Geert Wilders has been denied entry to the UK.

‘Let them arrest me’: Dutch MP vows to defy Home Office ban and fly to Britain to show anti-Islam film

A right-wing Dutch politician who has been banned from Britain said today he planned to defy the authorities and fly to the UK, stating ‘Let them put me in handcuffs’.

Geert Wilders had been invited by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) peer Lord Pearson to show his anti-Islam film ‘Fitna’ and hold a Q&A session in Parliament tomorrow.

The 17-minute documentary features verses from the Koran – which it brands a ‘fascist book’ – alongside images of the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks.

It equates Islam’s holy text with violence and ends with a call to Muslims to remove its ‘hate-preaching’ verses.

Under UK and EU immigration rules, a person can be refused entry to Britain ‘if his exclusion is justified on grounds of public policy, public security or public health’.

He is being denied entry on grounds of public policy, public security or public health. Wilders does not have a contagious disease. In fact, the letter from the British Embassy cites a threat to community harmony as the reason; and, after all, the UK is replete with examples of community harmony that one would not wish to threaten.

On the other hand, Britain is sufficiently tolerant to allow this misomaniac not only to  live in the UK, but to use it as a base from which to spread his poisonous anti-Semitic vitriol:

Riyadh ul Haq preaches contempt for non-Muslims

A hardline Islamic movement, whose leading UK imam preaches anti-Semitism and calls on Muslims to “shed blood for Allah”, is controlling almost half of Britain’s mosques, a police report has found.

The influence of the ultra-conservative Deobandi sect, which is characterised by its total rejection of western values, has grown to such an extent that police now believe it runs more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques.

The revelations will put further scrutiny on plans for a “mega mosque” in east London by a group called Tablighi Jamaat, who are closely linked to the Deobandi movement.

The £100 million plan to build the “Islamic village” next to the Olympic site is already mired in controversy after intelligence services said the group was a recruiting ground for al Qaeda.

What should the UK government do? Obviously, allow Wilders into the country and make the showing of Fitna in all of Britain’s Deobandi mosques a condition of Riyadh ul Haq’s remaining there.

But, it seems there are people who have bigger blinkers than he does; the prize-winning twerp is a Muslim.   Adnan Oktar, if you disagree with Dawkins, offer some rational arguments to refute his position; what you have managed to do is bolster his assertion that those who oppose his scientism are irrational nincompoops. From the Times

A Muslim creationist has succeeded in having Richard Dawkins’s website banned in Turkey, after complaining that its atheist content was blasphemous.

The country’s internet users are now subject to a court order imposed on Turk Telecom that prohibits them from accessing richarddawkins.net.

The court in Istanbul issued its judgment after Adnan Oktar claimed that his book Atlas of Creation, which contests the arguments for evolution, had been defamed on Dawkins’s website.

In July Professor Dawkins wrote on his site: “I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breath-taking inanity of the content.”
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Earlier this year Mr Oktar, who uses the pen name Harun Yahya, tried to have Dawkins’s book The God Delusion banned in Turkey but failed. He is also appealing against a three-year prison sentence for creating an illegal organisation for personal gain.

From the Globe and Mail:

This month, Random House in New York shelved plans to release The Jewel of Medina, an historical novel about the Prophet Mohammed’s second and youngest wife, Aisha. Their reason: It might incite a violent backlash.

Might? That’s all it takes these days? According to whom?

Welcome to where things get interesting. Long before the controversy arose, Random House sent an endorsement request to Denise Spellberg, a non-Muslim history professor at the University of Texas. She found parts of the manuscript offensive and decided that Muslims should feel the same.

Reportedly judging the book to be a “national security threat,” she depicted it as “more dangerous than the Satanic Verses.” Prof. Spellberg ought to know: She teaches Salman Rushdie’s notorious novel in her class. Clearly, she doesn’t back censorship.

And yet her lawyer warned Random House not to use Prof. Spellberg’s name in or on the novel. Random House then consulted more “scholars of Islam.” In effect, the publisher invited postcolonial theorists with ulterior agendas to make mincemeat of its mass-market offering. Also pulled in was the corporation’s head of security.

Meanwhile, a listserv of graduate students in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies caught wind of the still-unpublished novel. They heard about it through a Muslim website manager who claims to have received a “frantic” call from Prof. Spellberg. His postings got forwarded to various forums, ultimately reaching a blogger who circulated a protest strategy.

There’s no evidence that anybody paid serious attention to his plan.

However, no matter the resounding lack of threats, Random House announced it would postpone publication for the sake of safety – including that of the author, Sherry Jones.

Mind you, Ms. Jones is free to court a fatwa: Random House has now terminated her contract so she may shop the manuscript elsewhere. “We stand firmly by our responsibility to support our authors,” its corporate statement reads. That’s one way to prove it.

How to begin unravelling the absurdity of this decision? For starters, Random House is in the business of free expression. Of course so are newspapers – and most of them didn’t reprint the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

But this novel can’t be compared to those cartoons. The Jewel of Medina treats both the Prophet and his bride with deep affection. My own conversation with Ms. Jones affirms her respect for the dignity of Aisha.

“I wrote Jewel, in part, because I recognize the absence of women’s voices in the way Islamic history is told,” she explained by phone. “Women played a huge leadership role in the founding of the faith. Silencing my voice only achieves more silencing of theirs.”

Thus another absurdity. The muzzling of Sherry Jones originated with a woman. To boot, Denise Spellberg is non-Muslim. Why no cries of interference, imperialism, even racism from those who typically tell non-Muslims to stay out of Islamic issues?

And a curious form of racism the pulping of this book is. Random House has revealed what low expectations it has of Muslims. Pre-emptive censorship – PC, you could say – reduces all believers to the status of children, incapable of handling sensitive material with civility. Now, that’s offensive.

Although Irshad Manji, has been critical of Muslim fanatics, she is missing the point here. It’s true that Prof. Spellberg – like most academics – is suffering from terminal Political Correctness and Random House are behaving like gutless poltroons, but their doing so is not entirely without cause. The perpetration of such delights as beheadings, stabbings, death threats, fatwas and general jihad mayhem tends to be the response of Muslims when righting a perceived minor slight against an alleged prophet. Although, in polite Canada, symbolic decapitation through an extended whine to the Human Rights Commission is often the preferred route.

And we have low expectations of Muslims because they can’t handle ‘sensitive material with civility’. I wonder why.

Those who make the decisions at Random House, of course, are not in the business of free expression; they are in the business of making a profit and living long enough to enjoy it.

That being said, it’s good to see that a Muslim is saying that the suppression of this book is absurd. And not all Muslims are desperate to find a reason to chop someone’s head off, so I expect there will be a groundswell of rational Muslims protesting to have it published. Maybe not.