In the cause of freedom the interventions of Dutch politician Geert Wilders are both a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing not merely on account of Wilders' own support for Israel, but because he has been absolutely unrepentant – and unrelenting – in his insistence on telling the truth about militant Islam. They are a curse because without his support and that of his Freedom party the efforts of a fringe animal welfare group to outlaw shechita in the Netherlands would have failed at the first hurdle. Make no mistake. Shechita is in peril in the Netherlands partly because of the propaganda put out by the Freedom party against religious slaughter of food animals, which most Dutch people take to mean Muslim slaughter. In a frenzy of passion against Islam, the Dutch have punished the Jews. For this state of affairs Wilders himself must take part of the blame.
Wilders is a driven man. On 22 June a Dutch court declared him innocent of charges that he had incited 'hatred and discrimination' against Muslims. The very public statements that landed him in court included the challenging assertion that 'Islam is a fascist ideology' and the equally provocative allegations that 'Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are not compatible.'
Each of these statements is credible (or at least plausible) and each can be supported by evidence. An Islamic state cannot be a democratic state. At best it could be a benignly-inclined theocracy, as the Emirate of Granada (southern Spain) was in the late medieval period.
But, however benign, it could not be a state in which freedom flourished. I know of no contemporary Islamic state that can by any reasonable definition be termed a democracy. All are characterised, to a greater or lesser extent, by the hallmarks of a totalitarian and more or less repressive society, underpinned by a more or less repressive religious identity.
