Joshua Keating wrote Geert Wilders' "...ban all immigration from Islamic countries belies his claims that he is not a racist..."

That on the face of it appears to be a huge leap in logic. Islam isn't a race. Islam is an ideology that is simply a fact.

However, Joshua Keating seems to be suggesting that any questioning of Islam or the culture is simply to be dismissed as racism is a mechanismto preclude any debate on the idealogical merits.

Joshua Keating also writes "The Koran verses cited in Fitna aren't much worse than some passages of the Bible". True but where do you see the biblical injunctions being enforced in the West? Where are gay people being jailed for a long time or executed in a Western country? Where in Western countries do you find religious police enforcing Biblical statutes? Where do you find the state looking the other way when women are killed by family members as a matter of honour?

It is the substance of how these violent expressions are managed, are they marginal or core beliefs?, is it socially accepted that state enforces this violence? that distinguishes the West from Islam not that they both share the same bigoted passages.

As someone who comes from an Eastern European / Middle Eastern background, I would love to see Mr. Wilders' film and critique it. I honestly have to wonder if we in the West truly study history with the intent to learn from it, or if we have simply become intellectually dishonest. The brutal oppression non-Muslims have lived with under Muslim States since Mohamed broke out of Medina should give anyone in the West who loves their freedom (or their lives)pause to think. Unlike other religions, Islam gained it's converts through death threats (for pagans) or the reality of oppressive taxes and cruel subjugation for those who did not convert. In country after country, wherever they have gone throughout history, they have never been able to live peacefully with any other religion without relegating the peoples who follow it to an almost slave status. Yet, we only need to look at the last 100 years of our history to get a true picture of what this religion entails. Ask yourself these questions: Where are the native Armenians and Greeks that once inhabited Turkey? Where are the native Greek inhabitants of Northern Cyprus? Why are four fifths of American Arabs Christian and not Muslim? What cruelties were practiced on Serbs by Albanian and Bosnian Muslims under the Nazis? How did Lebanon go from a predominately Christian-ruled and progressive country (by Middle-Eastern standards) to another backwater? Why have over two million Christian and Animist Sudanese lost their lives to the North Sudanese Muslims? What happened to the Christians in East Timor? Why were over 140 Christian churches, monasteries, and graveyards hatefully destroyed by Albanian Muslims? And the list goes on. Regardless of other contributing factors to turmoil in these areas, Islam always provides the driving influence. Even in such self-proclaimed secular states as Turkey, Islam provided the cultural ethos that fueled the mass slaughter of Greeks and Armenians.

Instead of trying to shut Mr. Wilders up, perhaps Liberals should take a hard look at themselves and ask why they have such a contempt for the Judeo-Christian values that gave birth to our democratic and free societies- freedoms that they enjoy and use freely. Regardless of the many crimes supposedly Christian nations have committed over time (and have also come to loathe), they do not stack up to the horrors Muslim states have practiced throughout history and continue to practice today. Neither does Islam appear to have any type of progressive ethos that allows the type of free and innovative thought that has spurred so much of Western artistic, philosophical, political, and technological development.

Trying to shut Mr. Wilders up only makes us wonder what it is that Liberals want to hide. Is it that they don't have the backbone to deal with the inevitable violence that their Muslim populations will erupt into when Islam is criticized? If so, this alone should frighten all of us. Other religious bodies take public criticism daily and manage to refrain from violence. If Muslims can do the same we would have nothing to fear. It's high time we expected some rational thought and reflection from Muslim communities vice the usual violence we have come to expect and fear.

I mostly agree with the author's position on the inherent strength of Democracy and the Enlightenment in America, to withstand not only Islamic Takfiris movements but also Greet Wilders blatant racism and hate speeches.

But the political structures and the political culture in Europe in general is not so well prepared at this point of its History to face the level of freedom and tolerance we enjoy here in America. America was built on a melting pot. Not Europe who today faces an identity crisis. Some in Europe like Wilders are nostalgic of an old all white traditional catholic Europe that will never return unless they decide to empty their country of what helps them renew their own population and labor forces.

Furthermore the author forgets that what makes Wilders's speech the potential target of legal action against him is that he is an official representative at the Dutch parliament.

"One century ago, there were approximately 50 Hispanics in the USA. Today, there are about 1 million hispanics in this country. Where will it end? We are heading for the end of American civilisation as we know it..."
(The above quote is one of many offensive ones from Greet Wilders, an official representative of the Netherlands. I just replaced 'Muslims' with Hispanics.)

What would be the reaction in the US if a US representative in Congress held this type of language publicly today?
I can confidently assert that the political career of this representative would be over because of the general uproar it would create within the whole American population.
Unfortunately a speech like that in the Netherlands seems to attract a lot of following and constitutes then a real threat to public peace and order but also to the core values of the Enlightenment and Democracy!

America and Europe have both very differnt political cultures still ingrained in their popular psychic.

America is today what it is because Europe today is still what it was yesterday!

I'm not so sure, Joshua - please keep in mind that the USA is one of the few Western countries not to have comprehensive hate crime legislation, and so your position may be somewhat American-centric. There is no question, for example, that making it a crime in Germany and Austria to deny the Holocaust is a suppression of free speech. However, both of those countries would argue that denying the Holocaust is an attempt to rewrite history in order to make the actions of Adolf Hitler more acceptable, and thus repeatable. The primacy of free speech is an American doctrine, and while countries like Canada and the UK admit its importance, they do not believe it should trump concerns of inciting violence toward racial minorities.

Perhaps there is some argument to be made about whether what Wilders is saying truly amounts to hate speech, but that is probably something for the Dutch courts to decide. As for prosecution and denial of entry granting his arguments more weight . . . well, all we need to do is look at Mahmoud Ahmadinejab for an example of a politician with a tendency for hate speech and who is free of interference from the law. I would think it a triumph of democratic values, rather than a challenge to them, that we try men such as these.

I'm sorry but I don't understand what part of this quote you don't get. I am a grandmother in Denver Colorado and I sure hope somebody out there isn't terrified of offending Muslims, they sure haven't been worried about scaring us to death. That's what they want scared Americans. What can you possibly be thinking? Everbody has rights here in the good old Us except white Christians and Jews. They want us dead and you know it. Thanks alot for worring about offending Muslims. That's just the mentality that got 3,000 Americans dead.