Geert Wilders: On Trial For Telling the Truth
by sheikyermami on October 12, 2010
Update:
Thanks to Vlad Tepes we have Video!
Testimony of Dr. Wafa Sultan at the trial of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
Here is some stunning court testimony thanks to our never-sleeping Dutch to English translator, V.H.
The judge reads from testimony that was given by Dr. Wafa Sultan about the nature and threat of Islam to Western liberal democracy at the trial of Geert Wilders for whatever it is he is charged with. I phrase it this way because frankly, I feel he is charged with 1. Being Geert Wilders and 2. Not following the Frankfurt school party line on all things politically correct and incorrect.
In any case, this is a great couple of clips. Thanks to VH for the translation, and to The Baron over at Gates of Vienna for the formatting.
First Round 1:0 for Wilders: Acquittal for Geert Wilders on One Count (GoV)
There is nothing hyperbolic in stating that a trial which has just started in Holland will have unparalleled significance for the future of Europe. It is not just about whether our culture will survive, but whether we are even allowed to state the fact that it is being threatened. (Douglas Murray/Telegraph UK)
Truth is No Defense:
“”No matter whether Wilders’ publications are true or not, this does not mean that he can express those as facts”"
Telling the truth is now officially an offence punishable by a prison term. This trial in the Netherlands has now assumed Franz Kafkaesque proportions.
If truth is no defense, then what is? All that’s left is “might is right”. The courts are commending the rule of barbarism. Can it get any worse?
“No matter whether Wilders’ publications are true or not, this does not mean that he can express those as facts”
AMSTERDAM — Prosecutors say Dutch politician Geert Wilders cannot defend himself on hate speech charges by arguing that remarks he has made critical of Islam are true.
They say there is no general agreement about the nature of Islam and his statements are only his opinion….
Prosecutor Birgit van Roessel said at the start of her closing arguments Tuesday that the right to freedom of speech has limits, including when it infringes too far on the right of freedom of religion….(The Associated Press, October 12/via Jihad Watch)
A comment by Marisol:
By the prosecutor’s arguments, government has the right to define “truth” and what “facts” the public is capable of handling. What grown adult would submit themselves to be “minded” by their country’s government in this manner?
None ever should.
Hugh Fitzgerald:
Prosecutor Birgit van Roessel said at the start of her closing arguments Tuesday that the right to freedom of speech has limits, including when it infringes too far on the right of freedom of religion….”
So the “freedom of speech” is to be curtailed because of invocation of the magic word “religion” in the phrase “freedom of religion.” But freedom of religion does not include freedom from critical, scrutiny and remarks — and we are all free to discuss the truth, or asymptotic approach to the trut, or falsehood, or wild falsehood, of those critical remarks, and the evidence of our senses, including sight, which allows us not to only read the daily news, but to read the relevant texts, read historians and scholars, of this or that belief-system called, by convention, a “religion.”
There are those, including many ex-Muslims, who have argued that Islam is much more than a “religion” in the conventional sense. It shares with what we call “cults” a ferocity toward those who leave this “religion” or “cult,” and outdoes the cults we all know in that ferocity, inflicting — where it can — the death penalty on those considered to be defectors from the Army of Islam. It is a Total Belief-System, and includes so many elements of what should be called a Politics and Geopolitics of Islam, that to treat it merely as a “religion” is it mislead and endanger oneself, for the very basis, the very heart, of Islam is the division of the universe between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infidel, and Muslims owe their loyalty only to fellow Muslims and above all, to Islam, for the real object of worship in Islam is Islam itself, which must be protected and promoted, and lying about the contents of the faith is perfectly permissible to protect and promote it.
In any case, even if we were to concede — many will lat this point no longer wish to concede that Islam is a “religion” tout court, what happens when the demands Muslims make for freedom from criticism of Islam pushes against the most important of all Western freedoms, on which all other freedoms depend — freedom of speech?
Those who in Western Europe are running around not knowing what to do, who allowed in so many Muslims, who did not perform due diligence over the last few decades (this is not a phenomenon resulting from some long historical process — the arrival of more than a handful of Muslims in the West is only a few decades old, was not inevitable, and the acquiescence of the West in that large-scale presence is not historically determined, can be — and should be- reversed; it was the product of Western nonchalance, naivete, and a worship of diseased versions of the gods Tolerance and Diversity — on by way of civilisational sacrifice, some have decided, Prosecutor Brigit van Roesel and the judges in the Kangaroo Court now chomping at the bit, as they jump in place,in Amsterdam, have all decided — that they will, to those gods, and because they lack the wit and intelligence to imagine a world where the truth about Islam can be told, and cannot figure out what they would have to do to intelligently deal with the consequences of that truth-telling, instead are prepared to make burnt offerings of the West’s freedom of speech, and in the end of everything that makes the West the West, on the altars of those two false gods.
More from Hugh:
The more one thinks about this statement by Birgit van Roesel, the prosecutor in what may turn out to be one of the most important trials in Western history, the more outrageous it seems.
She is claiming for an ideology that she insists must be called a “religion” — without discussing what kinds of belief-systems are legitimately to be called “religions” — beyond mere convention, and lazy or misinformed habit, that is — and thus to be accorded the protections afforded by “freedom of religion” — that part of what it should enjoy is freedom from criticism, even if that criticism is true. She also wants to cover all bases. She says that what Wilders says is in the realm of “opinion” and not of truth — so that truth can be no defense. But just to be sure, just to make it clear that Wilders will not be able to emerge unscathed, will not be able to say what he wishes to say about Islam, and we who hear or read him can then decide, on the basis both of the evidence he adduces, and the evidence of our own senses which we are quite capable of comparing with what he, and others say. Are we not capable of comparing what Wilders says with what others say, including Muslim apologists? Or are we not to listen to Wafa Sultan? to Ayaan Hirsi Ali? to hundreds of other articulate apostates? Are we not to read C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, many hundreds of other Western scholars of Islam but only read those who bear the Islamic Seal of Approval, including such worthies as Karen Armstrong and John Esposito? And will Dutch people have to, as during World War II, listen secretly to broadcasts on clandestine radio stations, beamed in from the Resistance outside?
In the history of the modern West we have learned, from such historians as Jonathan Israel, that the Dutch Enlightenment, associated with Baruch Spinoza, preceded, and helped to create, the French Enlightenment. Central to that is the spirit of free and critical inquiry. It is this that those who would curtail freedom of speech who are busily undoing in this trial of Geert Wilders.
“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” Karl Kraus famously wrote. Where language is curtailed, thought is curtailed. And where thought is curtailed…well, it’s back to the old drawing-board, for the Western world, at a time of great and varied peril, not all of it emanating from Islam, but Islam, and the threat, and the expense, and the distraction, and the upset, and the fear, and the everything, that the large-scalle presence of Muslims has created in the West, are using up our attention, are confusing some and distracting others, and making them forget what the West itself is all about, or should be.
Here’s yours truly:
This would have been the moment for Geert Wilders to throw the book at the judges and to walk out.
The only thing these PC freaks understand is raw force. Geert should rally ten or twenty thousand of his followers to beleaguer the courthouse, block the traffic and shout so loud that the walls come down. This charade has to be ended.
The Dutch are becoming the laughing stock of EUrabia with this witch-hunt.
No comments:
Post a Comment