The Geert Wilders trial

[Furunculus]

Sorry, I nearly forgot to respond to this.

I am neither obtuse, nor do I 'get it now'. Quite the contrary: your author, I'm afraid, has got it all backwards.

Far from this trial showing an increase in repressive laws, the legal tide is moving in the other direction. Things are now said openly in European debate, that were a firm taboo twenty years ago. The courts are following this social shift - what was considered firmly far-right and grounds for criminal prosecution is now mainstream right, and even left. Anti-discrimination and anti-hate speech intolerance peaked in the 1980s, and his since decreased.

Nor is Wilders prosecuted for breaching new laws. The hatespeech law with which Wilder is charged has been put in place in the 1930s, to protect a religious minority that was the subject of far right hatemongering back then.

Neither the trial itself, not the laws on which it is based, are a sign then of an increase in authoritarian laws and prosecution. The author did not do his homework.

my point was simply that; in creating a torrent of new criminal offences (4,300 in twelve years of misrule) labour has demonstrated an extreme and excessive bent to authoritarianism.

There is one aspect about this trial that Wilders and his proponents conveniently forget:

Anti-hatespeech laws are the exact legal instrument used to stop hatemongering Imams, to stop calls for the murder of Western swines, and other Islamofascist agitation. Criticism of, especially the call to remove, these laws will strip the anti-Islam movement of the very legal means it requires.

(Unless, of course, they want to have one set of rules for Muslims, and another one for Westerners)

Wilders himself wants to ban half the Koran for containing hatespeech. Apart from this blatant hypocricy, has he thought through the result of his squeeking about the dictatorial nature of the existence of anti-hate speech laws?

i have no objection to 'mongering' hate, i soley object to inciting violence.