Alan Franklin writes: I am reinstating this comment on our website as it is still so pertinent.
How Britain, the cradle of liberty, is sleepwalking towards cultural suicide
MELANIE PHILLIPS, WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE WEB
If anyone had doubted the extent to which Britain has capitulated to Islamic terror, the banning of Geert Wilders should surely open their eyes.
Wilders, the Dutch member of parliament who had made an uncompromising stand against the Koranic sources of Islamist extremism and violence, was due to give a screening of Fitna, his film on this subject, at the House of Lords.
Rightwing: Dutch Parliament member Geert Wilders
This meeting had been postponed amid claims that Muslims would lay siege to the Lords if Wilders was allowed to speak.
To their credit, the Lords authorities had stood firm and said extra police would be drafted in to meet any threat and the Wilders meeting should go ahead.
But now the government has announced that it is banning Wilders from the country.
A letter from the Home Secretary’s office to Wilders, delivered via the British embassy in the Hague, said: '...the Secretary of State is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society.
'The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.'
So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism.
It is he, not them, who is considered a ‘serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society’. Why? Because the result of this stand for life and liberty against those who would destroy them might be an attack by violent thugs.
The response is not to face down such a threat of violence but to capitulate to it instead.
It was the same reasoning that led the police on those pro-Hamas marches to confiscate the Israeli flag, on the grounds that it would provoke violence, while those screaming support for genocide and incitement against the Jews were allowed to do so.
The reasoning was that the Israeli flag might provoke thuggery while the genocidal incitement would not. So those actually promoting aggression were allowed to do so while those who threatened no-one at all were repressed.
And now a Dutch politician who doesn’t threaten anyone is banned for telling unpalatable truths about those who do; while those who threaten life and liberty find that the more they do so, the more the British government will do exactly what they want, in the interests of ‘community harmony’.
Wilders is a controversial politician, to be sure. But this is another fateful and defining issue for Britain’s governing class as it continues to sleepwalk into cultural suicide.
If British MPs do not raise hell about this banning order, if they go along with this spinelessness, if they fail to stand up for the principle that the British Parliament of all places must be free to hear what a fellow democratically elected politician has to say about one of the most difficult and urgent issues of our time, if they fail to hold the line against the threat of violence but capitulate to it instead, they will be signalling that Britain is no longer the cradle of freedom and democracy but its graveyard.
This piece first appeared online at www.spectator.co.uk
