I was just speaking with a friend in England about Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician and critic of Islamic extremism who was denied entry to Britain on Thursday. Why? Wilders had been invited to screen his short film Fitna, which traces the roots of Islamic violence to the Koran, to members of the House of Lords. But Nazir Ahmed objected. Nazir Ahmed? He’s a Muslim, a Labour member of the House, and (in Andy McCarthy’s apt phrase) “grievance-industry agitator of the first order.” According to Melanie Phillips and others, Ahmed threatened to mobilize 10,000 of his co-religionists to demonstrate against Wilders if he were allowed into the country to show his film and express his opinion about radical Islam. Ahmed denies making the threat, but has gone into print to brag about his successful effort to intimidate the British government into making a fool of itself. The instrument of this latest act of dhimmitude was none other than Jacqui Smith, the British Home Secretary who won an unenviable place for herself in the annals of spineless Orwellian doublespeak when she decreed last year that Islamic terrorism–i.e., terrorist acts carried out by Muslims–should henceforth be renamed “anti-Islamic activity.” Yes, really. In her most recent act of cravenness, Ms. Smith declared that Wilders’s presence in Britain “would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the U.K.” So when Wilders flew into Heathrow on Thursday, he was instantly rounded up and sent packing back to Holland.
There has been a lot of comment about this episode, much of it highly, and rightly, critical of Ahmed and the British government. Charles Moore, although he described Fitna as “an unscrupulous film” (watch it and judge for yourself) made the interesting observation that Ms. Smith, by drawing a causal link between unhappy Muslims and likely violence, actually makes a point very similar to that being made by Wilders. “What the Home Office means,” Mr. Moore writes, is that
“If you upset Muslims, there will be violence”. With the single word, “therefore”, Miss Smith is making a link which is itself insulting to Muslims. Would she say the same about upsetting Christians, or Jews, or farmers, or socialists, or vegetarians? Of course not. It is only Muslims that scare her. So she is saying much the same thing as Geert Wilders!
The question is, as Mr. Moore goes on to reflect, is this correct? “Is Islam so basically intolerant that you have only to be foul about it for its adherents to rise up and kill you?” Charles Moore is a canny and clear-eyed observer. I am surprised he has difficulty in answering this question. Or maybe he is just feigning indecision. After all, it was he who, when Muslims started torching embassies and killing people when a Danish paper published some cartoons of their prophet, said that “I wish someone would mention the word that dominates Western culture in the face of militant Islam — fear. And then I wish someone would face it down.”
Some people are. The entertaining Pat Condell, for example. In his latest internet video, Condell comments on the Wilders affair, noting that Jacqui Smith, in addition to covering herself with shame, inadvertently gave Geert Wilders and Fitna a huge publicity boost. “Millions of people who didn’t even know that this film existed,” Condell observes, “have now made a point of seeking it out on the internet thanks to the stupidity, the incompetence, and the cowardice of the British government.” Quite right. But Condell’s main point concerns the fate of liberty and free speech in England and the West generally. We have just witnessed an extraordinary capitulation to evil and intolerance. Where will it end? As Condell asks at the end of his video, “How much more of your freedom needs to be whittled away to defend this intolerant, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic ideology from the robust and frank and open criticism that it so richly deserves?”
Good question! Jacqui Smith speaks about promoting “community harmony.” That was something that Muzzammil Hassan, of Orchard Park, New York, pretended to be interested in as well. Hassan is the founder of Bridges TV, a cable network that was launched in 2004 and that aimed to portray Muslims in a positive light. Its slogan was “connecting people through understanding.” On Thursday, as Geert Wilders was being deported, Hassan was arrested and charged with beheading his wife.
What is it about Muslims and this penchant for separating people from their heads (and other parts of their anatomy)? I mentioned Hassan’s surgical method of connecting, or rather “disconnecting,” people through understanding to my friend in England when we were talking about Wilders. “The full Muslim,” he called it. Is that disrespectful? Or is it merely an unpalatable truth? I know what Daniel Pearl would say, if only he were alive to say it.
Harmony in the UK thats’ a joke.
More akin to cowboys and Indians awaiting a starter whistle.
Don’t forget Johann Hari’s recent columns in the Independent UK.
First of all –
“…Ms. Smith, by drawing a casual link between unhappy Muslims and likely violence, actually makes a point very similar to that being made by Wilders. “What the Home Office means…”
Did you mean to say “causal link”? Perhaps your spellchecker “corrected” it. That happened to me once in an offline publication. At least that was the editor’s excuse. Changes the whole meaning of your words though. Or perhaps you did mean “casual” link?
For me there is nothing casual about it. In fact “casual” is a word I’d be surprised if these extremists understood or ever used. Too gentle.
Jacqui Smith was wrong, so wrong to deny Free Speech in my country. And now the government has inadvertently let the cat out of the bag.
Apart from Free Speech there are umpteen issues here and not just the fact that Islamicist fundamentalists and even fairly “moderate” Muslims get upset over criticism, while we have to swallow hard while they scream incessant insults and threats at us in OUR used and abused land.
The government is SCARED, BIG TIME.
Brown is terrified of riots over both the economy (his baby as Chancellor for 11 years, not Blair’s) AND when people’s eyes are opened to the inequities within Britain. Most people haven’t really noticed, aided in their blindness by a compliant Left press.
Things like bigamy, polygamy, multiple social security claims, frequent forced marriage still, honour killings still ongoing (formerly described as “domestics”), female mutilation, Islamic washrooms in secular, even Church of England schools, Christian school services altered or removed, Christian crosses disallowed while burkhas are permitted, Sharia courts in 5 cities. I could go on.
Wilders would have become the focus for this. He would also have been able to highlight the fact that the lack of authoritative Islamic leadership means that there can be few decisions made to which each Muslim must comply. A child can preach to men (boy child of course). And even head mullahs are forbidden to alter the Koran or interpret its violent teachings as “out of place, out of time”.
The issues are deep and consequential. Brown does not want riots on this on his watch.
And he does not have Blair’s ability to calm jangled nerves.
It is as mentioned above.
FEAR. Writ large.
And the end result is that for the first time EVER we have banned FREE SPEECH and banned a fellow European from using it.
The Home Secretary is likely to have to face the European Court over this.
I hope she and her dhimmi boss both end up eating dirt.
That’s exactly what they deserve.
Thanks to “Blair Supporter” @3: yes, I did mean “causal” not “casual”: now fixed.
SIGNPOSTS ON THE ROAD
=====================
It’s hard to believe that the England that has just deported Geert Wilders is the same England that we once knew and loved.
It’s one thing when a Moslem state like Dubai deports two Brits for fornicating nude on the pristine beaches of Araby.
That’s a perfectly understandable and even commendable interference (trampling, some people would call it) on the free sexual rights of individuals by a government .
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262642
[Would that the US government had interfered in a similar fashion on a recent “sexual” event in the state of California].
But It’s quite another when the bastion of free speech of Western civilization deports a perfectly respectable foreign citizen for fear of “what he might say”.
Yet this type of thing is becoming the rule rather than the exception in Britain. Let’s not forget the cowardly acts exhibited upon the publication of the book “Alms for Jihad” a couple of years ago and the ballyhoo that caused.
(To refresh your memory, the book was pulled from bookstores and libraries nearly world-wide and remaining copies at the publisher’s were shredded).
Still, we must not lose sight of the forest for the trees.
As I recently mentioned either here or elsewhere, I’d like to remind readers that the vast majority of acts and events that tend to disparage Islam in the eyes of Westerners (such as the Wilders affair), are performed not by *Arab* Moslems but by sub-continental Moslems (the Indo/Pakistan crowd).
All the main characters mentioned in Mr. Kimball’s article are sub-continentals in origin, from Nazir Ahmed to the murderer of Daniel Pearl. [Or, they are Westerners, but that’s another story].
This is a most important point to remember, to the extent that if you are unaware of it or you discount what its ramifications and iimplications are, and, if you are going to discuss the Western/Islamic confrontation, you simply don’t know, in my opinion, what you’re talking about.
Just a day or two old, a major shakeup in the Saudi government, barely reported in the Western press, if at all, has just taken place in the Kingdom.
I urge all readers with an interest in this subject to read it carefully. Here’s the first paragraph of my source:
…….RIYADH (AFP) — King Abdullah on Saturday made sweeping changes to his government, axing [like that word] the head of the religious police and appointing Saudi Arabia’s first-ever woman (+) deputy minister in the biggest shakeup since he took over the throne.
Full story at:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gNttcO4qrInojf_FpMljQSsK3KSw
Roger reports: In her most recent act of cravenness, Ms. Smith declared that Wilders’s presence in Britain “would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the U.K.”
By that standard, England should pull out of all future World Cup competitions. When England loses, “community harmony” is threatened by the soccer hooligans who will wreak havoc on the country. When England wins, “community harmony” is threatened by the soccer hooligans who will wreak havoc on the country.
Are not those threats to “public security” in the U.K. on a much more regular and predictable scale than letting a single foreign MP attend a single movie screening?
We Yanks lament lately that we’re “losing” England. Newsflash: It’s already gone.
So let’s see. The British government doesn’t want him in the country because (1) it is an evil slur to say Muslims are violent, and (2) if he is let in, Muslims will riot violently.
Imagine Mr. X made a movie, “Jews: the Evil Controllers of the World’s Economy”, and the UK government refused to let him into the country because (1) he is an antisemite, and (2) if he is allowed in, the Jews will retailiate by collapsing the UK’s banking system.
Wouldn’t that just be proving Mr. X is right?
Some people have no sense of irony.
>>>>>“would threaten community harmony”
“Muslim thugs will riot”.
Any word yet on whether Muzzammil Hassan’s lawyer has petitioned the court to re-orient Hassan’s toilet so that it no longer faces Mecca?
What is it about Muslims and this penchant for separating people from their heads (and other parts of their anatomy)?
The Koran commands: “smite the neck of the unbeliever.”
Is it possible that there is more to the story about Mrs. Hassan? For the believer, other forms of killing are used.
Is this a case of apostasy by the wife?
Whistle-Blower,
Good “Sign-Posts” post – it lines up some ducks for me.
By reassigning the roots of modern Islamicist terror to Pakistan, it is much easier to equate this export’s tactics and ideology with Europe’s modern collectivist ones, and, in so doing, unmask it as the proxy it is.
The economic and social agenda both espouse is coercive, orthodox, rigidly-stratified and controlled (its telling that both exhort bans on private usury). In this, both converge to represent bondage and a return to that tireless human vanity we call slavery.
Putting meat on the bones of your argument: it is well-known that Pakistan’s political discourse has been cross-pollinated (polluted?) by European “anti-colonialism” and Marxist/Leninist thought to a much higher degree than has the Arabian Peninsula’s ruling class. And, to guess at her motivation, it is by virtue of Pakistan’s design and inception as a hindu-free, anglo-phobic “Republic” that she is constitutionally anti-pluralistic and resentful of colonial parliamentary processes. In other words, Pakistan is congenitally handicapped. She doesn’t “do-democracy” very well.
In a nut-shell, tracking the so-called “Islamist” movement to an echelon of London School of Economics graduates (ie. Socialists) holed-up in offices in Karachi, will make it a lot easier to pin the “Islamist” tail on the Left’s donkey.
Whistle_Blower, with follow on by steveaz; now that is really quite good, I’d been used to blaming the lefties at Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne for a lot of the ills of the developing world. By all means, lets add the lot at LSE! Really, Whistle_Blower, that idea merits further development.
Yes, he is entertaining but the problem with Condell is his failure to see the inevitable link between post-Christian Britain and this whole affair. Condell amusingly criticizes ALL religious faith in his youtube vlogs, but completely misses the connection between this multiculti postmodern cowardice on Jacqui Smith’s and others parts and the way that Britain (and all of western Europe and only slightly less so America) has been transformed into a society of weakness, intolerance, and, to use Bork’s phrase, one of “radical, autonomous individualism”. Condell is right to condemn this nonsense and does so in a sometimes very funny way, but like almost all on the left who fail to see the necessity of the CULTURE of Western Christendom (or Judeo-Christian civilization if you prefer) in preserving, or even UNDERSTANDING the importance of an objective, rational, real notion of “tolerance”, he is only so useful (a court jester’s “usefulness” in a kingdom) in the fight we must fight in modernizing the Islamic world, and resisting the Smiths of the world who appease the Muslims who won’t be modernized. I get the feeling, with all due respect, that some conservatives who keep lauding the Pat Condells of the world are failing to understand this.
That turboprop droning in your ear is the sound of Churchill rotating in his grave.
This gutless capitulation is all the more despicable because Geert Wilders is not the hater of Muslims that he is portayed as. Charles Moore is wrong, as I said in a comment on his piece – Wilders is not a racist or even a bigot. Drawing attention to those verses in the Koran that some Muslims act on and commit atrocities, Wilders challenges Muslims to debate and reform their religion. So he is actually for cohesion, not against it.
I’ve got more to say on this in my article at PJM, which should be up tomorrow.
“After all, it was he who, when Muslims started torching embassies and killing people when a Danish paper published some cartoons of their prophet…”
In the interests of journalistic objectivity, shouldn’t that read “cartoons of their alleged prophet”?
Now there’s a useful term. Next time we hear of an abortion clinic bombing, we can call it “the full Christian.”
Western civilization- The coulture of death wish meeting the coulture of suicide bomber.
The UK has gone down the rat hole. A government of politically correct spineless weaklings afraid of exercising democratic actions. The British nanny state has so screwed up life in the UK,no wonder citizens are outraged with the UK government.Which obviously is fearful of the Muslim threat. One of the ways to counter that is to STAND UP to the threats.Not back down. A bunch of pussies!!
I live in Eastern Canada, and I fear this brand of spineless moral cowardice that passes for liberalism over here is going to allow these monsters to march right into our lives with no real friction whatsoever. We are saddled with the same equivocating politicians and I fear they will not be able to stand up to this method of insinuation. The shocking thing is how many people don’t see the pall these people are casting over our way of life.
Ironically I found your column researching talking points about Muslims on the CBC site. Your column is bang on and I will keep reading!