His "unsavoury policies" include issues like "freedom of speech, female equality and gay rights." Pardon?

Andrew Bolt:

The New York Times brands Dutch political leader Geert Wilders an ‘extremist” and “populist” who causes trouble for “mainstream” politicians with his “unsavoury policies”. It then calls on a Dutch academic to help explain how bad this “outspoken critic of Islam” really is:

Dick Houtman, a professor of political sociology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said that Mr. Wilders had built on Mr. Fortuyn’s legacy, successfully avoiding the overtly racist language of far-right politicians in other countries by highlighting issues like freedom of speech, female equality and gay rights. ”That serves to exclude Muslims from the Dutch political consensus,” he said.

Are these guys listening to themselves? If “highlighting issues like freedom of speech, female equality and gay rights” does indeed “exclude Muslims from the Dutch political consensus”, then who is the real problem here? Which side of the debate does indeed have “unsavoury policies”?

This siding with the threat rather than the threatened is already sick enough, But note also that Wilders’ forerunner, gay academic Pim Fortuyn, was murdered by a green activist upset by his warnings of the threat to freedom posed by Islam, and that Wilders himself is now under 24-hour guard merely for speaking his mind.

Michael Finch sums up:

Apparently to be part of the postmodern Western “political consensus”, too be inclusive of Muslims, we need to be against freedom of speech, gay rights and female equality?

Houtman, aware of it or not, has made a brilliant, if obvious, observation. In order for many Muslim immigrants to feel culturally and politically included in the West, most clearly in Holland, they need to exist in an environment that is not open to the pluralistic, open and free West of the Enlightenment of the past 300 years.

So when a Western politician like Wilders openly embraces the values of liberty, he is called an extremist, hate monger and radical with ties to neo Nazis. The elite class, currently in Washington and throughout the halls of Western academia and the media, feel it more important to be inclusive of Muslims then holding true to the values that created the most open and free society the world has ever seen. And to oppose this new orthodoxy makes one a criminal, as the Left hopes to make of Wilders.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/how_dare_wilders_not_surrender_freedom_to_islam/

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