Geert Wilders Wins One

Dutch MP and film maker Geert Wilders won a belated victory today when The Asylum and Immigration Tribunal in London ruled that Wilders should not have been refused entry to the United Kingdom in February:

The Birkenhead Society, a British organisation that promotes freedom of expression, had brought the case on his behalf.

Wilders was invited to show his anti-Islam film Fitna at the House of Lords, the upper house of parliament, by a UK Independence party peer, Lord Pearson. However, the British home affairs ministry refused him entry to the country, saying his visit would “threaten community security and therefore public security”. {...}

Wilders wanted to defy the ban and flew to the UK anyway. He was detained when he arrived in London and put back on a plane to the Netherlands. {..}

In response to Tuesday's ruling, a British home office spokesman said, "We are disappointed by the court's decision today. The government opposes extremism is all its forms. The decision to refuse Wilders admission was taken on the basis that his presence could have inflamed tensions between our communities and have led to inter-faith violence. We still maintain this view."

Wilders has welcomed the ruling as “fantastic news”. He added that “The British government’s political decision has rightly been swept off the table by the British judge. This is a victory for the freedom of expression.”

The real story of course is that Wilders was denied entry explicitly because the threat of what the Home Office spokesman genteelly calls 'the threat of inter-faith violence.

That threat didn't come from Wilders but from Labour-apponted Muslim Peer and kingpin of the Muslim Council of Britain Lord Ahmed, who actually threatened to 'mobilize 10,000 Muslims' in the streets to prevent Wilders from entering London.

This is the same Lord Ahmed who who hosted a book launch in the House of Lords for a neo-Nazi holocaust denier in 2005 and who tried to deny author Salman Rushdie police protection after Rushdie became the object of a death sentence fatwa by the Iranian mullahs. .

In a country where sharia law has equal status with British common law, British police run from Muslim mobs and there are no go areas for non-Muslims in some of Britain's cities where the police only go in armed bands, Lord Ahmad's threat obviously carried some weight.

That's how bad it's gotten.

As a point of interest, I had to look through several links to find one that didn't characterize Wilders as 'far right' or 'anti-Islam' in what purported to be straight news stories. Even this one refers to him as 'anti-immigrant', which is about as true as the other characterizations of him.

Wilders is still facing politically motivated prosecution in Holland by the Socialist municipality of Amsterdam for ' inciting hatred and discrimination' . We'll see how that one goes.

A commendation to long time Joshua's Army member Dragon Dinosaur for sending this my way.