Idiots threaten idiot with idiocy
I don’t have a great deal of time for Geert Wilders, the deliberately provocative Dutch politician and leader of the PVV who has made a creer out of aggravating his country’s Muslim population. And he’s at it again.
The Dutch government is bracing itself for violent protests following the scheduled broadcast this week of a provocative anti-Muslim film by a radical right-wing politician who has threatened to broadcast images of the Koran being torn up and otherwise desecrated.
Cabinet ministers and officials, fearing a repetition of the crisis sparked by the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper two years ago, have held a series of crisis meetings and ordered counter-terrorist services to draw up security plans. Dutch nationals overseas have been asked to register with their embassies and local mayors in the Netherlands have been put on standby.
Wilders is promising that his film will be broadcast - either on television or over the internet - and it will, he says, reveal the Koran as “source of inspiration for intolerance, murder and terror”. In November, the Dutch government formally warned Wilders of the potential security risk he may run with his film and now they are trying to pre-emt the reaction. Foreign Minister, Maxime Verhagen had this to say:
It is difficult to anticipate the content of the film, but freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend.
The thing is, freedom of expression does mean the right to offend. Even if the person doing the offending is an idiot with an agenda.
Inevitably, of course, the the usual idiots have risen to the bait:
Speaking in the European parliament on Tuesday, Syria’s chief mufti Ahmad Badr Al-Din Al-Hassoun said Geert Wilders would be “solely responsible for any violence and bloodshed” that might follow after the release of his film.
He called upon the Dutch to stop the release of Wilders’ work.
Any violence that follows the release of the film will be the responsibility of whoever commits the violence. No one else.
Job Cohen, the Mayor of Amsterdam appears to understand that the best response to poisonous speech is rational speech. He won’t talk about the film until after it had been released but has called for a debate “so that the moderates can make themselves heard”.
Monday 21 Jan 2008 | Paul | The Netherlands
