Britain's politicians care so much about constitutional protections for human rights that they have two sets of them--the centuries-old traditions laid out by parliament and precedent and the newfangled European Convention on Human Rights, written into British law in 1998. Neither of these stopped Britain from becoming the first European Union country to bar an elected European legislator from its territory for his political opinions on February 12.
The Dutch MP Geert Wilders heads the Freedom party, which holds 9 of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber in The Hague. He has been preoccupied with militant Islam at least since November 2004, when the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim fanatic in Amsterdam, and Wilders's own name turned up on a jihadist hit list. In March 2008, Wilders released Fitna, a 15-minute film, on the Internet. It details contemporary Islamist outrages and locates their inspiration not in any perversion of Islam but in specific suras of the Koran itself, which Wilders likens to Mein Kampf and urges authorities to ban.
When two members of the House of Lords invited Wilders to give a screening of his film, the rabble-rousing Labour peer Lord Ahmed threatened to put 10,000 people in the streets. The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, warned Wilders that he would not be admitted to the U.K., since "your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the U.K." Wilders came anyway, on a British Midlands flight packed with 50 journalists and cameramen. When he was turned away as promised, he called British prime minister Gordon Brown "the biggest coward in Europe."
This episode, taken together with the ongoing attempt by Wilders's opponents in the Netherlands to have him prosecuted for discrimination and incitement to hatred, reflects the European confusion about what free speech is and how it is best protected. Author Kenan Malik, a veteran of London antiracist movements, was most disturbed that "Wilders was penalized not for what he did but for what someone else may have done to him. That is neither logical nor just." There was confusion on both sides of the Channel. Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen protested to the British government before and after Wilders's arrival, but he had said of Fitna when it first came out: "Freedom of expression doesn't mean the right to offend." Many would say that freedom of expression is a synonym for the right to offend.
Two things are being mixed up: freedom of speech and freedom of movement. Under the old, pre-EU dispensation, Britain would have been entitled to turn Wilders around at Heathrow. Just because a country protects free speech for its own citizens does not give it any obligation to admit any foreigner for any reason. During the Cold War, the United States permitted its citizens to spout Communist propaganda to their hearts' content, but it also passed the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act in 1952 to bar foreigners considered ideologically undesirable. By the end of the Cold War, there were 368,000 people--Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda among them--to whom the government said: No pasarán. More recently, the State Department withdrew its visa to the Swiss Islam scholar Tariq Ramadan without feeling the need to explain its actions in detail.
The problem is that Britain has--by act of Parliament--subordinated its own laws to the European Convention on Human Rights. Brussels, not Westminster, sets the rules. In the human rights context Wilders is a fellow European. And the British action sets a new precedent for relations among EU citizens. That is why promoters of the European Union were so upset by Wilders's exclusion, even on the left. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, for instance, called it "indefensible."
There was a lot of huffing and puffing about the necessity of banning Wilders. Foreign secretary David Miliband and left-wing MP Keith Vaz were particularly insistent, although both admitted to not having seen the film, which is ubiquitous on the Internet. An Observer editorial called it a mistake to bar Wilders, but felt the need to add that he and his movie were "poisonous," "brutal," "shoddy," "deluded," "grotesque," and "odious." The most common criticism was that creating a cause célèbre played into the hands of Wilders, helping a publicity hound to spread his obnoxious ideas. But most politics today--from announcing mission accomplished in Iraq on the decks of the USS Abraham Lincoln to peddling a stimulus package in front of jobless people in Elkhart, Indiana--involves publicity. When you cut through the hemming and hawing and question-dodging, the only grounds for banning Wilders would be that he is a racist. Is he?
Wilders is not a crank (or not just a crank), and 84 percent of Dutch people object to the way the British handled him. Wilders is a politician of the center-right who drifted away from the market-liberal VVD (over the party's EU policy) shortly before the murder of van Gogh. Like his former fellow party member Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who described Wilders as "definitely not a racist"), he went into hiding in the days after the van Gogh murder. His party took 6 percent of the vote in the last election, but a recent poll showed that if elections were held today it would win 25 seats in the Second Chamber, just two behind the country's largest party.
He talks a mile a minute, and, when I interviewed him in 2005, he repudiated attempts to link him to the hard-right Belgian party then called the Vlaams Blok: "I would never do that," he said. "I remember the Vlaams Blok from years ago, and many of the same people are in place." Nor was he an ignoramus about Islam--he had read a lot of books by serious scholars. But he was insistent that there was a lot to worry about. "I'm not saying this out of xenophobia," he said. "There are a million Muslims in the country, and they are heading all the wrong lists."
In August 2007, Wilders wrote in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, "I've had enough of Islam in the Netherlands--not one more Muslim immigrant. I've had enough of Allah and Mohammed in the Netherlands--not one more mosque." He announced that he was working on a film about the Koran, and rumors began to fly that a Koran would be torn onscreen. Or perhaps burned. The Malaysian ambassador to the Netherlands warned that violence would ensue that would make the Danish cartoon riots look "like a picnic." The Dutch cabinet drew up emergency plans and practiced evacuations for its embassies. Queen Beatrix devoted her Christmas speech to tolerance.
So when the film came out it was a bit of an anticlimax. It was a confused and choppy collage--a bit like the Beatles' "Revolution 9." Wilders didn't use any incendiary language, only the footage of actual Islamist atrocities, interspersed with the text of a half-dozen suras. A lot of it was, to be sure, horrifying: clips of planes hitting the World Trade Center, bodies falling from the building, audio of the 911 calls ("I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die! I'm burning up!"), a 3-year-old girl saying she had learned in the Koran that Jews were "apes and pigs," the beheading of a hostage in Iraq, the beheading of (one assumes) an adulteress, signs at marches reading God Bless Hitler and Freedom Go To Hell, and then the ripped page. But here Wilders struck a conciliatory note: "The sound you heard was a page being removed from the phonebook. For it is not up to me but to Muslims themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Koran."
One suspects that Britain is excluding Wilders--and that the Netherlands is prosecuting him--not because his views are divorced from reality but because they make a certain contact with it. He is, after all, not the first to describe the Koran as a war manual: Schopenhauer, Renan, and Churchill said such things, and Afshin Ellian, the Iranian-Dutch legal philosopher, has noted in recent weeks that Erasmus--that great icon of the pan-European open society--was considerably tougher on Islam than is Wilders.
Of course, none of this makes Fitna a good film or a fair film. In calling for the Koran to be banned, Wilders runs into two big problems. The first might be called the grandfathering problem. It has recently occurred to censorious radicals that there is no particular reason that the monuments of our culture should be exempt from the ideological censorship we bestow on newer works. Thus, in recent years, evangelical Christians in Britain have been interrogated on suspicion of homophobia on the basis of the scriptures they were distributing. There is a similar obtuseness in Wilders's denial that the Koran is a monument of a magnificently impressive culture, even if it is not our culture.
The second problem is the sauce-for-the-goose problem. Wilders has on many occasions urged that the Netherlands ban Muslim radicals. He even argued against admitting Khalid Yasin, a hardline Muslim preacher from Sheffield, England. As Ian Bur-uma notes: "For a man who calls for a ban on the Koran to act as the champion of free speech is a bit rich."
That's quite right as an intellectual matter. But what is important about Wilders is the legal matter. He is not concerned about free speech. He is concerned about Islam. What makes this a free-speech issue is the actions of the Dutch and British government. Wilders's arguments should be met with other arguments. They should not be met with threats of jail.
Do European speech laws now favor Islam? Has Britain, the cradle of free speech, ceased to care about it? People ask such questions as if they are rhetorical and can be answered only with a sigh or a sad nod. In fact, they are real questions with real answers.
Yes, there is increasingly a special regime for speech concerning Islam, or at least concerning religion. After the murder of van Gogh in 2004, the Dutch justice minister, Piet-Hein Donner, urged that blasphemy laws that had fallen into desuetude be revived to protect Muslims. He failed, but so did efforts to eliminate those laws, and Donner's successor, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, has sought to strengthen them in recent weeks. Dutch elite opinion now leans towards the idea that one should try not to give the Muslim populations any cause for anger. In Britain, Muslims sought in 2006 a "law against incitement to religious hatred." Before it passed, the House of Lords altered it to ensure that it would not chill critical discussion of any religion. Apparently they failed.
Yes, the British government has grown less interested in freedom. After the July 2005 transport bombings, and even more after the foiled airplane plot of the following summer, the government said so explicitly. "Traditional civil liberty arguments," said Tony Blair, "are not so much wrong as just made for another age." Since then, 270 people have been refused admission to Britain on grounds of sowing hate. Only four of these have been Europeans. This kind of disparate impact must leave Jacqui Smith feeling she has little to apologize for in banning Wilders.
The new European conception of freedom of speech, based on anti-racism, protects a lot less speech than did the old British and Dutch conceptions of freedom of speech, based on sovereignty. Maybe membership in the family of man relieves one of a certain amount of worry about the liberties of one's fellow citizens.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. His Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West will be published by Doubleday in July.