A young Dutch writer discovered about 64 years ago provided a brutally honest account of her oppression and came to symbolize what Roger Rosenblatt described as “the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings.” In today’s Holland, Anne Frank might be prosecuted for such temerity.
The appalling decision to try [Geert] Wilders, the Freedom Party’s head and the Dutch Parliament’s only internationally famous member, for “incitement to hatred and discrimination” against Islam is indeed an assault on free speech.
Bruce Bawer chronicles the fall of a country that contributed much to Western art and culture. Pim Fortuyn, on the verge of becoming prime minister before his assassination, spoke out against the country’s accommodation of sharia law. He was labeled a racist and loathed by the liberal establishment. Theo van Gogh, another filmmaker to criticize Islam, was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam. Queen Beatrix skipped his funeral in order to visit a Moroccan community center. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, scriptwriter and member of parliament, tossed off the shackles of Islam and promoted women’s rights. She was deemed a “disruption.” She now lives in hiding in Amsterdam. Sound familiar?
In Dutch Muslim schools and mosques, incendiary rhetoric about the Netherlands, America, Jews, gays, democracy, and sexual equality is routine; a generation of Dutch Muslims are being brought up with toxic attitudes toward the society in which they live. And no one is ever prosecuted for any of this. Instead, a court in the Netherlands—a nation once famous for being an oasis of free speech—has now decided to prosecute a member of the national legislature for speaking his mind. By doing so, it proves exactly what Wilders has argued all along: that fear and “sensitivity” to a religion of submission are destroying Dutch freedom.
Dutch liberalism is moving beyond the useful idiot category and proving to be a whole class of Quislings.
