Geert Wilders, who is trying to air nasty cartoons about Prophet Mohammed, must know that there is a lot of difference between him and Charlie Hebdo cartoonists
A deeply cynical Dutch politician, Geert Wilders is willing to get people killed to advance his political career. Sometimes they are Muslims, sometimes they are people of Christian heritage — that doesn't really matter, as long as he reaps the publicity. And now he has come up with a clever new way to outrage foolish young Muslims and get them to murder people for him. Mr Wilders realised that a little-known Dutch law obliges the television networks to show anything that a politician wishes to include in a party political broadcast. No censorship is allowed on the grounds of truth, taste, or even safety. So the far-right politician, whose whole political career has been based on attacking Islam, decided to air some truly nasty cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed.
One shows a man labelled ‘Mohammed’ with snakes in his beard. Another shows a rather loony-looking young man who is clearly labelled ‘the Prophet Mohammed’. The third shows somebody who is probably meant to be the prophet on a unicycle, juggling five chopped-off heads with letters attached that spell ‘Islam’. Not funny, not clever, not really even topical. Just nasty. There is a world of difference between Mr Wilders and the dozen people who were murdered by Islamist extremists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last January. They were equal opportunity cartoonists who targeted everybody with equal irreverence and a fine absence of discrimination; Mr Wilders is a monomaniac who wants to ban the Quran in the Netherlands because it is “like (Adolf Hitler's) Mein Kampf”. If he can trick the ignorant Muslims into killing people by portraying the Prophet Mohammed in ugly and insulting cartoons, he wins.
The cartoons Mr Wilders has insisted be broadcast on Dutch television were originally shown at an event in Texas last month which awarded a $10,000 prize for the best (ie worst) cartoon about Mohammed. The organisers were trying to provoke a reaction, so they invited Mr Wilders to give the event a higher profile. It worked wonderfully: Two simplistic young fanatics tried to attack the conference, and were shot dead in the car park. So Mr Wilders brought copies of the cartoons home with him, and announced that he would broadcast them on the Dutch television as a defence of free-speech. The broadcast was supposed to go out in the Netherlands on Saturday, but somebody at the NPO1 television network managed to mislay the tape Mr Wilders had given them.
Mr Wilders was furiously indignant about that, of course, and insisted that his right as a party leader to put anything he wants on the party political broadcasts must be respected. He says he has now been promised that it will go out on Wednesday evening. If the promise is kept, the rioting and killing will probably have started by the time you read this. Mr Wilders knows perfectly well that this will happen, and is content that it should. He and his anti-Muslim allies on the far right of Dutch politics are what Marxists used to call the ‘objective allies’ of the bearded Muslim extremists screaming for blood in the streets and the more calculating Muslim leaders who urge those fanatics to go out and commit violence in the name of ‘defending’ Islam.
Both parties, however, much they hate each other, have a common interest in keeping the outrage level among their followers high, and they tacitly cooperate to keep the pot boiling. The poor old media knows, it is being manipulated and exploited by people with truly reprehensible agendas, but it cannot simply refuse to report the news, even if it is manufactured news (as is so often the case). And so, in a world where most people of any religion or none simply want to get on with their neighbours and lead a quiet life, we are fed a constant diet of lies that shows us a world full of blood-thirsty, hate-filled extremists. Oh, and by the way: Geert Wilders is a piece of human waste.