What were the Labour hierarchy doing giving publicity to an obscure Dutch right wing politician? Not since Nicola Horlick flew from London to Frankfurt to storm the offices of Deutsche Bank can a completely futile journey between two European cities have been so lovingly chronicled. As a planeful of hacks followed Geert Wilders on to a flight out of Amsterdam last week, the better to record the obscure Dutchman's pleasantries about Islam, the BBC recorded, stage by suspenseful stage, the news that Wilders was leaving Holland, was aloft, had landed and, hardly any time later, had arrived in the arms of Heathrow officials who banned him, as expected, from entering the country. Then Mr Wilders, excluded but no longer obscure, flew back to do whatever he normally does in Amsterdam when he is not collecting footage of terrorist victims to make into short films. Between bulletins on Mr Wilders's progress, numberless Britons who would never, otherwise, have known of its existence, discovered that the pretext for all this fuss, his 14-minute film Fitna, was readily available on their laptops. One of the most worrying aspects of the whole business is that foreign secretary David Miliband, previously thought to have rather an impressive, for a politician, command of internet technology, should have been forced to comment on Fitna's offensiveness without actually seeing it. Particularly when he knew about it a year ago. "I have not seen the film," he noted in his much-cherished, Diary of a Nobody-inspired blog in March 2008, "but it is by advertisement and description deeply anti-Islamic, equating it with murder and violence." By last week, Miliband's dislike of Fitna had only increased, apparently because of the "extreme anti-Muslim hate" he now intuited. "We have a profound commitment to freedom of speech," he reassured the BBC, before explaining that Fitna's was a case so extreme the public could not be allowed to judge for itself. "There is no freedom to cry 'fire' in a crowded theatre," he said, paraphrasing the American judge Wendell Holmes, adding: "And there is no freedom to stir up hate, religious and racial hatred, according to the laws of the land." Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs committee, who surfaced to attack the film on Newsnight, also confirmed that he'd not bothered to watch it. Although I didn't watch Vaz myself, since one can know perfectly well, from advertisement and description, when something is so deeply unpleasant as to merit prohibition, he too insisted that Fitna could incite violence in its audience. Or was it Vaz who wanted it shown to all primary school children, in order to promote diversity? Whatever. The response of a huge, online audience for this film following its incessant promotion by the Labour government cannot, at the time of writing, be compared to the "clear and present danger" identified by Miliband's repression icon, Wendell Holmes, as the sole justification for restricting free speech. Nor is there any sign that Wilders's putative hosts, the Europhobic Lord Pearson of Rannoch and his fellow peers are any more filled with hatred than usual following their viewing of Fitna on a screen at Westminster. If the stolid, so far, viewer reaction to Fitna's shock tactics is a little disappointing for Mr Wilders, the controversy surrounding his non-visit leaves a debt to Jacqui Smith that can never be repaid. Much more likely, when he arranged to show his collage of jihadist atrocities in some forgotten corner of the Lords, must have been the prospect of complete public indifference. To judge by comments in newspapers, blogs and on air, most of them backing Wilders's right to visit, it's unlikely anyone would have noticed him last week, had he actually been in the country. In fact, even if the government has yet to catch up, current thinking on freedom of speech is a lot less equivocal than it was 20 years ago, when both Tory and Labour politicians agreed that Salman Rushdie had himself to blame if many Muslims wanted him dead. Speaking for many Tories at the time of the fatwa, long before the arrival of Padma Lakshmi hardened opinion on the question, Lord Dacre announced: "I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them." A year later, Norman Tebbit agreed that the "villain" Rushdie had "betrayed" and "degraded" Islam. On the Labour side, a lot of us will never forget Lord Hattersley, then plain Roy and deputy leader of his party, explaining why the paperback of The Satanic Verses should not be published. "The proposition that Muslims are welcome in Britain if, and only if, they stop behaving like Muslims is a doctrine which is incompatible with the principles which govern and guide a free society," he argued. Whatever "behaving like Muslims" actually meant. Today, Muslim Ed Husain tells us: "Geert Wilders should be allowed in because this is a country that has pioneered freedom of speech, from Milton and Locke through to Mill." A thought that did not, in 1989, cut much ice with Keith Vaz. When demonstrators destroyed an effigy of Rushdie in Parliament Square, accompanied by shouts of "Rushdie die, Rushdie scum", even though he later condemned the fatwa, Mr Vaz described the event as a "great celebration of freedom". None of the protesters whose placards and shouts called for Rushdie's death was prosecuted. If Rushdie benefited from state protection from his assailants, so, too, did their proposition that freedom of speech was no longer absolute and not, in particular, where it might offend orthodox Muslims. Like that other Tory hand-me-down, the Dome, New Labour was to embrace this flawed idea with idiot enthusiasm. Last week's pre-emptive attack on a film almost no one had heard of, still less objected to, was characteristic of a government which has presided, for 10 complacent years, over a progressive diminution of our freedom of expression. But one of the good things to have happened since Mr Vaz led 3,000 demonstrators on an anti-Rushdie protest, is a parallel realisation, outside government at least, that Muslim sensibilities should not, contrary to what is implied by both Mr Wilders and those who want to gag him, be characterised as uniform and as so delicate as to merit privileged treatment. Wilders, at the end of his film, calls for Muslims to suppress certain verses in the Qur'an lest they inspire their co-religionists to acts of terrorism. Vaz wants him banned from saying that, in case Muslims cannot deal with being offended. But isn't it terribly offensive to be called easily offended? Absolutely, which is why Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem, is typical of our governing censors in taking condescension a step further. Wilders had to be banned, says Huhne, because his film is so anti-Islamic that it might provoke anti-Muslim violence even in those of us who managed to get through The Satanic Verses without acquiring a criminal record. The dreadful images, he cautions, "risk causing serious harm to others". Though not caused by him, of course. Maybe he watched it with his eyes shut.Geert Wilders has just made our leaders look truly idiotic
Sunday, 15 February 2009
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Nick Cohen: The bidding war for Amro marked the moment when reason was lost38 comments
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