generalspeaking

Slamming The Barn Door

A trifle late for that, (slamming the barn door after the incarcerants have made a run for freedom) even if the government of the Netherlands recognized that, which they obviously do not. Having invited the presence of an alien culture and religion, they must now deal with the outcome. Bad-boy Geert Wilders, like Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali before him, has been censured by their government for elucidating what they perceive as a threat to the civil society of their country.

That a country such as Holland, with its scant, below-sea-level land mass and its packed population of a mere 16-million people huddled in climate and geographic insecurity would be so lacking in a spirit of self-preservation as to introduce an immigrant population of one million souls whose heritage, culture, religion and social values are so at odds with that of the Dutch, is breath-catching in its risky lack of outcome awareness.

The Dutch want to prove, to themselves above all, how enlightened they are, how welcoming to others, how righteously accommodating. And don't we all, in the open atmosphere of the 21st Century - when most countries of the West, feeling themselves to be fortunate in their social balance, equanimity of vision, political stability, and freedoms so unlike much of the rest of the world - wish to welcome others to our prosperity.

The reason why Geert Wilders and others who perceive as he does, that in welcoming a huge, diverse and religiously/socially intransigent demographic unwilling to honour Dutch laws and the Dutch social contract, the country has been complicit in making itself vulnerable to hostility from within, which has been borne out more than amply in the very violence that has silenced two of his predecessors who forewarned of impending social unrest.

And now, at the very time that Geert Wilders is being prosecuted under the hate speech laws of the Netherlands, the country's security services are tearing their hair out, attempting to forestall yet another assassination of yet another Dutch politician or social activist, by yet another vividly outraged Islamist avenger - or Islamists as the case may yet be.

Mr. Wilders isn't much of a right-wing agitator. He is a Dutch politician convinced that his beloved country is in direct danger from the very immigrant contingent that it welcomed, fleeing religious, political and cultural persecution from the administrations in their home countries. Islam is indeed a religion with a great many proscriptions, setting out precisely how its adherents must live their lives.

And there are a good many contradictions that can be gleaned from selecting certain passages from the Koran; that can either instill in the faithful a need to preserve peace, a need to view others as equals, a need to live in harmony with others around them, while preserving the tenets of their faith - and conversely passages that committed jihadists clasp fervently as divine urging to do battle in the name of Islam.

And while the greater number of Muslims may cleave faithfully to the former, and have no wish whatever to visit the latter, among them there is a small, but vocal and ultimately lethal minority who eschew the former and cling to the latter, embellishing the codices in which Islam lays out its prescription for adherence to the faith and the manner in which devout Muslims should live their lives, the bitterly aggrieved minority prefers to dispense with those and embrace the call to jihad.

Mr. Wilders's popularity and that of his assertions in warning about militant Islam and the troubling interpretations of the Koran used by fanatics to justify their brutal and deadly incursions among moderate Muslims and Westerners alike, is actually on the uprise. Particularly among the larger Dutch population, becoming unsettled at the growing problems related to one-sixteenth of their human mass serving a cause other than that of the good of the nation.

Quite simply, Mr. Wilders's ideal is upholding traditional Dutch values of liberty and tolerance. And to come to grips with a growing incidence of lawlessness and violence; to enact tougher laws to deal with those problems. Needless to say, the Dutch Muslims for whom liberty and tolerance loom large in value, should see no threat in Mr. Wilders or his campaign, uncomfortable as it may seem for them.

As for that violence-prone minority, they do have reason to rise in anger that their propensity for and dedication to bloodshed has been unveiled. When, and if Mr. Wilders comes to power in the Netherlands, or whether any party in power has the fortitude to face reality, they will fully understand that it is the minority Islamists in their midst whom they must begin to take firm and lawful issue with, not Mr. Wilders.

Labels: Political Realities, Traditions, Troublespots, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, March 01, 2009