RUTHFULLY YOURS

Consider two examples of a western democracy refusing entry through its borders to a foreign dignitary on the grounds of a disagreement with his political beliefs.

In the first case, the man in question was denied entry for fear of offending a Muslim minority. He is in constant danger of assassination for his opinions, and he is being prosecuted for them by his home government. If that prosecution (which will start in October) is successful he could well become the first political prisoner on his continent since the end of the Cold War. To be sure, his views are controversial, and though he does not incite violence or racial prejudice he is sometimes abusive and insulting about the religion of Islam. However, he does not bear any grudge against the country that denied him entry, and has never defamed its reputation.

That man is Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who was denied entry to Britain by the Labour government in 2009. Much of the liberal intelligentsia in Britain was broadly supportive of the decision to ban him, and demonstrations were launched against him after the government finally did allow him into Britain in 2010.

Now consider the second case, of a man who was briefly denied entry to the West Bank by Israeli officials at the border with Jordan this week.

The man in question is one of the most prominent apologists for Islamist extremism in the world. More precisely, he is the leading evangelist for western self-hatred in the American and European opinion forming classes. Absurdly enough, he considers himself a “dissident” but lives a comfortable life free from any form of intimidation. He refers to the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans as a “Hitlerite” enterprise. He has consorted with Holocaust deniers, including Hezbollah. As far as the country which denied him entry is concerned, he despises it, he has built a career out of demonising it across the world, and he is fundamentally opposed to its existence in its present form. He is, another words, a far-Left extremist who has made of himself an implacable enemy of the country which denied him entry.

That man is Noam Chomsky, and the decision to deny him entry to the West bank this week has been acknowledged by Israel to have been a mistake which was, in any case, quickly overturned. The British and European media has gone ballistic in Chomsky’s defence. A hero of the liberal establishment has had a brush with a (quite reasonably) disgruntled Israeli bureaucrat. The outrage is palpable.

Now, like the Israeli government, I believe it was a mistake to initially refuse Chomsky entry. Nonetheless, his consistent defamation of the State of Israel would certainly provide grounds for declaring him persona non grata. If ever there were a case for doing so in a western democracy, this was it. But, as I have said, I regard it as a mistake. By no conceivable yardstick of harm to the national interest, however, could Wilders have been banned from Britain. His case was about censorship and appeasement of militant Islam. Nothing more, nothing less. The national interest had nothing to do with it.

In the sharply contrasting reactions to what ostensibly looks like two similar cases, what we have here is a remarkably illustrative case study of how the dominant opinion formers in the western media view the world. Chomsky, an extremist who displays complete contempt for reasoned discourse and who provides succour to totalitarian movements and their apologists around the world, is hailed as a hunted hero: a dissident being oppressed in a manner which led the Times gleefully to report an Israeli writer as saying “we may be becoming fascists”.

The Times article in question opened by describing Chomsky as “a leading left-wing political thinker”. The BBC went further, admiringly describing him as “Renowned US scholar Noam Chomsky”. Wilders is always described as “far-Right” Dutch politician, Geert Wilders. The tone of articles about him is condemnatory; the subtext consistently portrays him as a racist with no place in polite society.

Such are the values and beliefs which guide the thinking of a liberal establishment in Europe which has a near monolithic dominance over the political mainstream. A storm in a tea cup involving one of their heroes on the Jordanian border is indignantly magnified into a grotesque example of the horrors visited upon a gentle and brilliant intellectual by an oppressive Jewish state. A flawed but brave Dutch politician, a genuine political dissident who faces the threat of death and jail for his views, is excoriated and branded a pariah even though he has no grudge against the state which denied him entry.

And so it goes…