Geert Wilders has published an op-ed at Fox News about free speech and the Mohammed cartoons. Some excerpts are below:
Why we must defend Freedom of Speech
I am on the death list of Al Qaeda and other Islamic organizations. For over ten years now, I have been living under 24/7 police protection. But I will never allow the enemies of liberty to silence me.
The winner of the Garland cartoon contest was a former Muslim. There is something very symbolic about the fact that he is an apostate. Under Islamic Sharia law, apostasy is punishable by death. Under the same law, making illustrations of the prophet Muhammad is also punishable by death.
We must do exactly the opposite of what the terrorists want. If they want us to stop drawing cartoons and we react by showing even more cartoons, the terrorists will have lost. This is why I will ask the Speaker of the Dutch Parliament to invite the Garland Mohammed cartoons to be shown in the Parliament of the Netherlands. We should show them all over the free world.
The winner of the contest had made a picture of a fierce looking Muhammad, waving a sword. “You cannot draw me,” Muhammad said. Underneath the picture, the artist had written: “That is exactly why I am drawing you!”
Under Islamic Sharia law, depicting Muhammad is a crime. But as an American, the artist is not living in an Islamic country. He is living in America. In America, you are allowed to make pictures and drawings, no matter what the Sharia says. And you are also allowed to change your religion and become an apostate.
Barely a few minutes after I had given my speech in Garland, two jihadis attacked the event. They shot a police officer in the leg, but fortunately they were killed before they could do more harm. Through violence and terrorism, these two jihadis tried to impose Sharia law on America. We should not allow them to succeed.
[…]
There is more at stake than our freedom of speech. Our Judeo-Christian civilization and even our very existence are in danger. Islam is a Trojan horse within our societies. The more Islam we get, the less free our societies become. Of course I realize that while most terrorists today are Muslims, not all Muslims are terrorists. Of course, I realize that the terrorists are only a minority. But I am not naïve. Where are the demonstrations of Muslims who do not agree with the violence committed in the name of Islam and its prophet? I have not seen them. The majority may not commit violence, but they do not oppose it either.
Read the rest at Fox News.
Great words from a great man. I sincerely hope the cartoons are shown in the Dutch Parliament and everywhere, Geert Wilders words are powerful and true.
Geert Wilders is my hero. He’s THE ONLY decent, authentic human being in western european politics.
I agree. A true hero.
I still think that we need to do more than make cartoons about Mohammad, even if doing so is essential and important.
It is necessary to have a real debate about the limits of free speech which allows us to criminalize advocacy of the Koran as an authoritative prescription for Muslim behavior. Quite simply, the Koran explicitly commends and commands the murder of those who do not participate in criminal behavior. To assert that Muslims have a responsibility to obey the Koran is indisputably a means of threatening to kill those who do not enact murder and other crimes recommended by the Koran. This is not free speech, it is blatant criminal conspiracy.
I do not favor ‘banning the Koran’ outright, in a free society it must be possible for the public to have access to information, and the Koran is a historically significant artifact. But what it signifies must be open to interpretation and study, therefore the interpretation of the Koran which forecloses all others on pain of death cannot be permitted. The same is true of any document transmitted for the purpose of authorizing, condoning, or threatening murder of those who do not cooperate in criminal activities. Such things are not free speech, but the antithesis.
If we do not at least engage in the wider debate about the intrinsic and necessary limits of free speech, then the Mohammad cartoons accomplish nothing.
I agree that we need an urgent debate concerning free speech and Islam, but we can’t have that debate until we rid ourselves of the MC/PC yoke that blankets our lawful ability to truly express ourselves and places us at a severe disadvantage to known Islamic expansionism within all our lands.
What we now find ourselves commenting on today would not have been thought possible only 20 years ago when open public debate was a given.
I think you mean we can’t rely on the honest debate to drive real legislative change until after the MC/PC elite are removed from power. But we can open the debate itself before then.
Because the status quo is going to change, drastically and rapidly. How it changes is not entirely in our control, but not entirely in the control of those currently in power either.
Yes, such a debate would have at least two virtues:
1) It would bring into open debate the real, canonical teachings and basis of Islam;
2) It would bring into open debate the prospect of taking realistic actions to protect ourselves against a coherent, organized philosophy of terror and subversion, and the people who follow that philosophy.
I can’t subscribe to the notion that there are any real, canonical teachings and basis of Islam. The sources are too clear on this point, Islam isn’t supposed to be about ‘who’s right and who’s wrong’ based on a fixed, written scripture.
Yes, the Koranic Islamists make exactly this claim of authoritative finality without any ambiguity or room for individual interpretation and deviations from the Koran. But the Koran itself is entirely contrary to Qutham’s directives on how his teachings were to be promulgated and permitted even if some percentage of the contents of the Koran could be proven to be actual transcriptions of what faithful Qurra remembered Qutham saying (which is impossible in principle without open scholarship of the alternative variants created to demonstrate that Abu Bakr’s version was corrupted).
I think that what does need to be discussed is the reality behind the claim that “Islam” is what the Koranic interpreters decide, and how enforcement of this claim is incompatible with a free society or the spirit of honest inquiry. The supposed authority of the Koran as a book of scriptures disintegrates the moment a rational person reads a page of it, even without any review of the historical context. This has been demonstrated too extensively to need belaboring. But the historical context of Qutham’s instructions about how his teachings were to be promulgated and interpreted, as well as his own personal moral relativism, are even more devastating to the idea that the Koran is somehow representative of Islam.
Yes, I know that this smacks of the “nothing to do with Islam” meme we’ve all heard parroted until we’re tired of screaming in rage about it, but the truth is that the idea of the authoritative status of the Koran is completely unIslamic.
And this is particularly true of the way that Koranic authority is established…by a pervasive culture of violence against Muslims.
I admit that I don’t have a lot of use for a religion, like Islam, that fundamentally promotes as virtue the kind of cowardice and moral relativism that allows the most psychopathic elements in the community to establish authority based on their willingness to murder everyone who dissents. I’m fond of canonical teachings and firm principles. But dealing with reality requires that we recognize that the supposed authority of the Koran is nothing more than a murderous conspiracy of psychopaths to kill until they get their way. It is nothing to do with any kind of religion, even if it is the inevitable result of one so ‘morally flexible’ as Islam.
Anyway, only by discarding the idea that there are any real canonical teachings or basis can we confront the truth about Koranic Islam, that it is based entirely on anti-philosophic and incoherent resort to murderous violence for ‘reasons’ that cannot be expressed in sane terms.
As for how to deal with that, history provides a wealth of answers, some admittedly better than others but none so appallingly bad as refusing to accept that unreasonable violence is, as a matter of definition, unreasonable, and dealing with it as it is rather than trying to make any sense of it.
The only honest politician about Islam and it’s openly stated aims.
The leaders of Islam are legion, and they do not have to do much for Islam to spread. All they have to do is unleash the mad dog imams on the world and let the Muslims themselves do their dirty work.
What bothers me is that western governments are selling arms to Saudi Arabia at an accelerating rate, despite the fact that the Saudi government has contracted western forces to protect their oil and gas fields. I suspect that the Saudis are arming for an invasion of southern Europe in the near future, once the IS and other Muslim countries take out Israel.
With so many millions of newly settled European Muslims wanting sharia law, it’s only a matter of time before this new/old world war comes to a head.
Time to wake up the western leaders and take a stand for humane values, like Geert Wilders has done.