Hudson New York

Last month’s EU election results saw the press reacting with horror at the rise of “far-Right” parties. However, while some parties (such as the anti-Semitic Jobbik, which created a paramilitary wing in 2007) are indeed far-Right, some others described as such, are, as Soeren Kern has observed, among “[…] the best allies that Jews (and Israel) will find in Europe today.”

The most excessive piece of propaganda I saw during the recent EU election period was an article on EUobserver.com about Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom. Written by one Andrew Willis, and entitled “Netherlands embraces far right in EU elections,” the author decried the party as “far-Right” and “xenophobic.” This despite the fact that despite the fact that the Party for Freedom is a staunch defender of Israel, and that Wilders spent some of his youth in the country, and still visits it regularly.

Particularly troubling, however, was a photograph of a group of skinheads accompanying the text, along with the caption: “Neo-nazi youth look on as Geert Wilders campaigns in Leeuwarden, Netherlands.” The suggestion was of course that “neo-Nazi youth” are the real voters of the Party for Freedom, because the party is really neo-Nazi. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth (and curiously, there is not the slightest hint of Wilders or his party in the photograph). 

Although it opposes mass immigration, especially from Muslim countries, the Party for Freedom wants its immigrants to assimilate into Dutch society and enjoy the benefits of democracy and liberty. The party also ran on an essentially libertarian platform of defending women’s rights and protecting gays from street violence perpetrated by Muslim gangs (the extent of the latter problem was revealed last year after fashion model Mike Du Pree was dragged from the catwalk and assaulted by ten Muslim youths, shocking the Netherlands).

Additionally, Wilders has been careful to distance himself from actual far-Right parties, for example, telling the Guardian last year that, “My allies are not [Jean-Marie] Le Pen or [Jorg] Haider, We'll never join up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I'm very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.”

Fascists, the far-Right, neo-Nazis and skinheads are not really fond of Israel, Jews, women’s rights, or gay rights. They are not interested in the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, democracy, or freedom.

As it turns out, they are fond of Islamism. Islamism and Nazism have had an on-off relationship since the 1930s. However, only last year Abraham H. Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, observed a “[…] burgeoning relationship of far-right and Muslim extremists who increasingly are working together to promote anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.”

The Holocaust is key to Islamist and neo-Nazi propaganda, and the latter has enthusiastically adopted the arguments of the former. If supporters of Israel are now portrayed as far-Right, the Jews are portrayed as the new Nazis, or “Zio-Nazis” by pro-Hamas agitators in Britain and Europe. At Durban II recently, a member of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's entourage even accosted Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, and repeatedly screamed “Zionazi” at him. In this applied historical revisionism - Britain’s and Europe’s politicians and media - Muslims must be portrayed as the new Jews, and Palestine as the new or real Holocaust.

Catherine Heseltine of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK), justified the banning of Wilders from the UK on Sky News in February [video], calling him a “fascist,” and asserting that his view of Muslims “is precisely what Hitler said about the Jewish population in Europe sixty years ago, and it led to the horrors of the Holocaust.”

At the time of the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons controversy, Asghar Bukhari, a founder member of MPACUK, also went on television [video] to confront the editor of a German newspaper that had reprinted them:

“I would have thought that someone from Germany would understand the danger of these type of images,” he said, “Haven’t you learned a lesson from the past?”

Bukhari is clearly alluding to the Holocaust (and implying that publishing the cartoons is the first possible step toward an eventual genocide of Europe’s Muslims). However, in 2005, MPACUK published an article entitled “Zionists Behind Terror Attacks,” along with a cartoon of a grotesque “Jewish” devil, obtained from a neo-Nazi website. The next year Bukhari sent funds and messages of support to neo-Nazi-connected Holocaust denier David Irving, encouraging him in his “fight for the Truth.”

Again, although Lord Ahmed complained to the Home Office about Wilders visiting Britain to show his short movie Fitna, by invitation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch, already in 2005 Ahmed had held a book launch in the House of Lords for anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Israel Shamir.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, Shamir is “[…] a longtime supporter of leftist causes, [who] believes that the U.S. government and Israel created 9/11 to carry out anti-Muslim policies.” He also has neo-Nazi connections. And in the same year that he accepted Ahmed’s invitation, Shamir spoke at a conference co-hosted by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. The conference was entitled “Zionism As the Biggest Threat to Modern Civilization.”

Remarkably, it is Wilders that will be prosecuted for “hate speech,” for his movie Fitna, for calling the Koran a “fascist book,” and for suggesting that if Hitler’s Mein Kampf is banned, then why should not the Koran be banned, too for violating the Netherlands’ hate speech laws?

However, Wilders is not the only one to raise the subject of banning the Koran for possibly violating hate speech legislation. In 2005, as the British government was seeking to introduce the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, the then future Mayor of London Boris Johnson challenged the proposal in the House of Commons, reading out extracts of the Koran degrading to Christians and Jews. Johnson then continued, again rhetorically:

Mr. Deputy Speaker, that that is pretty strong stuff. I see the Minister scratching his head. I do not see him leaping to his feet to elucidate whether he believes that that is inflammatory and inspirational of hatred against the believers of those religions. I would like him to explain to us all here and now why and how he thinks the repetition of those words [of the Koran] in a public or private place does not amount to incitement to religious hatred of exactly the kind that the Bill is supposed to ban. If this Bill is to make any sense at all, it must mean the banning of the reading of such things in public or in private […]

It is no secret that al-Qaeda and Muslim terrorists draw inspiration from the Koran for attacks on non-Muslims, just as the Taliban and clerical fascist regime of Iran, for example, find in the Koran, sharia law, and so on, justification for violence against the people of their own countries, including fellow Muslims.

That the Koran is interpreted fascistically by the Islamofascist movement is entirely clear. Hamas cites the Koran in its charter along with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic forgery used by the Nazi Party for propaganda, and, moreover, links them ontologically:

The Zionist plan is limitless. [It] is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ […] Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason, and cursed be he who does that. ‘for whoso shall turn his back unto them on that day, unless he turneth aside to fight, or retreateth to another party of the faithful, shall draw on himself the indignation of Allah, and his abode shall be hell; an ill journey shall it be thither.’ (The Spoils - verse 16).

Again, the Hilali-Khan translation of the Koran even introduces modern militarism into the text. Thus 8:60 reads “And make ready against them all you can of power, including steeds of war (tanks, planes, missiles, artillery, etc.) to threaten the enemy of Allah and your enemy.” Tanks, planes, etc., obviously aren’t mentioned in the original Koran.

Nevertheless, some non-Muslims argued that banning Fitna, or banning Wilders from entering the UK, was right, even if the Muslim-run, counter-jihad, Quilliam Foundation did not. Staunch defender of some free speech Chris Huhne felt that, with its “shocking images of violence,” Fitna incited hatred against Muslims and, as such, that the Home Office had acted correctly in preventing him from visiting the UK. Nevertheless, Huhne was keen to highlight his free speech credentials, pointing out that he had, “[…] defended people with some particularly odious views, such as the recent case of the Australian Holocaust denier Dr Frederick Toben.”

Although he acknowledged not having watched the 15 minute long movie (though he had heard Huhne saying that it promulgated hate), former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone remarked [video] that “The British government has fairly consistently -Tory and Labour - argued that you shouldn’t allow people a platform to say anything that incites hatred because that can often lead to violence.” Peculiarly, Livingstone neglected to mention his 2004 invitation to notorious anti-Semite and terrorism promoter Yusuf al-Qaradawi to speak in London - an invitation that the extremist cleric gladly accepted.

There are, of course, many Muslims in the West who reject Islamic militancy. And there are also a number of outspoken reformist Muslims, such as Irshad Manji, and reformist groups such as Muslims Against Sharia, which are standing up against the Islamic fascist movement, despite receiving death threats.

But just as the West seems so thoroughly unwilling to support Iran’s democracy movement over the Islamofascist regime, so the same governments, political parties, and much of the media, have shunned moderates and reformers in Western countries. It is the extremists that the authorities appear keen to appease or promote, and the Islamic fascism of Hamas and Hezbollah that they appear keen to accommodate in their own countries.

If such Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites are considered moderate, then Wilders might well be considered extremist. However, in reality, Wilders is broadly in line with reformist Muslims. If Fitna ends with the call for “[…] Muslims themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Quran” - and while many Western liberal politicians no doubt think this “hate speech” - Muslims Against Sharia has posted a Koran online, with the violent passages removed as part of an attempt to modernize Islam. Manji also has a “progressive, 21st-century translation” of the Koran on her website (the US publisher backed out of the project after seeing the riots over the Mohammed cartoons).

In the name of “community cohesion” Britain has consistently failed to stand up for the values of liberty and justice, and indeed even for free speech, rational inquiry, or for the truth. Instead we see more and more the façade of a liberal society, “celebrating diversity” yet turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism, honor violence against Muslim women, forced marriage of Muslim girls, calls for the murder of homosexuals and the subjugation of all non-Muslims, or “kuffar.”

In 2007, for example, the Historical Association found that a number of British schools had even stopped teaching the Holocaust because of “anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils.”

Earlier this year we saw thousands protesting in support of Hamas in London, with violent outbreaks at the Israeli embassy, and attacks on British Jews.

Last year, the Independent revealed that 17,000 girls and women are victims of “honor violence.”

Again, the archconservative Telegraph pointed out a few days ago, that the major parties clamor for the gay vote, but refuse to address the hatred of homosexuals among a disproportionately high percentage of Muslims, and, moreover, the incitement of violence against them by a number of British imams (as was exposed in the documentary Undercover Mosque).

Would British teachers stop teaching the Holocaust if they thought “neo-Nazi youth” would air anti-Semitic or Holocaust denial sentiments? Would Britain’s feminist or Leftwing stay silent if 17,000 girls and women were the victims of “honor violence” perpetuated by, and against, Catholics or Evangelicals? Would Britain’s political parties turn a blind eye to the “average” citizen inciting violence against homosexuals? No. No. No. And they would be right not to.

Yet the problem is not limited to Britain. As Wilders said about the other parties in the Netherlands recently, they like to call themselves “progressive,” but  “We [in the Party for Freedom] are doing their work. Why are we the largest party (in a poll held) on the website of (gay magazine) Gay Krant? Is anybody thinking? Because homosexuals experience the consequences of Islamisation every day in their neighbourhoods.” The other parties, he said, “should be combating […] the dire position of women, unbelievers and homosexuals.”

I think we can safely say, these are not the sentiments of a politician on the “far-Right.”

A healthy society would be stirred by such images to stand for freedom, to support moderates and reformers, and tackle the fascists of our own time, not least of all by exposing their aims, ideology, and crimes. Yet, the response of Britain and the Netherlands has been to attempt to prevent Wilders from speaking, and to force their societies to turn a blind eye to the most grotesque injustice.

The political class will of course allow “some particularly odious views” on the Holocaust, Zionism, etc., to be aired, but this has nothing to do with believing in free speech, and everything to do with avoiding a confrontation with the Islamofascists.