Mark Steyn corrects Charles Krauthammer about Geert Wilders
March 9th, 2010I heard Krauthammer’s remarks about Wilders last night and thought that they were shallow and uninformed. Mark Steyn deals with it:
Wilders does not need to be lectured condescendingly about distinctions within Islam, because he lives with them every day. And he has concluded, notwithstanding Dr. Krauthammer’s views on the precise “minority” that identifies as “Islamist,” that Islam itself is the issue — and that, therefore, notwithstanding the “moderation” of the “overwhelming majority” of Muslims, the more Islam the less Netherlands in any recognizable sense. Are the gangs of gay bashers on the streets of Amsterdam “Islamist” by Krauthammer’s definition? Maybe, maybe not. But, either way, they make the running, and the rest of the community is either indifferent or quiescent.
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The Continental political class does not want to debate the question of its ever more assertive Muslim populations, and so has decided to criminalize the debate. Geert Wilders lives under 24/7 security because Muslims (including the killer of Theo van Gogh) have pledged to murder him. Yet he’s the one on trial for incitement? The issue is not Wilders or his views, but the Dutch state and their ever more “extreme, radical, and wrong” views on core Western liberties.
First comes political correctness in speech, then criminalization. I doubt that I would find Wilders’ political views compatible with my own, if I knew what his more general views were. But he clearly knows the danger of appeasing Europe’s Muslim minorities: their vocal radicals think they get to kill you if you disagree with them.