johnbyronkuhner.com

There really is quite a bit of interesting stuff going on in Holland (surprisingly enough).  The party of Geert Wilders, campaigning against further Muslim immigration to Holland – and, honestly, there is room for a discussion of immigration, especially as the economic reasons for it are now suspect, as capital go to cheap labor now rather than vice versa – seems poised to become the plurality party.  Wilders has compared Islam to fascism and has said that Dutch tolerance of it is morally equivalent to tolerating fascism.  For this he was refused entry into England in 2009, arrested at the airport and deported.  Now he might become prime minister.

At the same time, he is on trial in a Dutch court for five counts of “religious insult,” which is apparently a crime in Holland.  This has got to be bad practice.  In America we have very little experience of speech codes like this except in universities, and it is shocking to see it.

You can see why he would be worried about a social phenomenon which is protected by court from opposition (or at least “insult”).  And there are problems.  I just read the book Infidel, by former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an interesting memoir in part chronicling her leaving Islam.  She’s about as kind to Islam as your average “recovering Catholic” is to the Church; the difference being, that for the remainder of her time in Holland, she had to live in hiding, under constant threat of death.  Her collaborator for a ten-minute movie about Islam – controversial, no doubt, but not nearly as intentionally offensive as, say, Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Piss Christ” or the guy who made paintings of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung – was shot on a crowded street.  The muslim attacker wanted to saw his head off too, but only got about halfway through his throat when he decided to get on with business and use his knife to pin a letter to the dead man’s chest.  The letter was to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Apparently not long ago Dutch Prime Ministers walked through the streets without guard; that Holland is gone for now, it seems.  Another right-wing politician with similar ideas, Pim Fortuyn, was assassinated in 2002 – “the first modern [post WWII] assassination in Holland.”

I think the only answer is freer speech; the excesses and horrors of religion are a legitimate target for grievance.  The blasphemy laws of Muslim countries – I see here in today’s news two Pakistanis getting twenty-five years in jail for touching a Quran with dirty hands – do not speak well for the habit of censoring religious speech and behavior.  Once an “insult” is a crime, you are on a slippery slope.