The essence of Wilders’s crime

Andrew McCarthy cleverly captures the essence of the charges against Geert Wilders:

For a prosecutor, it was a simple matter of cause and effect. First, I showed that the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, called for acts of violence: He admonished Muslims that Allah commanded them to slay non-believers and precisely quoted Islamic scriptures to back up that admonition. Then I showed that Muslim terrorists responded to these scripturally based exhortations by plotting and carrying out terrorist acts.

For this, the Clinton administration presented me the Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award, the Justice Department’s highest honor. For doing exactly the same thing, the justice department of the Netherlands presented Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders with an indictment.

Oddly, however, McCarthy seems to be unaware of the deeply ambiguous and bizarre nature of the trial (or so it seems to those of us insufficiently familiar with the Napoleonic Code). In the same article, which was posted at 4 a.m. this morning, he writes that “Wilders has been acquitted.” Of course he has not been acquitted. As VFR and other sites have been reporting since Tuesday, the prosecutors have recommended that the first charge against Wilders and then the second charge against Wilders be dropped, but the decision is up to the judges, who are virulently anti-Wilders and show no disposition to drop the case. However, in a Corner entry posted at 5 p.m. yesterday, McCarthy indicated his understanding that the trial is not over.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 16, 2010 06:39 AM | Send