Geert Wilders

The Nightly Build...

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Free Speech on Trial in the Netherlands

Rod Dreher, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, reports that Geert Wilders, the far-right, racist, Islamophobic Dutch politician has been ordered to stand trial for incitement of hatred and discrimination against Muslims. Dreher is livid. How much of Dreher's outrage is in defense of free speech and how much is in defense of this bigot's anti-Muslim politics is not clear. Combine the two and you can be sure it gets the full Rod Dreher treatment.

"It boggles the mind to imagine it."
"It is infuriating to watch..."
"It's outrageous to think that now people in the Netherlands risk criminal prosecution for criticizing religion and religious believers."

Think back seventy years. The people Rod Dreher would be defending would be the Nazis. The free speech he would be defending would be Nazi incitements to hatred and discrimination against the Jews. The Dutch, who suffered in the Holocaust, naturally are less enamored of racist bigots exploiting free speech rights than is Rod Dreher, who himself doesn't have much good to say about Muslims, the targets of today's hate speech.

The lesson Dreher draws from this is a classic case of blaming the victim. He argues that "the Dutch court's action goes a long way toward vindicating Wilders' claim that the Dutch are losing their freedoms and their democracy because of the Muslim presence among them." In fact, Muslims are the targets of Wilder's hate speech, not the reason the Dutch are losing their freedoms. Lay the blame for that on Geert Wilders, who is testing the limits of free speech rights in the Netherlands with his despicable, racist, bigoted public utterances.

Personally, I stand for the right of free speech, not out of sympathy for the likes of Geert Wilders, but for myself. Thomas More, in the play A Man for All Seasons, dramatically said, "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!" Geert Wilders is a despicable man with despicable politics. But free speech must be a right for the despicable if it is to be a right for the rest of us, too. The trouble with Rod Dreher's blog is that one can't help but suspect that Dreher admires Geert Wilders' extremism as much as or even more than he cherishes free speech.

I summarized the above in a one sentence comment posted on The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog: "I can't tell if Rod Dreher is upset because free speech is under attack or because a racist Islamophobe is under attack." I was censored. My comment was deleted. Ironic, no?

P.S. Before you apply Godwin's law to my post, note that Geert Wilders himself has compared Muslims to Nazis. So, a case can be made that I wasn't the first to raise Nazis in this debate. That's my story and I'm sticking with it.