RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Israel, through no fault of its own, is a pariah nation almost completely surrounded by larger nations that do not even recognize the existence of the State of Israel. Iran routinely refers to Israel as the “Little Satan,” and European nations typically take overtly anti-Israeli policies to curry favor with Islam. Yet Israel is not alone in being disparaged for no reason other than that it is small and its enemies are large.

Taiwan, the Republic of China, is a free land that has political and civil values precisely like what we ought to want the rest of the world to have. Freedom House has only two nations in Asia stretching from Sinai to Sakhalin listed as “Free,” Japan and Taiwan, which has a freer press than even Israel or South Korea. The contrast between Taiwan and most nations in Asia is as stark as the contrast between Israel and the nations surrounding it in west Asia and north Africa.

Freedom House gives Taiwan the “1” rating (the highest rating) for political rights and “2” for civil rights, exactly the same rating as Israel. China, by contrast, is listed as “unfree,” the worst category, and it has a “7” rating (the lowest rating) for political rights and a “6” (the second lowest rating) for civil rights.

Taiwan is a prosperous land, despite the absence of natural resources. The island’s per capita GDP is $47,000 per year – higher than Germany or France or Canada – and just as Taiwan is as free and democratic as Israel, Taiwan is as prosperous as Israel, despite, like Israel, having no real wealth except the diligence and intelligence of its people.

The per capita income in China is that is 30% of the per capita income in Taiwan. The per capita income of Jordan and Egypt, to pick two peaceful nations as close to Israel as China is to Taiwan, is 30% of the per capita income of Israel. Indeed, Taiwan has a high per capita income than any nation in Asia – including Japan and South Korea – except Singapore.

Taiwan has no fewer than five political parties with seats in its national legislature and ten parties with seats in municipal or county government. Tsai Ing-wen, elected like Trump earlier this year, was the first woman to be elected president of the Taiwan, and real feminists (there aren’t any, of course) would be thrilled that Trump talked to her when Obama and Hillary did not.

Our attitude toward Taiwan reeks of the same sort of sick double standard we are used to seeing in how nations that ought to know better deal with Israel. Both states represent the answer to virtually all our national security and diplomatic problems. Indeed, Taiwan and Israel are, in a practical sense, our two best allies in the world.

“Morally bankrupt.” – Salman Rushdie, author with a $600,000 bounty from the Iranian regime on his head, speaking of Amnesty International.

Amnesty International sponsored a rally in Brussels, where Islamist speakers celebrated the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust and demonized gays and Jews.

It seems that Amnesty turned its back on the battle of human rights in favor of a grotesque anti-Western bias. The Economist accused Amnesty of “reserving more pages to human rights abuses in Britain and the United States than in Belarus and Saudi Arabia.”

Amnesty’s secretary general compared Soviet forced-labor camps, where three million people died of hunger, cold and executions, to a US military base where no prisoner has died, and which has prevented countless innocent civilians from being blown up.

“Canada is obliged to arrest and prosecute Bush for his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture”, said Susan Lee, Amnesty International’s Americas programme director. Amnesty’s also charged Obama of “war crimes.” The Western “war on terror”? According to Amnesty, “it is sowing fear.” US drone strikes? A “war crime.”

Alan Dershowitz summarizes Amnesty International’s definition of Israel’s “war crimes”: “Whatever Israel does to defend its citizens.”

A report by NGO Monitor detailed “Amnesty’s repeated examples of ‘lawfare’; systematic flaws in the reporting of human rights abuses; limited understanding of armed conflict leading to erroneous claims and incorrect analysis; and violation of the universality of human rights, including a consistent institutionalized bias against Israel through double-standards.” There are even Amnesty’s officials who called the Jewish State “a scum state”.

There was a time when Amnesty International defended victims of ideological repression such as the wife of Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, Olga Ivinskaya, who spent years under arrest and persecuted for her husband’s refusal to bow down to the Kremlin. Now, the Times of London has documented links between Amnesty International’s officials and “networks of Islamists.”

According to Amnesty International, the centers that host migrants arriving in Italy, known as “hotspots,” are like concentration camps. This is what you learn from Amnesty International’s new report, which accuses Italy of nothing less than “torturing” migrants. The report features a sequence of testimonies, never proven, that describe methods worthy of a South American military junta.