Author: Melaine Phillips
Publication: The Spectator
Date: February 11, 2009
URL: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3344161/britain-capitulates-to-terror.thtml
If anyone had doubted the extent to which
Britain has capitulated to Islamic terror, the banning of Geert Wilders a
few hours ago should surely open their eyes. Wilders, the Dutch member of
parliament who had made an uncompromising stand against the Koranic sources
of Islamist extremism and violence, was due to give a screening of Fitna,
his film on this subject, at the House of Lords on Thursday. This meeting
had been postponed after Lord Ahmed had previously threatened the House of
Lords authorities that he would bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege
to the Lords if Wilders was allowed to speak. To their credit, the Lords authorities
had stood firm and said extra police would be drafted in to meet this threat
and the Wilders meeting should go ahead.
But now the government has announced that
it is banning Wilders from the country. A letter from the Home Secretary's
office to Wilders, delivered via the British embassy in the Hague, said:
...the Secretary of State is of the view that
your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious
threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The Secretary of State
is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed
in your film Fitna and elsewhere would threaten community harmony and therefore
public security in the UK.
So let's get this straight. The British government
allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas,
it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain
and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass
intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament
of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the
threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism.
It is he, not them, who is considered a 'serious
threat to one of the fundamental interests of society'. Why? Because the result
of this stand for life and liberty against those who would destroy them might
be an attack by violent thugs. The response is not to face down such a threat
of violence but to capitulate to it instead.
It was the same reasoning that led the police
on those pro-Hamas marches to confiscate the Israeli flag, on the grounds
that it would provoke violence, while those screaming support for genocide
and incitement against the Jews were allowed to do so. The reasoning was that
the Israeli flag might provoke thuggery while the genocidal incitement would
not. So those actually promoting aggression were allowed to do so while those
who threatened no-one at all were repressed. And now a Dutch politician who
doesn't threaten anyone is banned for telling unpalatable truths about those
who do; while those who threaten life and liberty find that the more they
do so, the more the British government will do exactly what they want, in
the interests of 'community harmony'.
Wilders is a controversial politician, to
be sure. But this is another fateful and defining issue for Britain's governing
class as it continues to sleepwalk into cultural suicide. If British MPs do
not raise hell about this banning order, if they go along with this spinelessness,
if they fail to stand up for the principle that the British Parliament of
all places must be free to hear what a fellow democratically elected politician
has to say about one of the most difficult and urgent issues of our time,
if they fail to hold the line against the threat of violence but capitulate
to it instead, they will be signalling that Britain is no longer the cradle
of freedom and democracy but its graveyard.
