The WSJ calls on the Netherlands to stop the trial of Geert Wilders—but guess why?

My brain is running out of the neurotransmitters that transmit amazement. The Wall Street Journal has an article this week that calls on the Netherlands to cancel the trial of Geert Wilders—but not because it is wrong to put a man on trial for stating opinions; and not because it is totalitarian to send a man to prison for criticizing Islam. In fact, the author, Leon de Winter, does not actually find fault with the Netherlands’ “hate-speech” laws under which Wilders is being tried, and his strongest criticism of the effort by Dutch prosecutors to put Wilders in prison for his opinions that it is “preposterous.” He does not call it tyrannical

Why, then, does de Winter want the trial to be stopped? Because the trial will expose the violent, hate-filled teachings of Islam, and that must be prevented at all costs. As he writes: “On trial is not so much Geert Wilders, but the Holy Book of Islam.”

There’s a secondary harm de Winter sees resulting from the trial: Wilders might be convicted. But, as de Winter makes clear, the reason he wants to prevent that outcome is not that Wilders would be fined or go to jail and that the people of the West would be scared into silence on the subject of the encroaching power of Islam. No, de Winter want to prevent the conviction of Wilders because it will make Wilders more popular and help advance his cause.

From de Winter’s reasoning it is clear that if Geert Wilders had not declared at the openiing of the trial on January 20 his intention to make the truth of his statements about Islam the basis of his defense, de Winter would not have called for the cancellation of the trial. He is doing so, not in order to protect Wilders and other besieged Islam critics from tyrannical leftist governments, but in order to protect Islam from the truth.

One last point. From a quick look around the Web, it appears that conservative websites think that de Winter’s column is pro-Wilders, mainly because of its title, “Stop the Trial of Geert Wilders.” They don’t seem to realize that the column is anti-Wilders, and pro-Islam.

Stop the Trial of Geert Wilders
A Dutch court is forced to compare Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and the Quran.
By LEON DE WINTER
JANUARY 26, 2010

What started as a trial against Geert Wilders for alleged Islamophobia has nearly turned into its opposite: a historical case about the message of the Quran. The Amsterdam court trying the controversial Dutch politician is now preoccupied with the question of whether this book, sacred to more than a billion believers, can be compared to one of the most vile publications in the history of Western civilization—Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” What could possibly go wrong?

In his writing and speeches, Mr. Wilders has found these two works to be similar in terms of their anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred, and has thus called for a publishing ban on the Quran similar to the one in place for “Mein Kampf.” This is what triggered Mr. Wilders’s prosecution for discriminatory and insulting remarks against Muslims and Islam. The Dutch politician, though, denies having insulted Muslims. He insists his focus is on radical Islam and the Quran, which he considers to be not only a religious text but also a political pamphlet encouraging Muslims to discriminate against and, if necessary, kill Jews, Christians, apostates and other unbelievers. That’s why Mr. Wilders claims the right to criticize and condemn Islam.

Following complaints brought by mostly Muslim and radical leftist activists, Amsterdam’s district attorney in 2008 at first found no legal basis for prosecuting Mr. Wilders. Prosecutors were forced to change course only after an activist appeals court last year ordered Mr. Wilders’s prosecution—basically condemning the politician before any trial could even begin and before Mr. Wilders had a chance to defend himself. The court’s unusual intervention illustrates the Dutch confusion about the conflict between two essential rights: the right to free speech and the right to protection from discrimination. [LA replies: that’s de Winter’s strongest criticism of the Dutch authorities; not that they are acting like tyrants, but that they are “confused” about how to balance the right of free speech with the right of Islam to be protected from truthful criticism. Winter himself does not say how he would resolve this confusion.]

According to polls, Mr. Wilders’s Freedom Party, a libertarian-conservative movement with populist tendencies, is currently the most popular political party in the Netherlands. If elections were held today, Mr. Wilders would be a serious contender for the position of prime minister. Mr. Wilders’s detractors are mistaken if they think a conviction would hurt him politically. The trial is a win-win situation for him: If the court rules to restrict Mr. Wilders’s right to free speech, many Dutchmen will interpret this as an effort by the politically correct establishment to limit the growing strength of the Freedom Party, which would widen its appeal to many voters. If, on the other hand, the prosecution fails to prove that Mr. Wilders has purposely insulted Muslims because of their religion, Mr. Wilders’s views will be seen as vindicated. Again, he will gain politically.

More importantly, Mr. Wilders’s prosecution may in the end inadvertently create a crisis between the Netherlands and the Islamic world. On trial is not so much Geert Wilders, but the Holy Book of Islam. On Jan. 20, the first day of the case, Mr. Wilders’s defense team presented the court with a list of expert witnesses. It is indicative of his strategy. The expert witnesses, a group of internationally renowned academics on the one hand and, on the other, radical Islamists (among them Mohammed Bouyeri, the killer of Theo van Gogh, and the influential Iranian Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, an outspoken anti-Semite and religious mentor of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad), are requested to testify about the Quran’s message and Mr. Wilders’s comparison of the Quran to “Mein Kampf.” As Mr. Wilders stated on the first and, so far only, session in court, if his statements about the Quran and “Mein Kampf” are correct, he cannot be convicted for telling the truth. So Mr. Wilders’s defense team will concentrate on the extreme and violent paragraphs in the Quran, and compare them to paragraphs in “Mein Kampf.”

The prosecution did not object to calling the witnesses for the purpose of shedding light on the Quran and “Mein Kampf” and only objected to the high number of witnesses named (17). The court will thus most likely allow most witnesses on the list to testify. Without doubt, there are many anti-Jewish remarks in the Quran. According to some researchers, there may be more of these in the Quran than in “Mein Kampf.” So it is quite conceivable that the court will judge that Geert Wilders was within his right to compare the Quran to “Mein Kampf.” Anything is possible in this absurd trial.

The three judges hearing the case—no doubt decent, modest, postmodern Dutchmen with a minimum knowledge of Islam and its culture and traditions—will now be forced to debate the nature of a religious text, something that should have never been heard in the court of an enlightened society. In front of the judges and television cameras, the ancient founding text of an entire civilization will be criticized and weighed against one of the most inhumane texts written in the 20th century—without any doubt a deep insult to Muslims, radical or not.

There is a way out. The district attorney’s office has complied with the appeals court’s order to prosecute Mr. Wilders. The trial has started. It should now ask the court for an acquittal. This preposterous trial needs to be stopped right now.

Mr. de Winter is a Dutch novelist and adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.

- end of initial entry -

Jed W. writes:

The Mein Kampf analogy is on the money. De Winters is a PC sheep like so many others. Oh let’s not insult the people that are collectively trying to enslave us.

LA writes:

A reader sent this article to several correspondents with a cc to me. His cover note says:

Remember the WSJ article a week or so ago—I certainly thought it pro-Wilders, calling for the authorities to drop the case against Wilders. Now take a look at Larry Auster’s analysis of the article here—very different slant.

James P. writes:

De Winter says,

“The Amsterdam court trying the controversial Dutch politician is now preoccupied with the question of whether this book, sacred to more than a billion believers, can be compared to one of the most vile publications in the history of Western civilization—Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’”

So the great popularity of a text renders it immune to criticism? Would he have argued in 1941 that criticism of Mein Kampf was unthinkable because it was “sacred” to millions of believers in Nazism?

“Mr. Wilders’s prosecution may in the end inadvertently create a crisis between the Netherlands and the Islamic world.”

If telling the truth about Islam “creates a crisis” between Islam and the Netherlands, then there is already a crisis between Islam and the Netherlands, though the Netherlands is in denial about it.

“So it is quite conceivable that the court will judge that Geert Wilders was within his right to compare the Quran to ‘Mein Kampf.’ Anything is possible in this absurd trial.”

What is “absurd” about telling the truth about Islam? If there are more anti-Semitic remarks in the Quran than in Mein Kampf, then such a comparison is apt and true, however much Muslims may dislike it.

“The three judges hearing the case—no doubt decent, modest, postmodern Dutchmen with a minimum knowledge of Islam and its culture and traditions—will now be forced to debate the nature of a religious text, something that should have never been heard in the court of an enlightened society.”

Apparently the assumption here is that “knowledge of Islam and its culture and traditions” would somehow allow these judges to understand, overlook, and excuse the vile anti-Semitic messages and calls to violence in the Quran.

Also, we should note that it is precisely the “postmodern, enlightened society” of the Netherlands that demanded this trial by enacting hate-speech laws. Christian religious fanatics did not force the state to take a position on the nature of Muslim religious texts; the state itself brought this about when it insisted on prosecuting someone for making statements about the nature of Muslim religious texts. If the state proscribes free public debate on the nature of religious texts, then that debate must inevitably take place in the courtroom, and only the state is to blame for this outcome.

In my view, an “enlightened society” would not prosecute hate speech at all, and thus this trial would never have occurred.

“In front of the judges and television cameras, the ancient founding text of an entire civilization will be criticized and weighed against one of the most inhumane texts written in the 20th century—without any doubt a deep insult to Muslims, radical or not.”

De Winter, it seems, has ruled out the possibility that the “ancient founding text of an entire civilization” may be inhumane. What would de Winter think about criticism of the Bible or the founding text of any other religion besides Islam? Permitted free speech, or impermissible “hate”?

And why on Earth should the Dutch government give a damn what Muslims think about what a Netherlands citizen says? Does the Dutch government exist to protect the rights of Dutch citizens, or to protect the world’s Muslims from “insult”?

LA replies:

In reply to your last point, obviously the Dutch government, just like President Obama (as he stated in his Cairo speech), has taken on the responsibility to defend Islam from negative stereotypes, wherever they occur. In prohibiting criticism of Islam, the governments of the West have become the agents and enforcers of the Islamic law.

Also, I had missed this quote, which you bring out. De Winter wrote:

“So it is quite conceivable that the court will judge that Geert Wilders was within his right to compare the Quran to ‘Mein Kampf.’ Anything is possible in this absurd trial.”

So, according to de Winter, if the court finds that Wilders did not commit a criminal act when he compared the Koran to Mein Kampf, that would be a further indication that the Wilders trial is “absurd.”

It seems to me that de Winter is either an unthinking knee-jerk liberal who has not engaged in any analysis of the issues, or he is consciously on the side of Islam.

January 31

A. Zarkov writes:

Except for his last two paragraphs, in the main, I agree with Leon De Winter. He writes,

“The trial is a win-win situation for him [Wilders]: If the court rules to restrict Mr. Wilders’s right to free speech, many Dutchmen will interpret this as an effort by the politically correct establishment to limit the growing strength of the Freedom Party, which would widen its appeal to many voters. If, on the other hand, the prosecution fails to prove that Mr. Wilders has purposely insulted Muslims because of their religion, Mr. Wilders’s views will be seen as vindicated. Again, he will gain politically.”

Exactly correct. Geert Wilders can only benefit from this trial; the Dutch government was amazingly stupid for prosecuting him. [LA replies: but de Winter says it’s bad for Wilders to benefit from the trial, and you say it’s good; so you don’t agree with de Winter.]

De Winter then writes,

“More importantly, Mr. Wilders’s prosecution may in the end inadvertently create a crisis between the Netherlands and the Islamic world. On trial is not so much Geert Wilders, but the Holy Book of Islam.

Except for the “inadvertently” part De Winter shoots another bull’s eye. The Quran is anything but a work of moderation. If anything is “hate speech,” surely it’s the Quran.

However in his last two paragraphs, De Winter’s train jumps the tracks, rolls over in a ditch, and burns. He writes,

“The three judges hearing the case—no doubt decent, modest, postmodern Dutchmen with a minimum knowledge of Islam and its culture and traditions—will now be forced to debate the nature of a religious text, something that should have never been heard in the court of an enlightened society.”

Does he think religious texts should get some kind of free pass? Had Adolf founded the Church of Hitler, and made Mein Kampf a sacred text, would that make a difference? Finally De Winter’s loses his mind completely when he tells us,

“In front of the judges and television cameras, the ancient founding text of an entire civilization will be criticized and weighed against one of the most inhumane texts written in the 20th century—without any doubt a deep insult to Muslims, radical or not.”

If the Quran had been written in the 20th Century would that make a difference? Do ancient texts also get some kind of pass? Communism dominated more people than Islam, and it too had founding texts such as the Communist Manifesto. Was that too beyond criticism? De Winter seems to have some kind of grandfather clause for hate speech in his personal constitution.

My daughter believes as we do: stop Muslims from migrating into the West. She too gets insane justifications from people who cannot bear the truth. An engineer told her that scientific progress would stop if we kept Muslims out because that would mean they would not participate in international conferences! As bad as De Winter sounds, there is always someone who can go him one better.

Thucydides writes:

De Winter assumes that “without any doubt” the comparison of the teachings of the Koran with Mein Kampf will be “a deep insult to Muslims, radical or not.” But is this so? Can he be unaware of the close collaboration of many Muslims with the Nazis? For example, one prominent leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, spent much of World War II as their guest in Germany. Has de Winter not heard the diatribes of Iran President Ahmadinejad? Why does he assume that the comparison will be found universally objectionable?

At a deeper level, this seems to be yet another example of the liberal denial of the reality of human evil. Just as nobody took Mein Kampf seriously, even though Hitler laid out his plans in detail, because it just seemed too awful to believe, so too nobody wants to face up to the reality that Islam is not a “religion of peace,’ but one which calls on its followers to do evil, i.e., to do morally unjustified harm unto others. To acknowledge this fact would force the overturning of cherished liberal pieties, including the sentimental Rousseauian view that humans are naturally good and rational, or at least sufficiently malleable that a little education can make them that way. There is no way to reconcile this view of humanity with the fact that countless millions of Muslims in all stations of life accept the injunctions of the Koran as to the brutal treatment of non-believers as the absolute word of God, and would not dream of objecting.

To abandon the belief in the natural goodness of man would upset the idea that all cultures must be equal and equally benign, or at least potentially so, and that in turn upsets the idea of that all human beings are of equal moral worth regardless of their actions and beliefs.

LA replies:

Thucydides writes:

Islam is not a “religion of peace,” but one which calls on its followers to do evil, i.e., to do morally unjustified harm unto others.

I’ve never seen this point stated as succinctly and persuasively. And I say that as someone who has refrained from calling Islam “evil,” because I don’t feel comfortable characterizing the religion of a billion people as evil; I describe it as tyrannical and as mortally dangerous to non-Muslims .

January 31

Alan Roebuck writes:

Another way to make our case: Compare the most basic messages of Christianity and Islam.

What’s the most basic message of Christianity? No, liberals, it’s not “Be a do-gooder, like Jesus.” According to the actual evidence, the earliest message of the church was “Repent, and believe the gospel.” And, of course, that’s still the basic message of the real Christianity.

The basic message of Islam? “Submit, or die.”

Notice that the basic message of Christianity involves knowing and believing. It makes an appeal to the intellect, as well as to the will and the emotions. The basic message of Islam involves no such thing. There is no such thing as Islamic apologetics, strictly understood. There is no evidence to convince you to submit. You just should.

Think in terms of essences: “Submit” versus “Repent and believe.”

N. writes:

Is it not ironic that liberals / left liberals / leftists, such as de Winter, who pride themselves on being part of the “reality-based community,” have such a difficult time with unpleasant aspects of reality? Here we have a man who admits some of the unpleasant truths about the Koran, and his response is basically to beg everyone “Stop talking about this scary stuff!”

It’s a response more akin to a child hiding its head under the bedclothes, hoping the scary shadow in the dark corner of a room will just go away, rather than anything a “reality based” adult would do. Isn’t this astounding?

LA replies:

It reminds me of Richard John Neuhaus’s response to The Bell Curve: we just shouldn’t talk about this.

Rick U. writes:

LA wrote:

“I describe [Islam] as tyrannical and as mortally dangerous to non-Muslims .”

But, Islam is mortally dangerous to some Muslims as well. Women, children, and those outside the Jihad are brutalized routinely.

LA replies:

I don’t know that we have the power to save Muslims from Islam. We only have the power to save ourselves from Islam. Always my primary focus in discussing Islam is on what Islam means to us, the infidels, not on what it means for Muslims.

LA writes:<

P> In a new entry, I expand on the exchange between Thucydides and me on whether it is correct to call Islam evil.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 30, 2010 10:45 PM | Send