This is not directly about refugees, but I thought it was important enough to post anyway. Free speech is an issue all over the world, and those of us who have blogs or who write or speak for public consumption in other ways have an intense interest in keeping our speech free here in the United States. Britain no longer has free speech, and the banning of Dutch member of Parliament Geert Wilders is one result. Wilders was thought to be too inflammatory for tender British ears in that he criticizes Islam. For the last four years he has been under 24-hour-a-day guard in the Netherlands as the result of death threats.
Thanks to Diana West for posting Wilders’s speech on her blog. It is very moving, and it is a shameful thing that Wilders was prevented from entering Britain to give it. Here’s a short excerpt:
In 1982 President Reagan came to the House of Commons, where he did a speech very few people liked. Reagan called upon the West to reject communism and defend freedom. He introduced a phrase: ‘evil empire’. Reagan’s speech stands out as a clarion call to preserve our liberties. I quote: If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.
What Reagan meant is that you cannot run away from history, you cannot escape the dangers of ideologies that are out to destroy you. Denial is no option.
Communism was indeed left on the ash heap of history, just as Reagan predicted in his speech in the House of Commons. He lived to see the Berlin Wall coming down, just as Churchill witnessed the implosion of national-socialism.
Today, I come before you to warn of another great threat. It is called Islam. It poses as a religion, but its goals are very worldly: world domination, holy war, sharia law, the end of the separation of church and state, the end of democracy. It is not a religion, it is a political ideology. It demands you respect, but has no respect for you.
Read more about the current Wilders incident at FrontPage Magazine, here. And see our previous posts mentioning Wilders here.