Fitna, Geert Wilders and the Death of European Freedom

Have you seen Fitna? Please watch it. It's only 17 minutes long so asking people to watch it is not as much of an imposition as asking them to learn Arabic and read the Qur'an or to read the Bible, the latest European treaty or possibly even the terms and conditions of a tacky bit of software they will be deleting again in five minute's time.

Fitna is a short film which does feature some violent and disturbing images, but most of them will have already been featured on television news, probably with a warning about their graphic content.

Causing offence is not a crime. Some third party being offended is not a reason for any action to be prohibited. I am regularly offended by many things which make me angry but I know that making me angry is not a sufficient reason to prohibit any actions.

Fitna looks at Islam as a cause of violence, intolerance and hatred. That is a taboo subject among the religious. People have to observe the unspoken terms of the great truce: you don't tell the world how crazy my religion is and I won't tell the world about how crazy yours is. The religious will happily conspire together against secular authorities to promote the cause of religion because they see freedom for religion to thrive as being of far more importance than any other kind of freedom or right. If there was a country in which everything was tolerated except religion its embassy would be burned to the ground in every city of the world by mobs of the religious and no bishops or imams or any politicians from any party would dare to shake the hands of its leaders. Unless they had nukes. Or oil. Nothing galvanizes resistance more than a call to protest about religious freedom as if this was the greatest problem in the world.

Of all the hideous problems that Arabia has (don't call it Saudi Arabia, you wouldn't call the UK “Windsor Britain” would you?) is the lack of bibles the top of your priority list? It isn't on mine. While I would like to see other religions be allowed to show their face in Arabia I would not give that priority above ending the chattel status of women and the barbarities of mutilations and executions. It would be on the list, well below ending stoning, beheading, amputation, genital mutilation and the marrying of children. Is the confiscation of Bibles at Arabian airports a bigger issue than the stoning of women for the crime of being raped? If it is I suggest you reconsider whether or not you are a moral person at all or just a religious stooge.

Religion does not deserve capital R respect. It does not deserve to be protected from feeling offended. Blasphemy is a victimless crime. People have a right to choose a religion and a right to not choose a religion and they have a right to discuss why. Nobody has a right to declare that their beliefs impose duties upon other people who do not share them. Muslims may decide not to depict their prophet, that is their choice, they do not have the right to say that he may never be depicted by anybody. This is exactly the same as alcohol and pork, Muslims may decide not to drink alcohol or eat pork but they do not have the right to demand that other people follow their teachings. I am not going to give up alcohol or pork or be circumcised or fast for a month during daylight hours and I am not going to be obliged to recognize Muhammad as God's last prophet. It is my right not to be forced into religious observation and I will defend that right.

I am a decent man with morals so I am not going to do anything stupid and deliberately offensive. I will leave it to American Christians to make Qur'an toilet paper. Desecration is an urge that appeals to the religious minded person, I own several Bibles and I have not defaced them at all. What would be the point? I might have considered doing so as a stunt but there would be no reason for me to do so when nobody was looking. In contrast the religious do get their kicks from destroying the religious symbols of other religions and they don't need an audience to justify doing it. I find this bizarre. For me there is no magic in a cartoon or drawing of Muhammad or the Arabic word “god”. Making such a depiction or destroying it would have no more significance to me than doing the same with a picture of Captain Hook or Henry VIII, I wouldn't get off on the experience in any way. I am not superstitious. I would not make a cartoon of Muhammad for the same reason I wouldn't go out of my way to walk under a ladder: I couldn't be arsed to. I wouldn't set fire to a Bible or a Qur'an for the same reason I wouldn't set fire to an unused postage stamp, it is a futile gesture destroying something of limited, minor but real utility.

Fitna has been portrayed as an attack on Islam and an incitement to violence, the equivalent of crying "fire!" in a crowed theatre. Well the theatre is crowed and there is a fire so who is the criminal: the one who raises the alarm or the ones who try to silence him? There are Islamists in Europe who are trying to create Muslim enclaves with Sharia law just like in the ungovernable provinces of Pakistan and who look to the day that Europe will be a part of an Islamic Caliphate. They are small in number, they are a minority within the European Muslim community but that community is growing in size by a combination of both legal and illegal immigration plus a much higher birth rate than the indigenous community. These are all facts, however uncomfortable and inconvenient they are. Wilders is doing nothing but draw attention to facts. All the information is already out there in the public domain all he is doing is putting them together and inviting people to draw their own conclusions.

If you want to know how dangerous it is to live in a country where a religiously motivated community is doing its damnedest to out-breed you and draw in more and more immigrants who are their co-religionists just ask a Palestinian. See if the Palestinians think that the best strategy is peaceful coexistence and turning a blind eye to the dangerous mixture of religion and nationalist politics. Don't you think that they might give advice along the lines of Geert Wilders? Wake up Europe! These people say they want to take over your country. Why are you not believing that they are sincere? Why are you pretending that they will all change their minds when they settle down with a few wives and a few dozen children?

Where is the evidence that Muslims are becoming more and more integrated into our western culture? These days if you hear a brown person speak with a broad local dialect you just know that they are over 35. The younger generation don't talk with Blackburn, Bradford or Burnley accents they talk in an accent which is just Northern English Pakistani. Children talk with the accents of the people they want to fit in with. The disappearance of broad and distinctive local accents among the British Muslim population is a worrying sign, they don't want to be like the white children, they don't mix with the white children, they have no desire to be accepted by them. Multiculturalism means never having to try to fit in.

Islam is a dangerous religion. The religious have to take on board the idea that there is such a thing as a dangerous religion, a religion which destroys freedom and perverts human motivations. All religions have some potential to damage society but clearly they vary and their effects vary. The religious need to be woken up out of their complacency and led to the understanding that religion is not something which is universally benign and good in infinite amounts. You can have too much religion and you can have a bad religion. Islam is dangerous because it is so conducive to the destruction of liberty, the denial of freedom and the crushing of dissent. Even quite mild religions such as Anglicanism can create intolerable conditions for those who don't fit in. It was the domination of Anglicanism which lead to the Puritans leaving and setting up home in America. It is the fear of being swamped by the Roman Catholic Church which motivates the Protestant paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland. When people see somebody else's religion about to impinge on their freedom they become moved to act. Unless they are spineless appeasers like the Labour Party and Prince Charles.

I am not in any way a person who likes conspiracy theories. I hate them. However the aspirations of Islamic militants are hardly secret. They really do want to take over the whole world. They have a clear agenda of building a new Caliphate, an Islamic empire, in which Islam will be the only religion. This Caliphate will begin with traditionally Muslim states but will expand to take in Europe and eventually America too. They are not patiently waiting for the end of the world they believe and teach that this will come to pass and it will require jihad, holy war, to achieve. They welcome war, struggle, violence, conquest and martyrdom. In what way is this not alarming? In what way is it reasonable to treat Muslims as just another harmless religion who will happily and peacefully coexist with other religions? It isn't. The Qur'an gives them clear instructions to use the idea of tolerance of religion so they can be tolerated until they are in a position to attack and then there is no room for tolerance. Allah has no desire to allow tolerance for those who deny him. Muslims are required, not allowed, required, to engage in holy war to spread Islam by the sword. Of course the all wise all knowing Allah's final prophet was unable to prophesy the coming of guns so Islam will always be dominated by men with beards and swords.

Pretending that Islam is just the same as Methodism or Zen Buddhism is complacent and deliberately ignorant of the reality. Some religions are slow-growing and benign and some are malignant. Over time religions can change from one mode of expansion to another. Christianity started out as a secretive cult, it became aggressive, assertive and obnoxious and at that time was selected by the Roman Empire as possibly useful. This was a fatal move for the Roman Empire and its civilization as its mechanisms were used to expand the reach of the religion and the civilization fell. Islam didn't start until all this was history. Muhammad knew from the history of Rome that religions and empire can go together. If a religion could conquer an empire why not create one? Surely this is the megalomaniac charlatan's ultimate wet dream: founding both an empire and a religion, having power over men, their minds, their souls their women, their little girls and the posterity of the entire species. Ruling the world. Centuries later that nineteenth century American charlatan Joseph Smith deliberately, consciously and openly modelled his new religion on the cult of Muhammad. What other model could possibly be better to use? Muhammad is without doubt the single most influential man who ever lived. That is simply a fact. Many things may be done in the name of Jesus but his actual teachings have been more venerated than observed and implemented. In contrast the law laid down by Muhammad continues to shape outcomes in the world today, his words live on, his imperial plans live on and his memetic and genetic legacy lives on. Genghis Khan sowed more wild oats and controlled more land, Alexander conquered more civilizations but nobody today follows their precepts or strives to implement their orders. More people know the name and ignore the teachings of Jesus but only one man in history has really had a chance of ruling the world for ever and ever.

The only prospect for world peace is Islam, the nightmare scenario of a universal totalitarian religion controlled according to the interpretation of words in an old book, the accounts of an illiterate uneducated man who claimed to be the spokesman on Earth of the one true god. What kind of a god would send a message to an illiterate nobody? One that liked the idea of war perhaps, a god who welcomed the prospect of men fighting for centuries trying and failing to do what he could do in an instant. Of all the gods I don't believe in Allah stands out as the most unbelievable.

If you're so clever why aren't you rich?

When Islam was expanding at its fastest it was as civilized, rich and powerful as any other civilization on the planet. The Ottoman Empire conquered the Byzantine Empire which was the successor to the Roman Empire. The Ottomans spread Islam around most of the shores of the Mediterranean. Arabs spread Islam across Africa from the west coast to Zanzibar and around the edge of the Indian Ocean. However there was resistance. In parts of the Balkans where Christianity arrived first Christianity inoculated the people against Islam and they resisted, in their minds heroically, for centuries. Similarly the huge land mass of India was resistant, they had a material and religious culture strong enough to resist the relentless tide of Islam.

An area can be conquered by an advancing aggressive religion. Once. But there is no way to do the trick a second time. Either Islam or Christianity could be potent enough to take a new area by storm and impose itself on that area if there hasn't been a modern powerful religion there before them and the conquerors march in brandishing state-of-the-art weapons and technology and material culture and wealth far in excess of anything that backwater has seen before. While Hinduism doesn't have what it takes to conquer new lands (in recent millennia at least) it can hold its own against either Islam or Christianity. So too can Judaism.

The Muslim's belief that their religion will conquer is based upon a flawed analysis of history. Islam has only managed to conquer lands where there wasn't a strong previous presence of a mature religion, lands which were well away from the cutting edge of science, civilization and progress. Poor lands filled with poor and uneducated peasants: always the perfect fodder for the missionaries of predatory monotheisms. Islam can take over the world's downbeat deadbeat backwaters but since the Byzantine Empire fell Islam's conquests have been decidedly second rate and in that time leadership of the world in terms of military might, civilization, culture and science has moved strongly away from the Islamic world. Islam has been playing in the third division of civilization now for over five hundred years and there is no prospect of that trend ever reversing. Islam is wedded to a pre-scientific past and an anti-scientific world view. Islam has no chance of taking over the world in the way that it did in the past. The Caliphate is an absurd pipe-dream. It could not happen because Muslim nations haven't got a handle on the way the world is operating these days. Islamic scholarship is moribund and useless. The days when Baghdad was at the cutting edge of scholarship are long gone and likely never to return. The world is not going to welcome Islam as a way out of poverty, ignorance and squalor. If anything it is clear that Islam offers an enhanced opportunity for Europe and America to experience more poverty, ignorance and squalor compared with the fruits of modern secular liberalism which are the sweetest man has ever known.

Ask any non-Muslim European which country they would most like their country to resemble, how many votes do you think Iran or Pakistan would get? Just how far down the list of desirable role models for the future would Afghanistan or Arabia come? If Pakistan and Islam offers such a wonderful model why are there any Punjabi speakers in Britain at all?

Islam offers nothing that Europeans want, if it did there would be hundreds of thousands of converts already. There are a few hundred and many of them converted as the only way to marry the person they loved, itself a terrible condemnation of the evils of jealous religion and the ease with which it makes people suffer to suit its own ends. Islam is strange, foreign and barbaric. Whilst Europeans have been quick to adopt the food of the Islamic world where it has been good little else has been of much interest. Europe has not been afraid of the Islamic world or repelled by it, the Islamic world has simply not had much to offer. If it wasn't for oil how many Europeans would ever have bothered to learn Arabic? It is only oil and their pathological hatred of Israel that keeps the Islamic world from fading into total and well deserved obscurity. Islam offers the world nothing but ignorance, fear and hatred. Nothing good comes directly from Islam that could not be achieved in another and better way.

Islam will not conquer Europe, that is clear, but Islamists will try and they are trying now. It is time Europe woke up and got to grips with this genuine threat. The threat to Europe from Islam is not a threat of terrorism it is the threat of Islam itself. Europe has stood up to much bigger threats than Islamic terrorism without buckling and giving in.

Islam is by its nature a thoroughly repressive and totalitarian system of thought. Islam means submission, surrender to God, or rather in reality surrendering freedom and will to the idea of the will of Allah preached by the local powerful imams. Islam is surrendering to the interpretation of the diktats of a dead illiterate and ill-educated man from a desert land. It is vitally important that Europe wakes up to this challenge and confronts it, not with violence but with resolution. We must be resolute in the defence of our hard-won liberties. In Europe we have freedom on a personal level and we have the freedom to opt in and out of religion. That freedom must be maintained. It cannot be right that future generations of Europeans be brought up in an Islamic cocoon hidden from the options to learn about science and civil liberties. It cannot be right that any cities or towns in Europe degenerate into no-go areas for white people. It cannot be right that extremists get to parade illegal messages of religious hatred and death threats on European streets.

It cannot be right that members of parliament from democratic countries are denied entry into any European country on the basis that illegal violent protests may occur because of their presence. Wilders, an elected member of parliament from a European Union country, from England's most natural ally, because British citizens who don't like British values may volunteer to be provoked into illegal and violent action in acts of spontaneous outrage carefully choreographed by shyster politicians such as Lord Nazir Ahmed. (The last letter in his first name should be treated as silent). This is an absurdity.

Geert Wilders is not the dangerous extremist he is often portrayed as by those who wish to excuse their support for the censorship of his views

Personally I do not agree with him on many points but nothing he says is or should ever be considered to be unsayable. If there is no legitimate way to express these thoughts and policy suggestions some people will feel that they should respond to the problems they perceive with mindless and pointless violence and hatred. Wilders does not advocate mindless violence. He is a democrat, he believes in the rule of law. He is far too much of an authoritarian and a right-winger for me to feel comfortable with him but he has the decency to say the same thing about nastier and far more fascist politicians such as Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider.

Silencing Geert Wilders because Muslims don't like what he has to say cannot be allowed to become acceptable in a free democratic society. Freedom of expression is vitally important. No ideas should ever be protected by absolute prohibitions on discussion or airing. People must be free to say that Islam is a violent and despicable religion or that homosexuality is an abomination or that the holocaust didn't happen or that 9/11 was the work of the US government or that sex with children should be allowed. Freedom of speech has no value if we are only allowed to say what doesn't offend anybody, ever. We can never be clear that we are thinking the right thoughts if certain ideas are never allowed to be raised for discussion in even the most carefully controlled circumstances for fear of hurting somebody's feelings or making them a little steamed up.

Being offended is your right in a democratic country.

Geert Wilders was not suggesting that Fitna be screened after a Leeds United game. He was not addressing a huge rally of skinheads. He was intending to screen his film in a committee room of the House of Lords. If debate cannot be held in the Houses of Parliament Britain is no longer a free country, the Islamofascists have already won. The Labour Party has hauled down its colours and surrendered to the Muslim mob to its eternal shame.

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