JACQUI SMITH AGREES WITH WILDERS

The British Home Office prevented Dutch MP Geert Wilders from appearing at the House of Lords to discuss his fim, "Fitna," because they said it might lead to violence.

As Charles Moore points out in the Telegraph, the Home Office agrees with Wilders about the dangers of Islamist extremism:

But such nasty films and plays and books – against all sorts of people, faiths and ideologies – are published every week. The immensely popular musical Billy Elliot contains a scene in which people wish an early death for Margaret Thatcher. There is nothing uniquely vile about Fitna: it is merely highly unpleasant. So why is Jacqui Smith "satisfied" that its author must not darken the red carpets of the House of Lords?

Go back to the letter from her office. Mr Wilders's words and film "would threaten community harmony and therefore [my italics] public security in the UK", it says. What the Home Office means is, "If you upset Muslims, there will be violence". With the single word, "therefore", Miss Smith is making a link which is itself insulting to Muslims. Would she say the same about upsetting Christians, or Jews, or farmers, or socialists, or vegetarians? Of course not. It is only Muslims that scare her. So she is saying much the same thing as Geert Wilders!

The question then arises, are Jacqui Smith and Geert Wilders right? Is Islam so basically intolerant that you have only to be foul about it for its adherents to rise up and kill you? If so, we have an unpleasant choice. Act as Mr Wilders wants, and drive Muslims out. Or act as Jacqui Smith wants, and criminalise or exclude those who criticise them.

One's answer to whether they are right cannot be unequivocal. The unpleasant power of Fitna is that the atrocities it depicts and the preaching it shows are real and recent, and they were all carried out or uttered by Muslims acting, explicitly, in the name of their faith. You could not, in our age, compile any comparable clips of Jews or Christians. As a matter of plain fact, Islamic terrorism exists. (Emphases added.)

Hat tip to Roger Kimball who observes:

What is it about Muslims and this penchant for separating people from their heads (and other parts of their anatomy)? I mentioned [Muzzamil] Hassan’s surgical method of connecting, or rather “disconnecting,” people through understanding to my friend in England when we were talking about Wilders. “The full Muslim,” he called it. Is that disrespectful? Or is it merely an unpalatable truth? I know what Daniel Pearl would say, if only he were alive to say it.

What is it about Muslim violence? Nothing special. They do it because it works for them. They are slowly but surely capturing the West. They are gaining veto-power over what may be published in the Western press, over whom British Lords may invite to their own Chambers, and so many other details of daily life in Britain, Europe, and the US. Because of fear, in part.

But more importantly because the Gramscian leftists are using the jihadists to undermine Western institutions, and therefore do everything they can to encourage them.

The Scylla and Charybdis between which the West finds itself trying to navigate to the future are fear and collusion. Both must be defeated.