Not sure how we all missed this story, since it’s a hot one for all of us, on a number of fronts. Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, produced the short documentary Fitna, which has a few rather critical things to say about Islam. You can watch the move on LiveLeak. If you have not watched it, I recommend that you do, but be forewarned that he doesn’t pull any punches. This movie is graphic and violent in the extreme

As you can imagine, Muslims generally aren’t pleased with this. The presentation is borderline xenophobic, but such is the way of things. In the US, this guy would only have to worry about fatwa from the insulted Muslims.

In his own country, however - a modern, western Democracy - he’s being charged with inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims by comparing their religion to Nazism (which he does, but it’s only a teeny tiny piece of the movie):

A Dutch court ordered prosecutors Wednesday to put far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders on trial for inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims by comparing their religion to Nazism.

“By attacking the symbols of the Muslim religion, he also insulted Muslim believers,” the Amsterdam appeals court said in a written judgment.

“In a democratic system, hate speech is considered to be so serious that it is in the general interest to ... draw a clear line,” it added.

...

The prosecutor’s office in Amsterdam said it had no option to appeal the judgment, and an investigation into charges of hate speech would be started immediately.

This is what’s wrong with most of the rest of the modern world - somehow “freedom of speech” has been confused with “freedom to not be offended”. This is wrong at so many levels. This is one of the main points on my Discourse topic on Free Speech.

And this is what makes America better than the rest of these oh-so-civilized countries. In this country, the right to produce such movies, no matter how offensive, is protected. As it should be. Don’t like it? Rebut it. Don’t suppress it.