(Il)liberal Intolerance: Free Geert Wilders!
February 26, 2009
(Originally published in the Harvard Salient)
Your presence in this country will “threaten community harmony and therefore public security.” Your views are “one-sided generalizations.” You will be scrutinized in a court of law in your home country for broadcasting a subversive, divisive message. You will find no asylum here.
If the above paragraph were shown to Dutch parliamentary leftists without context, I suspect more than a few would rightly find it to be a detestable rejection of the right of free speech and the right of asylum that are so essential to the identity of that small country. Unfortunately for freedom’s sake, these insults were found in a notice to Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders from British Home Minister Jacqui Smith when he tried to enter the country in mid-February. Wilders returned home where the Dutch government, at the behest of its more leftist elements, continued its investigation of the MP for promoting intolerance.
Wilders is not a popular man among leftists in the Netherlands. Originally elected in 1998, Wilders is known worldwide for his vehement arguments against Islam. His vitriolic platform calls for such drastic measures as banning Islamic headwear in public and creating a limit of 5,000 political refugees in the Netherlands at any given time. His general attitudes towards Islam are best summed up by his own suggestion that the Dutch should “not tolerate the intolerant.”
Ironically, Wilders himself has not been tolerated by the Dutch and British governments. After creating a short film entitled Fitna, Wilders has come under investigation by his own government for inaccurately portraying Muslims. A group of British parliamentarians invited Wilders to present the film to them in England shortly after, but he soon received the Home Secretary’s notice declaring him persona non grata, and was sent back to the Netherlands.
Wilders’s case is disturbing for believers in free speech. The inability of the government to restrict certain views, no matter how distasteful, is a cornerstone of legal tradition in both Britain and the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the European Left seems to have a double standard for who exactly deserves protection under free speech laws. In many cases, the very same leftists calling for the prosecution of Wilders have advocated protection for radical Muslim activists. Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, for example, is a self-described socialist who invited Muslim preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi to talk about moderate Islam. Unfortunately for Livingstone, activists discovered that al-Qaradawi has spoken sympathetically in the past about suicide bombing, female genital mutilation, the killing of Israeli civilians, and the stoning of homosexuals. Livingstone was outraged that critics would point out these inconveniences, accusing them of pushing “lies and Islamophobia.” There is nothing fair, just, or free about Livingstone’s decision to give a podium to al-Qaradawi followed by his vocal support of the entry ban against Wilders. When Livingstone originally stood up for free speech, perhaps he ought to have just come out and specified that he only meant the kind that was convenient for delivering votes from his constituencies.
Wilders is an obsessive, irrational, fixated man. He scapegoats Muslim immigrants as responsible for crime, budget problems, and declining moral standards in his home country – ironic, given that Muslims do not tend to frequent the brothels and abortion clinics that Wilders’s Dutch predecessors made widely available. The point here is that Wilders’s views hardly deserve credence, but they, too, are entitled to tolerance. In a free marketplace of ideas, illogical hatred will be pushed to the margins. In a society that seeks to defend one group against another and to protect a minority from the views of a belligerent extremist, however, resentment will grow alongside sympathy for extremism. People will react strongly against what they perceive to be a threat to their liberties. So long as Muslims are correctly seen as appreciating freedom in the West, they will be welcomed and, over time, integrated. The moment that Muslims are seen as an excuse for censorship, otherwise indifferent people will begin to resent their presence.
The other unintended consequence of statements made by people like Minister Smith is that they actually reinforce Wilders’s point. After all, if Muslims truly are peace-loving people who respect liberty, why does the government have to prevent an extremist from entering in order to preserve the security of the community? In her own lefty way, Smith herself is embracing as much of a dangerous stereotype of Muslims as Wilders is. Unfortunately, when she enters another country, there won’t be a band of protestors to greet her.
No more ag subsidies! Sign a petition to Vilsack!
February 7, 2009
They’re bad for the economy, the world, and farming. Sign our bipartisan petition to send them to the Dustbowl of history!
“Republicans wanted to deny the premium subsidies to people who had annual incomes of more than $100,000 or assets of more than $1 million. They also wanted to prevent people with more than $1 million of family income from taking advantage of the Medicaid option for the unemployed.
Democrats voted down those proposals in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. (emphasis mine)
Representative Nathan Deal, Republican of Georgia, said “the poorest of the poor” had long been subject to income and asset tests when applying for Medicaid. But, Mr. Deal argued, under the new option, a millionaire could get Medicaid benefits, financed entirely by the federal government, without being asked about such matters.
The committee chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said, “It’s highly unlikely that you are going to find millionaires who would like to go on Medicaid.”
Moreover, Mr. Waxman said, the purpose of the new options is to “streamline the enrollment process” and speed assistance to people who are unemployed.
“It’s going to set up an unnecessary barrier if we have any income test,” Mr. Waxman said, adding that the enforcement of a means test could require “a whole new bureaucracy.””
Agricrap
January 31, 2009
My grandfather was a farmer; believe me when I say I’m all in favor of family farming as a lifestyle. But massive subsidies are wrecking markets, doing substantial humanitarian damage, and promoting environmental destruction. Stay tuned in the next few weeks for an opportunity to fight farming subsidies.
Long live Britain! No more gun bans!
January 24, 2009
Hope for a change
January 24, 2009
This week, America commemorates two momentous occasions. This year, the first African American president was inaugurated. He takes office on the promise of respecting the dignity of the poor, the needy, the sick, the immigrant, the prisoner, the homosexual, and the outcast. This is change we can believe in.
Hopefully, so is this.
Bush is a regulate and spend liberal!
January 17, 2009
Michael Tanner over at Cato is very, very right. Obama can blame Bush or he can blame the free market for America’s recent problems, but blaming both is just ridiculous. The massive trends towards privatization and deregulation in the past eight years that Obama went all Kucinich on during the campaign are not a part of observable reality. If anything, they stopped when Clinton left office.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/01/13/of-course-that-implies-he-had-principles/
“President Bush says that he ‘chucked aside my free-market principles’ when faced with the current financial crisis. Well, duh!
The president said that he had no choice because he was “concerned that the credit freeze would cause us to be headed toward a depression greater than the Great Depression.” Even if one accepts that rather contestable premise, one is tempted to ask what caused him to chuck aside conservative and free market principles when he:
* Increased federal domestic discretionary spending (even before the bailout) faster than any president since Lyndon Johnson.
* Enacted the largest new entitlement program since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, an unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit that could add as much as $11.2 trillion to the program’s unfunded liabilities;
* Dramatically increased federal control over local schools while increasing federal education spending by nearly 61 percent;
* Signed a campaign finance bill that greatly restricts freedom of speech, despite saying he believed it was unconstitutional;
* Authorized warrantless wiretapping and given vast new powers to law enforcement;
* Federalized airport security and created a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security;
* Added roughly 7,000 pages of new federal regulations, bringing the cost of federal regulations to the economy to more than $1.1 trillion;
* Enacted a $1.5 billion program to promote marriage;
* Proposed a $1.7 billion initiative to develop a hydrogen-powered car;
* Abandoned traditional conservative support for free trade by imposing tariffs and other import restrictions on steel and lumber;
* Expanded President Clinton’s national service program;
* Increased farm subsidies;
* Launched an array of new regulations on corporate governance and accounting; and
* Generally did more to centralize government power in the executive branch than any administration since Richard Nixon.”
Ever seen a train coming down the tracks?
January 12, 2009
Funny thing is, 3 years and 30 million poor retirees later, the “progressive” media will still spin this to look like greedy corporations screwing helpless Americans:
Radical Biblical Capitalism
January 9, 2009
An occasionally-flawed, yet ultimately consistent, rebuttal to “Christian” socialism: http://mises.org/story/2918
Equality has held steady for twenty years…
January 8, 2009
…but income reporting on tax forms has not. See pages 20 and 21 for the fastest visual evidence that the top percent of richest Americans is doing no better today compared to everyone else than it was in 1987. Read the rest to see why it looks like they are in many publications.
Bad Dinner Conversations 