RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It would have been better if the Dutch state had sent a clear signal (to terrorists) via a Dutch court that we foster a broad notion of the freedom of expression in the Netherlands”. – Paul Cliteur, Professor of Jurisprudence, Leiden University

The historic dimension of Wilders’s conviction is related not only to the terrible injustice done to this MP, but that it was the Netherlands that, for the first time in Europe, criminalized dissenting opinions about Islam.

“You can count in it. I will never be silent. You will not be able to stop me…And that is what we stand for. For freedom and for our beautiful Netherlands.” – Geert Wilders, Dutch MP and head of the Party for Freedom (PVV)

“We have a lot of guests who are trying to take over the house.” – Pym Fortuyn, later shot to death “to save Muslims from persecution.”

Before being slaughtered, clinging to a basket, Theo van Gogh begged his assassin: “Can we talk about this?”. But can we talk?

A country whose most outspoken filmaker was slaughtered by an Islamist; whose bravest refugee, hunted by a fatwa, fled to the U.S.; whose cartoonists must live under protection, had better should think twice before condemning a Member of Parliament, whose comments about Islam have forced him to live under 24-hour protection for more than a decade, for “hate speech.” Poor Erasmus! The Netherlands is no longer a safe heaven for free thinkers. It is the Nightmare for Free Speech.

The most prominent politician in the Netherlands, MP Geert Wilders, has just been convicted of “hate speech,” for asking at a really if there should be fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. Many newly-arrived Moroccans in the Netherlands seem to have been responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime there.

Paul Cliteur, Professor of Jurisprudence at Leiden University, who was called as an expert witness, summed up the message coming from the court: “It would have been better if the Dutch state had sent a clear signal (to terrorists) via a Dutch court that we foster a broad notion of the freedom of expression in the Netherlands.”

Here are just a few details to help understand what Wilders experiences every day because of his ideas: No visitors are allowed into his office except after a long wait to be checked. The Dutch airline KLM refused to board him on a flight to Moscow for reasons of “security.” His entourage is largely anonymous. When a warning level rises, he does not know where he will spend the night. For months, he was able to see his wife only twice a week, in a secure apartment, and then only when the police allowed it. The Parliament had to place him in the less visible part of the building, in order better to protect him. He often wears a bulletproof vest to speak in public. When he goes to a restaurant, his security detail must first check the place out. His life is a nightmare. “I am in jail,” he has said; “they are walking around free.”

Remarks, incomparably more damning icepicks than “fewer Moroccans”, [were] made by members of the Netherlands’ Labour Party, who of course were never prosecuted.

The irony cannot have been lost on the wider world that on the same day that news of Wilders’s conviction came out the other news from Holland was the arrest of a 30 year-old terror suspect in Rotterdam suspected of being about to carry out ‘an act of terrorism’.

Internationally it will continuously be used against Wilders that he has been convicted of ‘inciting discrimination’ even though the charge is about a proto-crime – a crime that has not even occurred: like charging the makers of a car chase movie for ‘inciting speeding’. As with many ‘hate-crime’ trials across the free world, from Denmark to Canada, the aim of the proceedings is to blacken the name of the party on trial so that they are afterwards formally tagged as a lesser, or non-person. If this sounds Stalinist it is because it is.

In the long-term, though, there is something even more insidious about this trial. For as we have noted here before, if you prosecute somebody for saying that they want fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands then the only legal views able to be expressed about the matter are that the number of Moroccans in the country must remain at precisely present numbers or that you would only like more Moroccans in the country. In a democratic society this sort of matter ought to be debatable.

If there is one great mental note of which 2016 ought to have reminded the world, it is how deeply unwise it is to try to police opinion. For when you do so you not only make your society less free, but you disable yourself from being able to learn what your fellow citizens are actually – perhaps ever more secretly – feeling. Then one day you will hear them.

The trial of Geert Wilders has resulted in a guilty verdict. The court – which was located in a maximum security courthouse in the Netherlands near Schipol airport – found the leader of the PVV (Freedom Party) guilty of ‘insulting a group’ and of ‘inciting discrimination’. The trial began with a number of complaints, but the proceedings gradually honed down onto one single comment made by Wilders at a party rally in March 2014. This was the occasion when Wilders asked the crowd whether they wanted ‘fewer or more Moroccans in your city and in the Netherlands’. The crowd of supporters shouted ‘Fewer’.

On Friday morning the court decided not to impose a jail sentence or a fine, as prosecutors had requested. The intention of the court is clearly that the ‘guilty’ sentence should be enough.

For Wilders himself this will have been another unpleasant ordeal. But he may have become used to them by now. Five years ago Wilders was put on trial for insulting a religion. The first trial fell apart after one of the judges was found to have attempted to influence the evidence of one of Wilders’s defence witnesses. Once the trial restarted, it resulted in an acquittal. So the Dutch Justice system turn out to have been “second-time lucky” in getting the conviction they appear to have so badly wanted.

This is apparent from remarks, incomparably more damning icepicks than “fewer Moroccans”, made by members of the Netherlands’ Labour Party, who of course were never prosecuted:

“We also have s*** Moroccans over here.” Rob Oudkerk, Dutch Labour Party (PvDA) politician.
“We must humiliate Moroccans.” Hans Spekman, PvDA politician.
“Moroccans have the ethnic monopoly on trouble-making.” Diederik Samsom, PvDA politician.

Donald Trump’s victory signifies much more than a slap to the elites so certain he didn’t have a chance. More than the satisfaction of seeing the chattering classes confounded, it is an assault on political correctness and the anti-growth nostrums it peddles.
When Sir Tim Rice penned “A whole new world” for Disney’s Aladdin back in 1992, the world was indee a very different place. A Clinton, Bill, was running for the White House. The Middle East, devastated by war, remained on knife edge, with a murderous dictator, Saddam, allowed to stay in power when Bush the Elder called off the drive to Baghdad. In Finland, an exciting new (2G) mobile telephone network had just been installed. In Australia, almost everyone was humming along to “Weather with you” by Crowded House.

Twenty-five years later, Rice’s magic lamp may finally be starting to shine. Castro is dead. Britain is leaving Europe, or at least getting ready to unhitch her moorings. The US has a new leader unlikely to bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, as Obama infamously did. And some of the political millstone-round-the-neck issues of the last two decades — infantile political correctness in the media, intent to destroy the enormous benefits of the global industrial economy in a vain attempt to reverse non-existent global warming, and obeisance to primitive cultures in place of civilization – look set to be rejected at last.

As Julie Andrews sang in Oscar and Hammerstein’s Sound of Music, “somewhere in (our) wicked miserable past, (we) must have had a moment of truth”. A majority of the US Electoral College is poise to confirm Donald Trump, a dis-inhibited braggart and billionaire, age 70, as the popular choice of voters in the states that matter as the more likely of the two contenders likely to propel America back to greatness. When America gets over a cold, the rest of the world recovers from influenza, malaria, dysentery and the Zika virus combined.

Post-communist Russia is now led by an ex-KGB agent — plus ca change! — while China’s still-Communist leader is married to a baby boomer pop star. Britain’s leader, for the third time since Boadicea, is “a bloody difficult woman”, as veteran Tory Ken Clarke was heard to opine when he thought the microphone had been turned off. And Japan, of recent years one of the most peaceful countries, is led by the grandson of a member of General Tojo’s WW2 cabinet.

We are told the 21st century belongs to the “agile and innovative” citizens of Asia upon whose coat-tails we hang in the quarry Down Under, otherwise known as Australia. If China ever stops buying our iron, coal, wheat, beef, lamb, wool, wine and milk it will be time to call the national taxidermist. Our former heavy manufacturing centres in Victoria and South Australia are already stuffed, so no hope of alternate sustenance there.

On December 9, for the first time in Dutch history, a court criminalized freedom of expression: The truly heroic Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders, was found guilty of the “crime” of “hate speech.”

The death sentence against Salman Rushdie in 1989 by Iran’s supreme leader looked unreal. The West did not take it seriously. Since then, however, this fatwa has been assimilated to such an extent that today’s threats to free speech come from ourselves. It is now the West that put on trial writers and journalists.

The Red Brigades, the Communist terror group which devastated Italy in the 1970s, coined a slogan: “Strike one to educate one hundred.” If you target one, you get collective intimidation. This is exactly the effect of these political trials about Islam.

“Hate speech” has become a political weapon to dispatch whoever may not agree with you. It is not the right of a democracy to quibble about the content of articles or cartoons. In the West, we paid a high price for the freedom to write them and and read them it. It is not up to those who govern to grant the right of thought and speech.

In Europe now, the same iron curtain as in the Soviet era is descending.

After the Second World War and the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, a central tenet of Western democracies has been that you can put people on trial, but not ideas and opinions. Europe is now allowing dangerous “human rights” groups and Islamists to use tribunals to restrict the borders of our freedom of expression, exactly as in Soviet show trials. “Militant anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century,” the prominent French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut has predicted.

A year ago, Christoph Biró, a respected columnist and editor of the largest Austrian newspaper, Kronen Zeitung, wrote an article blaming “young men, testosterone-fuelled Syrians, who carry out extremely aggressive sexual attacks” (even before mass the sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Hamburg and other cities). The article sparked much controversy, and it received a large number of complaints and protests. Biró needed four weeks off work because of these attacks and later (under pressure) admitted that he had “lost a sense of proportion”. Prosecutors in Graz recently charged Biró with “hate speech” after a complaint by a so-called human rights organization, SOS Mitmensch. The case will be decided in court.

Dear friends, I still cannot believe it, but I have just been convicted. Because I asked a question about Moroccans. While the day before yesterday, scores of Moroccan asylum-seekers terrorized buses in Emmen and did not even had to pay a fine, a politician who asks a question about fewer Moroccans is sentenced.

The Netherlands have become a sick country. And I have a message for the judges who convicted me: You have restricted the freedom of speech of millions of Dutch and hence convicted everyone. No one trusts you anymore. But fortunately, truth and liberty are stronger than you. And so am I.

I will never be silent. You will not be able to stop me. And you are wrong, too. Moroccans are not a race, and people who criticize Moroccans are not racists. I am not a racist and neither are my voters. This sentence proves that you judges are completely out of touch.

And I have also a message for Prime Minister Rutte and the rest of the multicultural elite: You will not succeed in silencing me and defeating the PVV. Support for the Party for Freedom is stronger than ever, and keeps growing every day. The Dutch want their country back and cherish their freedom. It will not be possible to put the genie of positive change back in the bottle.

And to people at home I say: Freedom of speech is our pride. And this will remain so. For centuries, we Dutch have been speaking the unvarnished truth. Free speech is our most important possession. We will never let them take away our freedom of speech. Because the flame of freedom burns within us and cannot be extinguished.

Millions of Dutch are sick and tired of political correctness. Sick and tired of the elite which only cares about itself and ignores the ordinary Dutchman. And sells out our country. People no longer feel represented by all these disconnected politicians, judges and journalists, who have been harming our people for so long, and make our country weaker instead of stronger.

But I will keep fighting for you, and I tell all of you: thank you so much. Thank you so much for all your support. It is really overwhelming; I am immensely grateful to you. Thanks to your massive and heartfelt support, I know that I am not alone. That you back me, and are with me, and unwaveringly stand for freedom of expression.

Today, I was convicted in a political trial, which, shortly before the elections, attempts to neutralize the leader of the largest and most popular opposition party. But they will not succeed. Not even with this verdict. Because I speak on behalf of millions of Dutch. And the Netherlands are entitled to politicians who speak the truth, and honestly address the problems with Moroccans. Politicians who will not let themselves be silenced. Not even by the judges. And you can count on it: I will never be silent.

And this conviction only makes me stronger. This is a shameful sentence, which, of course, I will appeal. But I can tell you, I am now more vigorous than ever. And I know: together, we aim for victory.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, we are strong enough to change the Netherlands.

To allow our children to grow up in a country they can be proud of.
In a Netherlands where we are allowed to say again what we think.
Where everybody can safely walk the streets again.
Where we are in charge of our own country again.

And that is what we stand for. For freedom and for our beautiful Netherlands.

Geert Wilders is a member of the Dutch Parliament and leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV).

In 1910, during a war against rebels in remote Yemen, a young officer of the Ottoman Empire liked to entertain his soldiers with music: French and Italian operas that he played every night on a gramophone in the desert.

The youthful musical preferences of Ismet Inonu—who would become president of Turkey some three decades later—were no mere personal quirk. Ever since the mid-19th century, when a series of reforms brought elections, civil rights and modern government institutions to the decaying Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s ruling elites had looked to the West as the standard of enlightenment and civilization.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secularist army officer who founded modern Turkey in 1923, sought to sever his land’s ancient bonds to the Middle East. A revolutionary determined to transform everyday life, Atatürk introduced Latin letters and the Swiss Civil Code to replace Arabic script and Islamic Shariah law. This longstanding orientation to the West has made Turkey a rare example of a major Muslim country that is also a prosperous, stable democracy (and, since 1952, a member of NATO).

Today that tradition is under attack as never before. Nearly a century after the Ottoman Empire gave way to today’s Turkish republic, a tectonic shift is under way. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s iron-fisted rule, Turkey is drifting away from its historic Western allies in perhaps one of the most significant geopolitical realignments of our age.

Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey has come to look increasingly like just another troubled corner of the Middle East. And, many Turks and Westerners fear, the country is becoming infected with the same sicknesses—intolerance, autocracy, repression—that have poisoned the region for decades.

Early on, Mr. Erdogan—who has held de facto power since 2002—was widely hailed as a principled democrat. In recent years, however, he has grown aggressively averse to dissent, and in the wake of a failed coup attempt in July, he has unleashed an unprecedented crackdown. He is now demanding constitutional changes that would give him near-absolute authority and let him remain at the helm of this country of 80 million people until 2029.

“Erdogan’s real aim is to take Turkey out of the Western bloc, out of the civilized world, and to turn Turkey into a Middle Eastern country where he can continue to rule without any obstacles,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Turkey’s biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP. “He wants to turn Turkey into a country where there is no secularism and where people are divided along their ethnic identity and their beliefs. It is becoming a nation that faces internal conflict, just as we have seen in Iraq, Syria or Libya.”

Turkish officials retort that the West is abandoning their country, not the other way around. Mr. Erdogan recently blasted the European Union for its “meaningless hostility” as decadeslong talks on Turkish membership in the bloc neared collapse. “Neither the European Union nor the European countries that are on the brink of falling into the clutches of racism can exclude Turkey from Europe,” said Mr. Erdogan. “We are not a guest but a host in Europe.”

Members of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, often point out that, as the July coup unfolded, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the first call to express support for Mr. Erdogan, hours before President Barack Obama weighed in. That night, many other Western politicians kept silent or even cheered for the putschists.

“It’s not Turkey that is distancing itself from Europe. It’s Europe that is distancing itself from the axis of democracy. For them, democracy is when we don’t elect Erdogan, and dictatorship is when we elect him,” said Mehmet Metiner, a prominent AKP lawmaker. “Turkish democracy is better than Western democracy.”

Such statements cause many Western officials to shake their heads in despair while pointing to Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian record. Some 150 journalists critical of the government are currently behind bars in Turkey, which jails more journalists than any other country in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders, a media-freedom group. Tens of thousands of Turks suspected of opposition or disloyalty—from teachers to bureaucrats to police officers—lost their jobs in purges that followed the July coup attempt. And last month, Mr. Erdogan’s government detained the co-heads of one of the country’s three main opposition parties.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s yearlong campaign against a renewed insurgency by restive Kurds has ravaged the country’s southeast. Dozens of towns and neighborhoods have been flattened in bloody urban warfare between government forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which both Ankara and Washington consider a terrorist organization. A separate bombing spree by Islamic State has hit major Turkish cities.

A month after the July coup attempt, Mr. Erdogan also unleashed a war abroad: Turkish troops invaded northern Syria, where they are fighting alongside Sunni Arab rebels against both Islamic State and a Kurdish militia linked to the PKK. Mr. Erdogan has also threatened military intervention in Iraq, and Turkish troops are already deployed near Mosul, most of which remains in the clutches of Islamic State. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dr. Herbert I. London is the President of the London Center for Policy Research

While the Euro declines in value reaching parity with the dollar, with debt overwhelming the underbelly of European states and with serious questions arising about the viability of the Union itself, the EU at the Bratislava Summit in September 2016 concluded that the time has come for its own military force.

The report EDAP (European Defense Action Plan) indicated that the 27 Member States “need the EU not only to guarantee peace and democracy, but also the security of our people.” Presumably a coherent EU response is called for.

So what could only be considered an ironic touch, participants at the conference contended that a strong EU force and a strong NATO are mutually reinforcing. However, it was not revealed how this might occur. With limited resources, the more likely scenario is a reduction in allocations to NATO in return for the generation of an independent European force, one that does not include the United States.

Moreover, the EU position has broadened priorities to include space, border and maritime surveillance and cyber defense. EDAP maintains that this defense arrangement will lead to cooperation as a common practice rather than the exception.

Reference is made in the report to a reliance on U.S. funding for the defense of Europe, noting EU Member States have decreased defense spending since 2015 by 12 percent. By contrast, in the last decade China increased its defense spending by 150 percent. This decrease in spending has not been accompanied by European cooperation. Since Member States act independently, there is duplication, a lack of interoperability and technological gaps at an annual cost of between 25 and 100 billion euros.

Should the EU force be adopted, there isn’t enough European capital to sustain billions for a new entity and the billions Trump will request for NATO. Something has got to give.