.

By banning Wilders from England, the Labour government has sent a clear message that Islam cannot be criticized. But by stifling free speech, the cornerstone of freedom and democracy, in this manner and appeasing a thuggish minority, it has set itself up for far worse consequences. But hopefully by then, the British people will have decided to take action themselves, reverse this trend towards humiliation and disaster, and re-establish the great legacy of their ancestors.

Stephen Brown is a contributing editor at Frontpagemag.com. He has a graduate degree in Russian and Eastern European history. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.


Preserving ‘Harmony’ for Islamic Radicals

Geert Wilders is barred from entering the United Kingdom.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 13, 2009


Geert Wilders shows his passport and boarding pass at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport before leaving for London. Wilders was refused entry by Britain, saying he was a threat to public security.
(AFP/ANP/File/Marcel Antonisse)


It has come to this: If you are an Islamic radical, trained to carry out terrorist atrocities in al-Qaeda’s jihad against the United Kingdom, the British will welcome you with open arms. Not content with that, Great Britain will lobby insistently for your release from custody so that you may freely roam British streets—and the halls of Westminster.

If, by contrast, you are a duly elected representative in the democratic government of a country to which England is bound in the European Union, and you speak about the undeniable—though mulishly denied—nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror, Great Britain will slam her door in your face.

That is the lesson in the appalling saga of Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament and Exhibit Umpty-Umpth illustrating the depths of capitulation to which the West has sunk in its half-hearted bid for cultural survival.

On Tuesday, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith took time out of her busy schedule of protecting from extradition Britain’s expanding roster of resident terrorists to warn Wilders that he was not welcome in the country—notwithstanding that the vision of Europe as a “union” is supposed to mean that Europeans may travel freely within it. Quite apart from the fact that Wilders is a government official of the Netherlands, he was not visiting the U.K. on a lark. He was the invited guest of Malcolm Pearson, a member of the House of Lords. Lord Pearson and Baroness Caroline Cox (a human-rights activist who has worked tirelessly on behalf of enslaved and oppressed Christians and Muslims in Sudan) had asked Wilders to screen his short, controversial film, Fitna.

Wilders is a lightning rod. In the great tradition of the Enlightenment, and to the consternation of post-sovereign Europe, he faithfully reports what his senses perceive. When he studies the Koran, he finds exhortations to violence. When he reads Allah’s command in Sura 9:5 that “when the sacred months have passed,” Muslims must “slay the idolaters wherever ye find them,” he entertains the outlandish idea that this means what it plainly says, and is understood by many Muslims as doing so. He has noticed, after all, that this passage is not singular, that its injunction is a recurrent theme in the Koran, and that the sentiment is even more pronounced in the Hadith and other Islamic scriptures, which elevate jihad—in its original, accurate, military sense: waging war against unbelievers—to the highest form of worship. He has noticed, moreover, that Muslim militants seem to slay the idolaters and other unbelievers with some regularity.

So Wilders is not making this up. It is, in fact, a view of Muslim doctrine he shares with some of the world’s most renowned authorities on the subject. There is, for instance, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the inspiration for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and also, according to Osama bin Laden, for the 9/11 attacks. Rahman’s leadership position in the global jihad stems solely from his scholarship—he is a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence and a graduate of Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the seat of Sunni learning. Or, to cite another example (and I could cite many others), there is Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who fomented international rioting over cartoons of Mohammed and who urges jihadists to continue the fight “in Palestine, in Iraq, in Lebanon, and in every country that has been conquered by foreigners.” Our own State Department describes Qaradawi as an “intelligent and thoughtful voice” from the Middle East who “deserves our attention.”

For his trouble in pointing out the ability of doctrine to inspire action, Wilders has been indicted in Holland for “inciting hatred.” Prosecutors initially declined to pursue the case, but they have been overruled by Amsterdam’s craven court of appeals, which is paralyzed by dread of upsetting Dutch Muslims, who have been known to erupt in murderous riots over perceived slights.

Fitna runs about 15 minutes long. It depicts a phenomenon familiar to Britons who witnessed July 7 and Americans who lived through September 11: The faithful rendition of verses from the Koran, often recited by influential Islamic clerics, followed by acts of terrorism committed by Muslim militants who profess that they are simply putting those scriptures into action. To be sure, this is not the dominant interpretation among the world’s billion-plus Muslims, most of whom do not so much interpret their creed as ignore those parts that would otherwise trouble them. But to deny that Fitna reflects an intellectually consistent construction of Islam, adhered to by an energetic minority, is to deny reality.

Wilders, consequently, discerns parallels between the Koran and Adolph Hitler’s polemic, Mein Kampf. Let’s set aside the fact that the German kampf and the Arabic jihad convey the same meaning—struggle. The analogy pressed by Wilders is hardly foreign to British ears. As Middle East expert Daniel Pipes and researcher Andrew Bostom have noted, none less than Winston Churchill himself, in his history of the Second World War, described Mein Kampf as “the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.” One needn’t accept the analogy (Pipes, for example, does not) to concede it is not a frivolous one.

Today’s Britain, however, is not the Britain of Churchill and free expression, but of Jacqui Smith and multicultural hypersensitivity. Wilders intended to screen his film in the House of Lords in late January, but his trip was postponed due to the machinations of Nazir Ahmed, a Labour lord and grievance-industry agitator of the first order. As the Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea reports, Lord Ahmed threatened to mobilize 10,000 rabble-rousers to prevent Wilders from entering Parliament. When the trip was rescheduled for this week, Smith’s office issued a curt letter apprising Wilders that he would not be admitted into the country. According to the letter, Wilders’s “statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the U.K.” Later, the Home Office laughably maintained that by barring Wilders it was perforce barring “extremism, hatred, and violent messages.”

Of course, extremism, hatred, and violent messages have found a comfortable home in the birthplace of Western civil rights, where “community harmony” means that jihadists talk and you listen. In 2005, Lord Ahmed hosted a book launch for Joran Jermas, one of Sweden’s most rabid anti-Semites, who predictably ranted about the “Jewish supremacy drive,” the Jews as the “one reason for wars, terror and trouble” in the Middle East, and Zionist “control” of Western mass media. The following year, his guest at Westminster, a building that happens to be one of al-Qaeda’s most coveted targets, was Mahmoud Suliman Ahmed Abu Rideh, who attended a session of the House of Commons. Before his release in 2005, Abu Rideh, a Palestinian, had been detained under Britain’s Terrorism Act of 2001 (an enactment later voided by the law lords as a violation of human rights) due to al-Qaeda connections and threats to carry out a bombing plot. Not to worry: Abu Rideh explained that he didn’t leave his family to go to Afghanistan for jihad, but to set up a charitable school for children. Next case.

Suspected al-Qaeda members are welcome in Parliament, but not a member of the Dutch parliament. Britain has a revolving door for Islamic radicals but a closed door for their democratic critics. In 2004, British authorities insisted that the Bush administration return to the U.K. all Britons who, having been captured fighting with the enemy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, were held at Guantanamo Bay. After President Bush acceded, the former detainees were promptly released.

Not content with that, the Brits proceeded to demand that non-British detainees be shipped to England from Gitmo if they had any basis to claim legal U.K. residence. Despite the Pentagon’s protestations that these detainees were extremely dangerous, the Bush administration again relented. As night follows day, in late 2007, British authorities set the suspected terrorists free. And when this move aroused grave public concern, Lord Peter Henry Goldsmith, a former attorney general, gave voice to the Labour government’s dismissive party line: It did not matter whether the men were dangerous, because at stake was a “principle . . . which is more important.” “The principle,” Lord Goldsmith piously proclaimed, “is fundamental civil liberties.”

Indeed. Fundamental civil liberties for those committed to destroying the ever-diminishing British way of life. Cassandra has been shown the door.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).


Related Link:

Click on link below to watch the movie Fitna:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020486.php