Yes, Wilders is highly controversial but freedom dies if we ban him from
addressing our Parliament
Last updated at 2:30 PM on 11th February 2009
MELANIE PHILLIPS, WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE WEB
If anyone had doubted the extent to which Britain has capitulated to
Islamic terror, the banning of Geert Wilders a few hours ago should
surely open their eyes.
Wilders, the Dutch member of parliament who had made an uncompromising
stand against the Koranic sources of Islamist extremism and violence,
was due to give a screening of Fitna, his film on this subject, at the
House of Lords on Thursday.
This meeting had been postponed after Lord Ahmed had previously
threatened the House of Lords authorities that he would bring a force of
10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the Lords if Wilders was allowed to
speak.
To their credit, the Lords authorities had stood firm and said extra
police would be drafted in to meet this threat and the Wilders meeting
should go ahead.
But now the government has announced that it is banning Wilders from the
country.
A letter from the Home Secretary’s office to Wilders, delivered via the
British embassy in the Hague, said: '...the Secretary of State is of the
view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and
sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of
society.
'The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims
and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere would
threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.'
So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to
march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows
Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and
the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass
intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of
parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British
Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious
fascism.
It is he, not them, who is considered a ‘serious threat to one of the
fundamental interests of society’. Why? Because the result of this stand
for life and liberty against those who would destroy them might be an
attack by violent thugs.
The response is not to face down such a threat of violence but to
capitulate to it instead.
It was the same reasoning that led the police on those pro-Hamas marches
to confiscate the Israeli flag, on the grounds that it would provoke
violence, while those screaming support for genocide and incitement
against the Jews were allowed to do so.
The reasoning was that the Israeli flag might provoke thuggery while the
genocidal incitement would not. So those actually promoting aggression
were allowed to do so while those who threatened no-one at all were
repressed.
And now a Dutch politician who doesn’t threaten anyone is banned for
telling unpalatable truths about those who do; while those who threaten
life and liberty find that the more they do so, the more the British
government will do exactly what they want, in the interests of
‘community harmony’.
Wilders is a controversial politician, to be sure. But this is another
fateful and defining issue for Britain’s governing class as it continues
to sleepwalk into cultural suicide.
If British MPs do not raise hell about this banning order, if they go
along with this spinelessness, if they fail to stand up for the
principle that the British Parliament of all places must be free to hear
what a fellow democratically elected politician has to say about one of
the most difficult and urgent issues of our time, if they fail to hold
the line against the threat of violence but capitulate to it instead,
they will be signalling that Britain is no longer the cradle of freedom
and democracy but its graveyard.
This piece first appeared online at www.spectator.
http://www.dailymai
Wilders-highly-
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Posts
