This is good news! Free speech, at least for now, still reigns in the Netherlands. It was a close call. Pamela Geller reports:
The judges in the Court of Amsterdam delivered their verdict Thursday morning in the heresy trial of Dutch Freedom Party politician Geert Wilders. Wilders has been found not guilty of all charges of inciting hatred against Muslims. The judge, Marcel van Oosten, and the other Dutch authorities ended up doing the right thing, no matter how cowardly and compromised they may have been. They must have known how history would view them if Wilders had been found guilty: as troglodytes who ushered in the return of the Dark Ages.
When do the Islamic supremacists go on trial for inciting hatred against non-Muslims?
“I am delighted with this ruling,” Wilders said. “It is a victory, not only for me but for all the Dutch people. Today is a victory for freedom of speech. The Dutch are still allowed to speak critically about islam, and resistance against islamisation is not a crime. I have spoken, I speak and I shall continue to speak.”
The charges against Geert Wilders were that he had made statements that were intentionally offensive to Muslims; incited hatred against Muslims; incited discrimination against Muslims; and incited hatred of non-Western immigrants.
The Islamic supremacists who initiated the case told the Dutch dhimmi judges that the things Wilders said had led to a rise in discrimination and violence against Muslims. They had no proof, of course, of anyone committing any act of violence against any Muslim, or discriminating against any Muslim, because of anything Geert Wilders said. They just wanted to compel the Netherlands to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws.
This has been dragging on for a good while. The Wilders heresy trial began last October 4, but fell apart just a few weeks later after a special legal panel determined that the judges were biased against Wilders. No kidding. But they found more dhimmi judges and kept going.
The Islamic supremacist “plaintiffs” were seeking a one-euro fine. But it was of course never about a fine, symbolic or otherwise. The Wilders case has always been an attempt to win an Islamic supremacist triumph over the tenets of Western law and free speech. They said if they didn’t get their symbolic one-euro fine, they didn’t get it, but they said they were considering taking their case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Ah yes, take it to the anti-humans under the guise of human rights.
This was a seminal case. Last fall Wilders explained what was really at stake in Holland, and in the entire Western world, in his case: “I am standing trial,” he said, “because of my opinions on Islam … and because the Dutch establishment – most of them non-Muslims – wants to silence me. I have been dragged to court because in my country freedom can no longer be fully enjoyed. In Europe the national state, and increasingly the EU, prescribes how citizens – including democratically elected politicians such as myself – should think and what we are allowed to say.”
Wilders was our proxy — the West was on trial. And while this was a great victory, the fight isn’t over. Even as Geert Wilders is justly acquitted, the noose of the sharia grows ever tighter around neck of the West. Attempts to silence freedom fighters — by legal action as well as through threats – will continue. Let’s take a step back ourselves and understand the price that Wilders and others really are paying, and will continue to pay. Former Muslim and author Wafa Sultan, former Muslim and Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, scholar Robert Spencer, former Muslim and scholar Ibn Warraq, scholar Bat Ye’or, former Muslim Nonie Darwish, cartoonist Lars Vilks, cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, Danish newspaper publisher Flemming Rose, South Park producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Salman Rushdie and countless others, myself included, receive horrible threats all the time. Wilders himself lives under round-the-clock tight security because of the hundreds of death threats he receives every year. And that will not end with his acquittal; if anything, he is in even more danger now.
In his closing remarks before the court a few weeks ago, Wilders said: “Mister President, members of the Court, you have a great responsibility. Do not cut freedom in the Netherlands from its roots, our freedom of expression. Acquit me. Choose freedom.”
They did. Thank Gd. And now we must keep on choosing freedom, and defending freedom, no matter what.
Me - Pamela Geller, who wrote the above, is one of the heroes of our time. Check out her blog Atlas Shrugs. (Note: I have blogged about Geert Wilders previously here, here, here, and here.)