NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
July 17, 2010
Breach in the alliance
Geert Wilders is a little too liberal for my taste. His Freedom Party, which made huge strides in the recent Dutch general election -- leaving Wilders only about two heartbeats short of their prime minister's office -- is the very opposite of socially conservative.Whether the issue is a sexual one on the gay or feminist agenda, or some funding requirement for the welfare state, one may more or less count on them to be leftier than thou. Except for Muslims, they tolerate nearly everything on the post-modern agenda. The more straitlaced sort of North American visitor, who almost involuntarily compares parts of Amsterdam with Sodom and/or Gomorrah, will get no sympathy from the Freedom Party. Indeed, such a visitor may find that his only allies, in calling down the wrath of the heavens upon the antinomianism of the contemporary urban Dutch, are preaching in the local Islamist mosque. Given the contrast between the modest demeanour of many young immigrant Muslim women, with their heads covered and their strollers full of babies -- and that of so many "native" young western women, childless but provocatively half-naked under the summer sun -- I have sometimes myself wondered which side I am on. Any new Muslim reader should be told that I am among the West's more backward souls. The Roman Catholic religion to which I subscribe also requires modesty in female dress, though I've never heard a priest specify a dress code. It also requires chastity, and constant acknowledgement of God. Had we world enough and time, I might try to range over the many centuries when the social customs of Europe were far closer to those of the Islamic heartland, than to what we see in Europe today -- right down to public recognition of the hours of prayer, and an awareness of the danger of heresy. That Christians and Muslims have been at each other's throats, as often as not through the centuries, along the frontiers between their respective civilizations, will go without saying to anyone who has read some history. There were, and there remain, profound theological differences between them, and in consequence, profoundly different conceptions of social order. And yet on basic questions of moral deportment -- of what constitutes decent and honourable behaviour -- much less to choose. The point here is that freedom has undergone redefinition, since the so-called "Enlightenment" in the West, and has been confused with licence in our post-modern era. Take free speech and press for example, which once pertained to the airing of one's opinions. This is now circumscribed by "human rights" quasi-law, and the far more effective peer pressure of political correctness. What a modern, emancipated, progressive person means by "freedom" today, is usually the right to publish pornography, or slander the upholders of decency itself. The Freedom Party of Geert Wilders takes this post-modern notion of freedom more or less for granted. It is hardly a Christian political force. It is "rationalist" in the Enlightenment tradition, and it is rational insofar as it detects a conflict between libertarian social values, and the strictures of even conventional Islam (let alone radical Islamists and terrorists). It is willing to fight for the preservation of these post-modern values, even if this requires banning mass Muslim immigration. Note, incidentally, that contrary to reports all over the mainstream media, neither Wilders's Freedom Party in Holland, nor the new international "Freedom Association" he announced this week (to have branches in France, Germany, Britain, the United States, and Canada) -- are absolutely opposed to Muslim immigration. Rather they are opposed to mass immigration, and to any suggestion of Shariah. They also affirm the right to publicly oppose Islamic teaching, and would thus subject Muslims to the sort of verbal thrashings that, say, Catholic and Evangelical Christians have been enduring for a long time. This creates an interesting challenge for our progressive types. They would like to think of Wilders as a "fascist," or better, some kind of fundamentalist Christian crazy. They have observed that his movement is catching populist fire, and may be spreading across Europe at Tea-Party speed. Worse (for them), it creates a yet-to-be-acknowledged breach in the alliance-of-convenience between radical Muslims, and radical Secularists. For anyone with a view into a university campus will have noticed that the two ideological forces converge into one, for the purpose of attacking their common "Judeo-Christian" enemy. The idea that Wilders must be silenced, as an "Islamophobe" -- and he is most certainly that, and proud of it -- wonderfully exposes the hypocrisy on the Left. A little more deeply, it wonderfully exposes the flaw in the whole project of the Enlightenment, which has come to a pretty pass in our post-modern era. For while the earliest "liberal" thinkers fully realized "toleration" could never be extended to the intolerant, the children of their children forgot. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top