More on Geert Wilders' prosecution by foolish lawyers

An English translation of the Dutch Court of Appeal ruling calling for the criminal prosecution of Geert Wilders is here.

It is an argument that we have seen well refuted in Canada over the last year's debate on the Human Rights Commissions. I won't go into it in any detail now. However, one passage jumped out at me:

The Court of Appeal has considered that the contested views of Wilders (also as shown in his movie Fitna) constitute a criminal offence according to Dutch law as seen in connection with each other, both because of their contents and the method of presentation. This method of presentation is characterized by biased, strongly generalizing phrasings with a radical meaning, ongoing reiteration and an increasing intensity, as a result of which hate is created. According to the Court of Appeal most statements are insulting as well since these statements substantially harm the religious esteem of the Islamic worshippers. According to the Court of Appeal Wilders has indeed insulted the Islamic worshippers themselves by affecting the symbols of the Islamic belief as well.

Secondly, the Court of Appeal has answered the question whether a possible criminal prosecution or conviction would be admissible according to the norms of the European Convention on Human Rights and the jurisprudence of the European Court based thereon, which considers the freedom of expression of paramount importance. The Court of Appeal has concluded that the initiation of a criminal prosecution and a possible conviction later on as well, provided that it is proportionate[my emphasis], does not necessarily conflict with the freedom of expression of Wilders, since statements which create hate and grief made by politicians, taking their special responsibility into consideration, are not permitted according to European standards either.

Provided that it is proportionate! In other words, freedom of speech must be balanced against hate speech. This is the given assumption of the court without any serious consideration of just what it is that is being hated. The object of Wilders' hate cannot be considered for the court would not dare to "insult" Muslims by passing any serious judgment on Islam. Otherwise, how could it outlaw religious insults? Of course, I'm sure one can still insult Christianity in the Netherlands, but we are not really talking about anything but arbitrary justice on behalf of those deemed legitimate victims, when we talk about the legal concept of "proportionality".

As was noted in yesterday's post on the concept of "proportionality" applied to Israel, the concept as a ruling legal principle is mindless: we should be disproportionate in our critique or war on certain evils, like Islamist movements that foment war not on behalf of any realistic vision/reality of a state or national interest, i.e. on behalf of an orderly world, but rather in the cause of an apocalpytic ideology that calls for child martyrs to keep its genocidal flame alive.

In Wilders' somewhat different situation, the Dutch court seems to value the "proportionate" because the court refuses to make any judgments on the good and evil in religion and culture. We have no right to "insult" others too much, whatever they believe, or do, but especially if they are not part of some dominant or established religion/culture. Thus Wilders' has some right to the protection of his freedom of speech; on the other hand, he can't hate Islam too much. At a certain point his hatred is a provocation. (By the way, the court is implying that as a member of the Dutch parliament Wilders' provocation is not actually in the cause of proposing duly-constituted or legitimate legislation on immigration and related matters - Wilders is simply written off as violent - in an age when the Dutch parliament has given up much of its sovereignty to European law.) The Court of Appeal doesn't seem to be arguing for Wilders' prosecution for disturbing the peace, or uttering threats, but only because his expression of political-religious resentment is not proportionate to his right to free speech. And it doesn't really matter why. Wilders might believe the Koran is an evil book, but such value judgments have no relevance to a court in a neo-feudal culture. The court chooses, when it decides to hear a case, to single out one man of hate from the rest of us haters, including the many whose hate is encouraged by a certain popular, intuitive, reading of the Koran.

One may conclude that the cult of "proportionality" is the ascendancy of arbitrary justice: whomever offends the empire's favorites of the day will suffer. Today Wilders, but maybe tomorrow some Muslim. That is how the Dutch-EU elites apparently plan to keep the peace: making it too scary to open your mouth. But as to any rational discussion that would distinguish good and evil: it just got a lot weaker in the Netherlands. But you can't build much of a peaceful order without free debate. You can have unpeaceful debate, in recognition of a shared interest worth fighting about, or you can forego recognition of a shared national interest and live with the consequences when one or another group decides to break from the empire. So, in reality, I'm guessing the Dutch will not keep the peace very successfully, not nearly as well as would a society where people had no right not to be insulted because of their religious beliefs.

So, let me insult where I deem it appropriate: the Dutch elite are fools; their multiculti religion is self-righteous and a dangerous delusion. It will rule and end as horribly as every other Gnostic ideology ever put in power. We should all insult them for it.

Here is the statement by Wilders' Freedom Party:

Court decision an all-out assault on freedom of speech
woensdag 21 januari 2009

The Freedom Party (PVV) is shocked by the Amsterdam Court of Appeal's decision to prosecute Geert Wilders for his statements and opinions. Geert Wilders considers this ruling an all-out assault on freedom of speech.

Geert Wilders: "Apparently this is The Netherlands today. If you speak out you might be prosecuted. To participate in public debate has become a dangerous activity."

"If I have to appear in court, not only I will be prosecuted, but also hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens who reject the Islamisation of the West. In Dutch Parliament only the Party for Freedom is willing to speak up for the preservation of our culture and our many freedoms."

The Freedom Party leader now faces legal proceedings that will probably take years to conclude and will also involve enormous legal fees.

"We depend on small donations. The Freedom Party is the only party in Parliament that does not accept any government funding. This court decision jeopardizes the very existence of the Freedom Party. We simply cannot afford the enormous legal expenses."

"This is a black day for freedom."

See Fitna here

Sign the Petition and pledge to boycott Dutch goods!
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UPDATE: I regret the title of this post: "foolish" was not nearly strong enough. It is a shame that good minds have to waste time on the utter nonsense of the Dutch court's decision. Ezra Levant has an excellent line by line analysis of the court's mindless hypocrisy, its obvious politicization of the law, which Ezra rightly identifies as little more than a suicide note for the Dutch nation which now issues fatwas against its members. When a high court in what was once a leading Western democracy can descend to this self-righteous evil it is surely a wake up call that we must renew our self-ruling nations now or embrace the coming violence.

Mark Steyn also explores the suicide theme:

The Dutch, like the Canadians, think they can maintain social peace by shriveling the bounds of public discourse and bringing what little remains under state regulation. But one notices that the coercive urge, which comes so naturally to Euro-progressives, only goes in one direction. The Swedish Chancellor of Justice shuts down the investigation into the Grand Mosque of Stockholm for selling tapes urging believers to kill "the brothers of pigs and apes" (ie, Jews) because that's simply "the everyday climate in the rhetoric". The masked men marching through the streets of London with placards threatening to rain down another 9/11 on the infidels are protected by a phalanx of Metropolitan Police officers. The PC nellies of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, happy to hound the last neo-Nazi in Saskatchewan posting to the Internet from his mum's basement, won't go anywhere near Abou Hammaad Sulaiman Dameus al-Hayitia, the big-time Montreal imam whose book says infidels are "evil people", Jews "spread corruption and chaos", and homosexuals should be "exterminated".

Instead, the state's response to explicit Islamic intimidation is to punish those foolish enough to point out that intimidation. You don't have to be as intemperate as Minheer Wilders can sometimes be: In the Netherlands even the most innocuous statement can get you into trouble. To express his disgust at Theo van Gogh's murder, the artist Chris Ripke put up a mural outside his studio showing an angel and the words "Thou shalt not kill". But the cops thought this was somehow a dig at the local mosque and so came round, destroyed the mural, arrested the TV news crew filming it, and wiped their tape. The Dutch have determined to commit societal euthanasia, and dislike fellows pointing out it might not be as painless as they've assumed.

Howard Rotberg on the cult of "proportionality" in the use of violence

Howard has an excellent post up, one of the smartest rebuttals of the inherently antisemitic idea that the economically and militarily accomplished, free-thinking, modern (and yet nationalist, self-ruling) "chosen people" are just too successful and must be hobbled in their nation's defense (after more than sixty years of failed Arab attacks). The idea that Israel must only use "proportional" and duly-sanctioned violence (sanctioned by some post-national, neo-feudal mandarin class of "international" academic "experts" and "lawyers") that the Jews' original vision of a covenantal nation, their great contribution to human liberty, must give way to some Gnostic dream of overcoming all that nation stuff in some post-national Utopia, amounts to little more than Judeophobic resentment.

Howard writes:

...I experienced hatred from recent Arab immigrants shouting out that I had no right to give a lecture at Chapters (despite my invitation by Chapters) and when the audience asked them to allow me to speak, one shouted out with hatred, "he is a fucking Jew".

The Tolerists with their moral equivalency (typified by the Judge who equated the rights of a lecturer with the rights of thugs to break up the lecture) hold that in any dispute the truth must be in the middle, and that all violence equates with all other violence.

Accordingly in Gaza, Hamas indoctrinates its young in Hate, and lobs rockets at Israeli civilians, and enlists women and children as human shields, and it knows that any disaster it brings upon its own people will be viewed by Westerners as at least 50% the fault of the Jews.

And, if Hamas is fortunate enough to lose the war it started and cause the death of hundreds of its own fighters (and the civilians who encourage them and are used as human shields) then it can rely on the puerile doctrine of "Proportionality" to rob a liberal democracy of victory against Islamofascist thugs.

The idea that a democracy, when faced with fascist attacks on civilians, must be limited to a "proportionate" response is so stupid that it would not bear commentary, if it was not so frequently used, especially by Europeans. You see, the Americans when they and the Brits and the Canadians and others defeated Nazi Germany were not handicapped by criticisms of "proportionality". Not even when they droppped atomic bombs. That is because our forefathers were smarter than we are, and understood that in the face of such Evil as the Nazi and Japanese regimes, a disproportionate response, leading to quick and total victory and defeat of Evil, is needed to stop future deaths caused by the Evil regimes. The nuclear bombs were morally justified because the number of people that would have been killed by Japan in the time that it would take to defeat Japan by conventional weapons would surely have exceeded the number killed by the Atomic bombs. A justifiable decision was made that the Japanese who supported the Evil would bear a disproportionate burden rather than the people who would be continued to be slaughtered by the Japanese.

Likewise with Hitler. Those who criticize the Allies for carpet bombing Dresden lack a moral compass.

In fact, "proportionality", being a concept most attractive to Europeans (who have never quite gotten over their anti-Semitism and their realization that Europe produced the most evil people of the 20th century) now delight in accusing the Jews of "disproportionate" responses. That is because the idea of "proportionality" is in fact a standard so bizarre in the realm of war, that it discloses that its proponents have something else in mind than justice or morality.

In fact, the critics of "disproportionate" response are classic anti-Semites. Who can blame them for thinking they can get away with this approach, when the best American Jewish director, Steven Spielberg, used proportionality as an immoral standard - when viewing Israeli actions after the moral travesty at the Munich Olympics (including the preposterous responses to the murders by both the Germans and the IOC, as I have written previously).

As I have previously written, the great William Shakespeare understood the foundations of anti-Semitism, and wrote his brilliant The Merchant of Venice, which unfortunately is not properly understood even today. Shakespeare shows that the vile Shylock is driven to his disproportionate response of insisting on the contractual pound of flesh, because he is facing a society which has completely marginalized him, and then he cannot receive a fair trial, as the Judge in the trial allows an adverse party to pretend to be the Judge; Shylock is trapped by the anti-Semitism of his time.

And so, the Europeans and the university students and the journalists who criticize Israel for disproportionate response ignore how Israel is trapped by hostile and hateful Arabs all around it, now armed by Iran, and now mostly making clear what has been true all along - that no two-state solution is acceptable and the Arabs want to drive all the Jews into the Sea, and end the Jewish state, and do who knows what to the Jewish civilians.

Now I return to the situation in Canada.

I have written about the blatant anti-Semitism of the anti-Israel rallies, the spitting, the shouts that more "ovens" are needed for the Jews and Israelis, the trotting out of a few token Jews willing to criticize Israel, the intimidation and the violence, which, since my problem in 2003, has ony gotten worse.

I have written how the Canadian Jewish organizations were still worrying about Nazi skinheads and stopping Ernst Zundel by organizing Human Rights Commissions, at the same time as Canada was allowing tens of thousands of terrorist-supporting, anti-Semitic Arab immigrants into the country, without so much as a small attempt at screening out those who had cultural values inimicable to the freedom and safety of Jews who have contributed to Canadian society for generations.

In the guise of cultural relativism and Tolerism, not even an elementary attempt has been made to stop the immigration of people who hate, who are violent, who seek to impose their religion on others, who abuse women and children, and who wish to form a dual society and Justice system where Sharia Law if their present and our future.

Go ahead, call me a "racist", but I care more for Muslims than their own leaders do. I suggest you look at the backlash caused by Mohammed Elmasry's bizarre statements and then ask the Muslims that I have dealt with in my years of law practice, how much respect I have given them and how much help.

It is not racist to insist that the Muslims we accept to Canada have a chance to live just as we have always done - in peace, dignity, courtesy between ethnic groups and religions, and with a chance for our children to particpate fully in our civic culture and have the protections of our Justice system.

As I end my blogging, I am prepared to state unequivocably that our leaders are making a fatal mistake that will cost our children dearly - we are importing hate. It is not racist to state the obvious - let Muslims immigrate, but only those who are in fact moderate, who in fact are prepared to stand up and support a Jew's rights to live in peace in Canada, and not just scream about Islamaphobia, every time someone objects to some extremist action or words.

Read the whole thing...