WHY did the British government choose to prohibit the controversial Dutch politicians, Geert Wilders, from entering Britain? Sadly, it was far more than just a cynical political calculation.
It was that, of course. Wilders is a hate figure to Muslims in Britain and worldwide because of his 15-minute film, “Fitna,” which blames Islam itself for terrorist crimes by Muslim fanatics from the London subway bombings to the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. And Britain’s Labor government is imploding in the opinion polls because of the financial crisis it helped to cause. So banning Wilders was its way of winning much-needed Muslim votes in key election districts.
Yet this is only a partial explanation. British governments have rarely used their arbitrary power to keep dangerous foreigners out of the country. Indeed, London has become known as Londonistan precisely because the Brits let Middle Eastern extremists establish and run their organizations there.
Only in extreme cases has a ban on entry been imposed. (Omar Bakri Mohammed founded a terrorist organization while living for 19 years on Britain’s generous welfare benefits; after a taxpayer-paid operation, he left Britain to convalesce in Lebanon – and was denied re-entry.)
So why ban Wilders? His film may be misleading, alarmist or just plain wrong. But it merely runs images of Muslim-linked terrorism side-by-side with Koranic passages or speeches by Muslim clerics justifying such crimes. He isn’t inciting anyone to murder or riot.
You may object that “Fitna” is one-sided or the Koranic quotations are wrenched from their context. If such criticisms have merit, surely the correct response is to debate with Wilders, not ban him.
The government, however, surely considered instead the different likely responses of British Muslims and other Brits.
When the average Londoner reads in The Sun about how Abu Hamza turned the Finsbury Park mosque into a terrorist recruiting office, he doesn’t join a mob outside the mosque threatening to burn it down. He mutters that the world is going to the dogs and turns the page.
But mobs of extremist Muslims have marched through London in recent years inciting murder. And Labor peer Lord Ahmed’s alleged threat of disorder in this case – to lead 10,000 Muslims to prevent Wilders from showing his film in Parliament – was very plausible. So Wilders was kept out.
Don’t just blame the victim – punish him. In effect, the government has enforced a fatwa on “Fitma” – without, as the hapless foreign secretary admitted, even watching the 15-minute film.
All this reflects an entrenched establishment attitude that the Muslim community is highly combustible and must be appeased. And, because Muslim extremists know this to be the official view, they’re likely to keep inventing pretexts for threats and riots.
The Brits, asked to choose between multiculturalism and freedom, will choose by degrees to be unfree.
Any sane British government would keep two ideas in balance: the importance of not driving ordinary Muslims into the arms of extremists by expressing generalized hostility to Islam, and the importance of not giving ordinary Muslims the impression that there is no price to pay for murderous rhetoric and hostility to Britain.
Here, such a balanced policy would mean admitting Wilders in order to debate him vigorously – while also publicly demanding that Lord Ahmed withdraw his threat and apologize for it. That would be only the start, however, of a long-term settlement.
The Muslim extremists who ended up planting bombs in the London subway or fighting British troops in Afghanistan began life as ordinary British kids who drank beer, played cricket and soccer and chased girls in short skirts.
But modern Britain gave them a vacuum in those parts of the soul where national identity, patriotism and allegiance take root and usually flourish.
Nature especially abhors this particular vacuum – and in places like the Finsbury Park mosque Islamo-fascism filled it.
Worse, Britain’s government, political parties, establishment, major cultural institutions such as the BBC and even the police (now widely derided as “the paramilitary wing of the Guardian”) foster this vacuum. They see patriotism as atavistic and discriminatory – and multiculturalism as its cure. At home and abroad, they are jingoists for the Other.
This collapse of the once-proud national identity into nothingness is a much deeper problem for Britain – and for allies – than Geert Wilders. And there are no signs whatever of its being understood, let alone seriously tackled.
John O’Sullivan is executive editor of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty and a Hudson In stitute senior fellow. The opin ions he expresses are his own and not those of any organiza tion.