Britannia Radio

01 April 2011 11:36 AM

Geert Wilders, Islam and freedom of speech: a whole other kind of Dutch courage

Nobody gets up the noses of the multicultural classes quite like Geert Wilders, the increasingly-influential Dutch

politician who refuses to back down in his criticism of the effects of Islam in Europe. Now he is back to give the 'we-embrace-any-culture-as-long-as-it's-not-Christian' types something new to be 'shocked' and 'offended' about.

In 2008, Wilders released a 17-minute film called Fitna (Arabic for 'Strife'), which -- I haven't been able to see the film, so I'm going on a description given to me by a member of Wilders's political staff -- demonstrated how the Koran encouraged acts of terrorism, anti-Semitism, violence against women, homosexuals and infidels.

Release of the film provoked the absolutely predictable reaction among British multiculturalists -- most of whom you'd have to guess also hadn't seen the film -- so in 2009 the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith barred Wilders from entering the United Kingdom. He was on his way to London to show Fitna at a private screening at Westminster, on the invitation of the then-leader of UKIP, Lord Pearson of Rannock.

Of course, given what we now know about the kind of films Jacqui Smith and most notably her husband do think are okay to watch -- porn, of course -- it is grotesque that she would have tried to bar a democratic politician from an allied country who had made a film condemning the brutal treatment of women under Islam.

Maybe if Wilders had called his film 'Hot Babes Unveiled in the Casbah' it could have passed the Jacqui Smith 'we're all adults here' quality test.

Still, a court eventually overturned the bar on Wilders entering the UK, and he was able to show the film. Now he has announced he will release Fitna 2 next year.

The topic of this one is going to be the Islamic prophet Muhammad, whom, among other things, Wilders calls 'murderous.'

Sounds to me like Wilders might as well draw a dotted line across his throat and write the words 'cut here' under it. Agree with him or not, Wilders and every other Dutch politician who speaks out on the effect of large scale Islamic immigration to the Netherlands must remember what happened to the flim maker Theo Van Gogh, seen here on the left, after he made a film called Submission.

The film was about the treatment of women under Islam. In 2004 Van Gogh was assassinated in a street in Amsterdam. His Mulsim killer used two knives to pin a note to his chest threatening unbelievers.

29 March 2011 12:03 PM

German Greens: flakier was better. I know, I was there

I'll get on to the results of the Baden-Wurttemberg elections and what it could mean for euro-scepticism in Germany later. But for the moment I'm just caught by what the election means for the Green party -- because I was in Germany when the party (in both senses of the word) was just getting started. What's now happened to the Greens wasn't in the plan then.

In the early 1980s the Greens were a counter-culture, baby boomer/late-blooming-hippy movement that piled on and off weirdly-painted buses in fancy dress to get to even weirder rock concerts that were somehow supposed to be anti-nuclear power and pro-environmental events. I thought one concert I went to was particular rubbish, but then I wasn't spending as much time in the loo as at least one of the Greens I was with. Exotic substances, nein danke. Still, my memory is completed blanked out as to whether the concert was in Bonn or Nuremburg, so maybe something in the air did get to me.

The Greens' most famous leader was Petra Kelly, a Bavarian-born anti-nuclear campaigner

and step-daughter of an American soldier whom her mother met while he was stationed in the American sector after the war. Thus, Fraulein Kelly.

I trailed around with her for ten days -- it was for a story. Also trailing around with her was her live-in lover, a retired general and former Wehrmacht panzer tank commander called Gert Bastian, 25 years older than Kelly.

This is him on the left. Imagine looking like that and trying to blend in at a German counter-culture concert.

Anyway, it all ended badly. Bastian shot Kelly dead in 1992 as she slept in their bed and then turned the gun on himself. Their bodies weren't found for almost three weeks, which shows how Kelly had fallen from importance in the ten years since I'd known her: seems no one much missed her for almost three weeks, so nobody checked to see if she were all right.

Petra Kelly was the Greens then, 30 years ago. Now, after the defeat of Angela Merkel and her Christian Democrats in the provincial elections in Baden-Wurttemberg even Germany's leadering conservative paper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), is talking about a future coalition between the centre-right Christian Democrats and the Greens (thanks to Eurointelligence for the translation).

In case you missed the headlines, Merkel's Christian Democrats have lost control in Baden-Wurttemberg for the first time in 58 years and a Green politician will now be a state premier -- a first for any Green. Berthold Kohler, political editor of FAZ, writes that the former anti-establishment movement has become the 'powerful kingmaker' in the German political system.

He says that if Merkel wants to form a majority after the federal elections in 2013, she has to think about this 'new reality.'

Certainly in her pre-election panic, Merkel dumped her support for nuclear power. That was the last impossible issue between the Greens and the Christian Democrats. According to Kohler, future alliances are even more likely given the two parties have already narrowed their differences considerably in foreign policy, immigration and integration.

So Merkel might be suddenly happy to hop on the left-wing hippy bus. Or the Greens are suddenly happy to think like a centre-right panzer commander. Either way, the party's over and Germany has a new pack of serious leftwingers as 'kingmakers.' This is no good for Germany.