Like my colleague Douglas Murray, who has already written an excellent post on the show trial of the century, I’ve been surprised by the lack of British media interest in Geert Wilders’s martyrdom in Amsterdam. An American minor celebrity only has to fart to receive blanket coverage in the British press, but when a major politician next door faces jail on trumped-up charges – in a case that will have implications for our freedom of speech – there seems to be little interest.

For those who haven’t visited these parts, Wilders is a Dutch politician on trial for “insulting” Islam by comparing the Koran to Mein Kampf, and for saying that Moroccans commit many street robberies in the Netherlands. Yes, put on trial – not fisked or twitter-lynched or condemned by the Equality Gestapo, but actually brought to court. Wilders calls it “surreal”, and it certainly seems strange that in a city where a gentleman can smoke Morocco’s most famous export and view half-naked women in shop windows, he can go to jail for criticising a religion.

What Americans – or anyone else who’s somehow missed Europe’s slide towards diversity authoritarianism – will find so strange is that it’s not even the truth of Wilder’s statement on trial. Comparing the Koran to Mein Kampf is daft – the Koran can be used for evil intent, and does justify violence in many passages, but it can, and has, also inspired much good; Mein Kampf is just plain evil. But this is a country with a long tradition of robust public debate, often of a comically abusive nature, and especially so about religion. It is part of the Dutch tradition of freedom that makes it such a pleasant society.

As for what he says about Moroccans, it is factually correct, but as one of the prosecutors said before the trial: “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’s witnesses might prove Wilders’s observations to be correct, what’s relevant is that his observations are illegal”.

How can the country that produced Spinoza have become so retarded? It all began with the Nazis, or more specifically with Holocaust denial, which was criminalised by France in 1990. It was an absurdly stupid law, since the number of Europeans who don’t believe the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews could probably fit inside David Irving’s living room, but it was the thin end of the wedge. Laws gagging neo-Nazis were soon extended to views that were unpleasant, bigoted or, increasingly, just unfashionable and offensive, as the band of acceptable opinions in Eutopia became ever smaller. Wilders is unfashionable, certainly, but his ideas are not beyond the pale.

Alongside the criminalisation of thought crime, those within the consensus have made their opponents’ views verboten by labeling dissenters as “racist” or “Islamophobic” or comparing them to Hitler, as the Dutch media did repeatedly with Pim Fortuyn up until the day he was murdered.

Another abused term is “far-Right”, a label that the British and American media routinely apply to Geert Wilders.

The European far-Right has certain characteristics – as well as being obsessed with race, it is anti-big business, pro-state intervention, pro-worker’s rights but anti-Communist, nostalgic about the countryside and often sentimental about animals, politically paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories, anti-gay, anti-American and, most of all, anti-Semitic Zionist (just as it used to be against “cosmopolitans” and “foreign intellectuals”).

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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100024237/geert-wilders-is-not-far-right/