Comments on: Qadhi Must NOT Enter the United Kingdom

By: Kt D

Kt D — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:45:52 +0000

I truly think this entire controversy is so strange–how can Wilders expect to discredit the third (or is it second now?) largest religion in the world? I absolutely realize there are concerns with terrorizing extremist groups in Islam, but that does not make up the majority of its followers. Why should their basic rights to freedom of speech and religion be taken away? Although Wilders continuously preaches free speech as his goal, it does seems somewhat hypocritical of him to do so. Or, at the very least, his definition is quite different than the freedom of speech that the United States adheres to. I watched an interesting video on all of this at newsy.com earlier. It’s worth looking at:

http://www.newsy.com/videos/free_speech_or_hate_speech/

By: Josh Scholar

Josh Scholar — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:49:48 +0000

Field, we left off “enslaver (some who makes free people into slaves), seller of slaves, owner of slaves, raper of slaves, killer of slaves”

I don’t remember how bad Vlad was, so I can’t compare with Mohammad. I do remember that Vlad was impaling birds at one point in his career which is less harmful than say, massacres and spreading hatred that will last forever like Mo did.

By: PrunusAbsurdus

PrunusAbsurdus — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:14:42 +0000

For those still arguing about Wilders here are his two tv interviews in the USA so far http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/025002.php#respond

He’s a pussycat!

By: Qwert

Qwert — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:39:55 +0000

Nor do I, nor the man on the Clapham Omnibus, need to be protected from Fred bloody Phelps – who I personally consider comic. I think Mary Whitehouse was born too early, she should have got involved in the whole minority group identity politics caper.

By: Qwert

Qwert — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:05:45 +0000

Or to put it another way, I couldn’t care less whether Geert Wilders is a bigot or not. I’ll take his arguments on their own merits as I judge them to have them or not, thank you very much. I don’t need to be protected from hearing “bigots” speak about Islam any more than I need to be protected from seeing James Bond lest I decide to go around sleeping with hundreds of different women.

By: Qwert

Qwert — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:58:09 +0000

I do think that Geert Wilders is an anti-Muslim bigot. I believe that it is possible to be strongly critical of the tenets of certain iterations of Islam, without inciting hatred.

I am unaware that the word “bigot” has any legal meaning. It seems like a prime candidate example for something like A J Ayer’s emotivist theory of ethics. It’s merely a disproval word in it’s common usage. Saying “Geert Wilders is a bigot” seems to carry very little meaningful truth content and is equivalent to “boo Geert Wilders!” most of the time. What element of objective content such a description could carry would be that he is a man who has opinions that are very hard to change. If true, it is no basis on which to ban someone from entering a country or from exercising free speech. It wouldn’t even really mean that what he says is factually incorrect, so I don’t see the question of whether Wilders is a bigot or not, even to the extent that it actually means anything and is not just a disapproval noise, has anything to do with the price of fish. It’s like an argument about whether James Bond films should be banned on the grounds of whether James Bond is a “cad” or not.

“Incitement to hatred” is also a legal nonsense. Hatred is an emotion, a set of synaptic firings. It is not a criminal offence so why should incitement to it be so?

By: field

field — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:50:39 +0000

Josh –

No it couldn’t be any worse. It would probably be better. As far as I know Vlad only went around impaling people. A reasonably self-contained pastime.

It is worth doing the list now and then, because out of politeness to the feelings of perfectly pleasant and respectable Muslims one is sometimes disinclined to focus on ALL the ways in which he was a completely unpleasant human being. One gets hung up on the Jihad thing or the democracy thing. But it’s a very, very long list. Mine was the abbreviated version.

If the Pro-Shariah movement are determined to stifle freedom of speech and silence democrats then I guess we have a duty to take a risk and focus on that list. We’ve got nothing to lose.

By: Qwert

Qwert — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:21:37 +0000

Incidentally, Hook Hand was convicted for incitement to murder Jews. An old law with no provisos or mentions of the word “Jew” and rightly so. The only purpose of having the word there could be to either privilege or disprivilege Jews. Exactly the same problems occur with any law with the word religion in it. It’s only purpose can be to disprivelege or privilege religious groups as compared to other subsets of the human race. Otherwise it is merely there for decoration. Same with any law with the word racial in it. A wrong against a racial group can only also be wrong against any other unchosen subset of humanity or else it isn’t wrong in the first place.

By: phil

phil — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:21:05 +0000

David T is a jelly spined fool, he and his kind have destroyed this country.

So David what was your opinion of Pym Fortuyn?, did you like him any better than Wilder’s?.

By: Qwert

Qwert — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:01:18 +0000

You rather lost me after that.

My point is that laws should not discriminate by religion or race but apply equally to all citizens. Provisos like yours, if they mean anything at all (indeed I left it open that they may not in your case) can only exist to produce a tiered legal system that discrimates and says that one wrong is legal and another objectively identical wrong illegal depending on group classification. It is this kind of double standards thinking that has got us into this mess in the first place, that we now have ridiculous events like the Wilders case.

I can see the argument that those who incite violence against members of the BNP should be banned, or the argument that they shouldn’t be banned, but it is plainly wrong to say that inciting violence against the BNP should be permitted but that if Nick Griffin turns up on TV tomorrow morning in a purple tracksuit genuinely declaring himself the Son of God and the true last prophet to mankind, while maintaining all his present policies, that incitement should suddenly became illegal whereas yesterday it was legal.

No law should even have the world “religion” in it. The only possible purpose for it being there is for discrimination / different laws applying to the religious as opposed to non-religious, or different religions one from another. Otherwise the word is completely superfluous. Either incitement to violence should be illegal or it shouldn’t be. Either incitement to hatred should be illegal or it shouldn’t be. Incitement to religious hatred being illegal but incitement to hatred not being illegal for some other subset of mankind is just fundamentally wrong.

Or to put it simply, laws should be about WHAT, not about WHO.