Geert Who?

The news out of the Geert Wilders show trial today is that the Dutch court is refusing to hear but three of the eighteen witnesses Wilders had wished to call.

What is one to make of this but that it shows an obvious desire on the part of the judges to keep things as quiet and short as possible. Once again we see that the "liberal" elites ruling the West simply cannot both defend their dogmatic positions on multiculturalism and "hate speech" without trying to shut up people who point out some of the deep problems with their ideology. And no problem is greater than the question of whether Islam, as it exists today in Europe, is compatible with European liberal democracy.

Diana West notes that it is not just the Dutch judges who don't want to hear too much about Islam, it is also the global media. One might have thought that when the government of a Western state puts on trial the Parliamentary leader of the party currently highest in the polls, this would be big news to those who supposedly pride themselves in chronicling and commenting on the ways of liberal democracy. Apparently not:

If anyone is puzzled as to why there is so little MSM coverage of this trial that is in the shameful and historic tradition of the trial of Galileo, the reason is unspoken, possibly unconscious media cowardice and embarassment: cowardice driven by the chilling effect of the experience of Kurt Westergaard and other critics of Islam under permanent death threat; and embarassment driven by intense discomfort with frank discussion of the gross incompatibility of basic Islamic beliefs with Western society.

In other words, this code of silence is the code of dhimmitude.

This reminded me of Paul Berman's conclusion to his celebrated 2007 New Republic essay on Tariq Ramadan:

The [Salman] Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, compared unfavorably in the press with the Islamist philosopher [Tariq Ramadan] who writes prefaces for the collected fatwas of Sheik al-Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb. Today the menace to society is declared to be Hirsi Ali and people of similar minds, of whom there are quite a few: John Stuart Mill's Muslim admirers, who are said to be just as fanatical as the fanatics. During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism [by the lefist establishment].

How did this happen? The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women's rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss with any frankness the role of Ramadan's family over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks--what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.

As for Geert Wilders, he apparently is not amused to be tried by judges who apparently suffer in fear of what they might hear and have to judge. Gates of Vienna reports Wilders' comments:

“This court is apparently not interested in the truth. I cannot conclude anything but that the court does not award me a fair trial,” Geert Wilders said after the court in Amsterdam rejected fifteen of the eighteen witnesses chosen by him.

“I have no respect for this,” Wilders added. He pointed out that in a typical criminal case there are often dozens of witnesses heard. He believes that his case, which he calls a matter of great principle, would also deserve that. Otherwise he cannot prove that he has spoken the truth with the statements that led to his prosecution.

The time is come when we all have to decide whether to shut up or face down our fear of the left-terrorist alliance.

As usual, Walker provides a great roundup of Geert Wilders news.

Shut up, already! Khurrum Awan sues Ezra Levant; comparisons made to Wilders trial and Fort Hood denial

The news going around the Canadian blogs today is that Khurrum Awan is carrying through with his previous threat to sue Ezra Levant. The details of the case are provided by Ezra at the link, along with his reminder of his need for financial donations:

instead of just fighting this lawsuit passively, what if I could use it to go on the offensive, and really root around inside the Canadian Islamic Congress, and expose their anti-Semitic, anti-Canadian ways? The trial will be partly about what I’ve written -- no problem. But it will equally be about Awan’s reputation, and that of the CIC. It will give me a chance to ask Awan questions he’s never been asked before, and to see documents he’s never had to disclose before.

I’ll be able to expose the CIC for the venomous outfit that it is. I can picture spending at least an hour talking with Awan about his organization’s call for the decriminalization of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups.

My friends, I don’t like being sued. But I have to tell you, of all the junk lawsuits thrown at me because of my campaign for free speech – and there have been plenty – this one is in some ways the most important. If I handle this one right, I can expose the true nature of the CIC and the radical Islamist, pro-terrorist groups in Canada with whom Awan has consorted.

Let me quote a Jew now, just because it will irritate Awan. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote nearly 100 years ago, “publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” I'm going to bring some klieg lights to trial on this one.

I believe that nothing will disinfect our public square better than scrutiny and publicity of how illiberal Islamic fascists are waging war against our values. I hope that the lasting impact of this trial will be the complete and final detonation of the CIC’s credibility.

Bring it on.

Can you help me, please?

As I mentioned, this lawsuit will probably cost me $50,000 to fight. And it’s just one of many suits and complaints that the same cabal has hit me with, again and again.

Over the past two years I’ve been hit with three human rights complaints, over twenty complaints to the law society and this is the fifth defamation suit. That's 28 suits and complaints. And they’re all junk lawsuits – SLAPP suits designed to shut me up.

I won the three human rights cases, and the first twenty law society complaints have all been dismissed. So far I have a perfect track record: 23 out of 23. Unfortunately, even if you win these sorts of nuisance complaints, you don’t get your legal costs back, so it’s been expensive.

If you’d like to help me, I’d appreciate it. It's expensive fighting two dozen legal fights, even if they are junk.... And I certainly don’t want this suit to change what I say or do in my life, especially my ability to criticize radical Islam and its politically correct allies.

Again, the details on how to donate are found on Ezra's post.

What links can we draw between what appears to be a lawsuit largely intended to hassle and fetter one of Canada's leading critics of Islamic "lawfare", by making a mountain of the molehill that, included in Ezra's reporting on the Canadian Islamic Congress' attempt to use the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal to punish Maclean's magazine for publishing Mark Steyn's columns denouncing the failure of Europeans to reproduce and to protect Western cultures from "Islamization", was an observation that Khurrum Awan under cross examination appeared to have been caught in a lie?

Phyllis Chesler draws the comparison to what is going on in Europe with Geert Wilders:

I have been privileged to meet and hear Dutch Parliamentarian and possible future Prime Minister, Geert Wilders, speak in New York City. Together, with other invited guests of the Hudson Institute, we watched Wilders’ short film, Fitna, which shows terrorist scenes of devastation around the world — we have all seen them on the nightly news. Fitna also has real mullahs reading aloud from the Qu’ran — reading passages that in all truth are contained there. The film, accompanied by a brilliant musical soundtrack, allows us to connect the dots. It does not preach so much as “show.”

Nevertheless, just as Kurt Westergaard’s “Danish Muhammed cartoons” were hardly offensive by Western standards — that did not stop a global jihad against them which continues to this very day. Yale University Press refused to publish the cartoons in a book they themselves commissioned about the cartoons. And Canadian author Howard Rotberg had to become a publisher himself in order to have his say despite Canada’s political correctness where certain subjects are concerned.

And, “lawfare” (war by legal action) and the lawsuits do not stop coming. The same litigious Muslim-Canadian who sued Mark Steyn for telling the truth and for daring to venture his own witty opinion, (which opinion “offended” certain professional easy-to-offend Muslims), is now suing Ezra Levant. Kathy Shaidle has a good piece about this here. Shaidle quotes Levant himself about Khurrum Awan, the man who is suing him. And, by the way, Awan is a second-generation Canadian Muslim.
[...]
By 2003/2004, I, and a handful of others, had already understood that free speech/truth speech were under siege in the West, and that the first row of attackers were precisely those Western intellectuals who prided themselves on their commitment to free speech but who behaved like totalitarian censors. No, they did not burn books; they simply refused to publish or review them. They “disappeared” certain authors by not interviewing them. Or, these cultural gatekeepers demonized the book, its author, and the ideas presented. They, the censors, labeled anything that ran afoul of the Party Line as a “fascist, racist, Islamophobic” work.

American professors became very careful and exceedingly quiet on campus when the subjects of Israel, American imperialism, or Islam were raised. Many Jewish students cared more about “not offending” the Muslim students than they cared about telling the truth about jihad, or about the war against the Jews.

Those who saw things as I did began publishing samizdat, American-style. The conservative media and the internet became the above-ground venues for our “underground” publishing ventures. I — a radical feminist, an American patriot, and a Zionist — really fell down Alice’s rabbit hole; my mates in the bunker were conservatives with whom I both agreed and disagreed on the burning issues of the day. This was clear: We all knew we were in a war, we all feared the fifth column in our midst, and none of us had any intention of surrendering. The other issues were important, but not as important.

We live in curious times. On the one hand, it is not difficult to find commentary, such as in this interview with sober ex-Muslim scholar Ibn Warraq, pointing out what is becoming obvious to large numbers of people on all sides of the current "clash of civilizations" - Ibn Warraq is speaking to the question of how Western societies can mix the need to tolerate cultural differences with the need of those same societies to remain coherent, orderly, and free:

there has got to be a common core of principles which are accepted by everyone, otherwise you will have chaos. Society cannot exist unless you have agreement on the basic principles; so that would mean Muslims having to shed some of the principles they were brought up on. There is no compatibility between Islam interpreted strictly and liberal democracy; this is obvious; take the position of women; they are considered inferior; men have the right to beat them; they have less rights in inheritance and so on.

And yet at the same time, we live in a world where official parlance cannot make any such simple statement. For example, Diana West is reporting how, in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti and the spectacular result in the recent Massachusetts Senate election, the official Pentagon report on the Fort Hood mass murder is being relatively ignored. The report - on the murderer, Nidal M. Hasan who, as a vast array of evidence has shown, was clearly motivated by his not-uncommon understanding of Islam, an understanding and the violent dilemmas it posed for him that he himself outlined logically in a Power Point presentation to fellow service people - is

86 pages long and doesn't mention the words "Muslim," "Islam," "jihad," "Sharia" (Islamic law), "Koran" -- despite the fact that we know, among other things, that the killer, who initiated his massacre with a cry of "Allahu Akbar," was a Muslim inspired by Islam to perform an act of jihad as sanctioned by Sharia derived from the Koran.

These facts, however, rate official silence. So what else is new? From the Bush years to the present, see-no-Islam denial has turned U.S. government attempts to assess and discuss national security issues into Kabuki gibberish, a perpetual exercise in make-believe that the core doctrines and traditional institutions of Islam -- not "radical Islam," not "Islamism," not other aliases -- pose no threat to the core doctrines and traditional institutions of the non-Islamic Free World. Naturally, mum's the Pentagon word over jihad at Fort Hood. Or, rather, "self-radicalization" is the word. It is mentioned more than a dozen times in the report.

I can't imagine a greater dereliction of duty than this failure of U.S. government leaders to recognize, articulate and defend against what in military parlance is known as the "enemy threat doctrine." But this dereliction, this failure will trigger no investigations or court proceedings on how and why our leaders consistently mask, soft-soap and otherwise fail to assess and repel the existential threat posed by the imposition or accommodation of these same Islamic doctrines.

Talk about irony: Within days of the report's release, one of the few politicians in the world who understands, articulates and fights the imposition and accommodation of these same Islamic doctrines went on trial in the Netherlands for doing exactly that.

I refer again to Geert Wilders...

I am of the view that most things that can be explained by the deeply human traits of laziness and the need for deferral of conflict should be so simply explained. I rather doubt there are many people in the Pentagon who actually think that the Fort Hood massacre was anything other than an Islamically-inspired, Jihadi attack, however much they would admit the possibility of multiple interpretations of Islam and however much we must acknowledge that Islam is a political religion that mitigates against Western forms of "corporate personhood"(Western capacity to create all kinds of associations and representative figures) and so its responsible or representative actors are as much lonely individuals as corporate entities (see Roger Scruton's discussions of Malise Ruthven, here and here). But there are many who will go along with not saying so publicly, lest their careers suffer the arbitrary and irrational sanctions of political correctness.

It is the essence of the human to want to defer conflict. But proper knowledge of this fact requires we also know when we are becoming cowardly and foolish in following one imperative and not another. Sometimes a little conflict is necessary to defer potential for larger conflict. We are living in dangerous times. I think we need to heed Ibn Warraq's words above and see that we need to give up the liberal ideology that thinks if only we are nice and appeasing to Muslims, in the name of their alleged victimization, especially to Muslims who insist on outlawing any criticism of Islam according to the dictates of Sharia law, then we will have peace, forgetting that "peace" is what Islam calls "submission". Rather, we need to assert that any successful integration of Islam in our now global civilization, with its single global economy, will require Muslims giving up certain Koranic imperatives, indeed whatever makes Islam more of a totalitarian political ideology than the kind of private religion that could find a place in the highly-differentiated structures of our shared modern civilization. Of course it is just the assumed impossibility of this "giving up" that lead some, like Nidal Hasan, to violence and self-destruction. Their dilemma must be named for what it is; we must give it the respect it's due, that we push Muslims, others, and ourselves to think through what we really believe when faced with the need to make choices between a Western-led modernity and Sharia. To this end, we might start by offering support, as we can, to Ezra Levant for daring to criticize what he chooses to call "radical Islam" and its attempted enforcement of an orthodox, Sharia-informed ban against criticizing Islam.

Kill Your Parents.

The following "paragraph" seems to be denouncing the formation of a new and improved version of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). If not, then please excuse me for not getting it.

I got news for you asshole, this is a new SDS that means that it might not be exactly the same as the old SDS. Not only that but my parents wouldn't buy me an x-box nor would I want one, wasting all your time on those stupid video games is not something I want to do. I am actually commited to changing things in this country and am working towards that instead of living in some happy little fantasy world where everything is just peachy. Soldiers and families in Iraq are dying right now, womens and queer rights are being flushed slowly down the toliet, corruption is running rampant as well as poverty, workers are getting screwed, and you know what rather than be a complacent whino like you, I am trying to work against all that stuff and I think maybe you should try it too or just stay the heck away from politics. It seems like you can't take the heat, but for some reason you won't leave the kitchen so your just standing in the kitchen whining!
http://dc.indymedia.org/mod/comments/display/150639/index.php

Some might recall Tom Hayden as more than Jane Fonda's ex-husband. He was in his prime, a co-founder of the SDS. I was thinking Hayden and his lot earlier this evening as I considered writing a review of Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up . I thought of titling the post "Go West, Young Man." Then, thinking of Hayden, I recalled the slogan from the 60s that I'm using here as headline. I might not have been the smartest kid when I was growing up in Slackjaw, Alabama, so that probably explains why I assumed the slogan was meant metaphorically, as some fancy-pants Yankee hyperbole. Now, having read some large portion of West's book, I'm not so sure it was not meant literally by the Haydenesque totalitarians of the time. Nor am I so sure this evening that if it was meant literally that it would have been such a bad thing. Yes, dear reader, that is an instance of Walkerian humor. "Ha." (Wait for it because another approaches.) "Ha."

Enough preamble.

Diana West, a writer I was not until a few days ago familiar with, or rather, with whose writing I was not familiar, has won me over in a matter a few short hours. How could it be otherwise? The kiddie Lefties like the one quoted above above hate her. She's a -- gasp-- conservative!

This brief analysis from amazon.com sort of sums it all up.

By Preston C. Enright (Denver, CO United States)
Another hate-mongering, arrogant conservative, imagine that?
Actually, these so-called "conservatives" are simply corporate lobbyists throwing out these bigoted arguments to delude/divert their audience about the realities of US foreign policy, global corporatism, ecocide and other pressing issues that the ruling elite doesn't want us to think about. West is fortunate that there is a segment of the US population that is profiting off of our society of mass destruction, so they welcome these ridiculous books with open arms.
If people are worried about how people are being encouraged to be irresponsible, it may be worth their while to study the most powerful entity in the world today, private transnational corporations.
The Corporation
West and the corporatist cabal she works for must just laugh at how easy it is to get some people to believe this nonsense, and also the way some will consciously avoid any ideas that challenge their world view.
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Grad. School ain't what it use to be.

According to Diana West, things aren't what they used to be since the end of World War Two when American parents decided that their children knew better than adults. News to me. News that such a thing could be seen so early on as the late 1940s and the 50s. Parents, West writes, gave up their responsibilities as adults and as parents, seemingly en masse, and decided that Buddy and Sissy were so special that they should run the family and then the world. Cool, daddy-O.

Except that it came true and it's totally fucked up.

West doesn't make the argument that we should kill our parents. (I don't either.) West's book makes the argument that leads me as a reader to wish the parents of the hippie generation had killed themselves and saved us all a world of hurt. I feel that way. So it must be valid.

West has written an easily accessible work, a few hundred pages long, word-witty, and insightful. Reader reviews at amazon make it clear that this is a book one either loves or hates, the five star system there being mostly fives or ones. I'm a four and a half guy here. I don't quite grasp, if its still to come, why the Greatest Generation abdicated their responsibilities as adult parents in favor of grotesque indulgence of children. I don't understand, from reading this book, why adults want to be perpetual children in the Western World.

Look at this as Part One. I'll try to finish the book tomorrow and continue in the hope of making clear that this is at least so far a book I think our readers for the most part will want to read. If you have read it, then please leave a comment. I would like to meet people who enjoy this book.