Mark Steyn writes:
When I appeared in London, Ontario last November, the local Islamic enforcer, Faisal Joseph, suggested that Muslims should protest by contributing to women’s shelters. As Kathy Shaidle pointed out, the Muslim community’s principal contribution to women’s shelters is the women (…)
Unlike most “right-wing extremists” who get slapped with the label, I am right-wing and extreme, very much so. But Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist who portrayed Mohammed as a “roundabout dog”, and Shabana Rehman, the Norwegian Muslim comedienne, and Gregorius Nekschot, a boundlessly profane Dutch cartoonist, and Farshad Kholghi, a Danish actor who has a stand-up routine as Mohammed al-Whatever, president of the Muslim organization of Very Very Moderate Extremists, none of these comrades would be considered in any sense “right-wing”.
Thus, in the Netherlands, Islam’s critics are also “extreme right-wing” racists” – if by “extreme”, “right-wing” and “racist” you mean gay hedonists (Pim Fortuyn), anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilists (Theo van Gogh) and liberal black feminists (Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
Whichever of these novel permutations of “right-wing” you fall into, you wind up either on trial (Nekschot, Wilders), forced into exile (Miss Ali) or pushing up tulips (Fortuyn, van Gogh). By comparison, my comrades in Copenhagen had suffered mildly, yet were on the same grim trajectory: for failing to understand the de facto and increasingly de jure protections afforded Islam, they had been variously arrested, subjected to death threats, had homes firebombed and a family restaurant shot up. And in the final indignity they’d wound up sharing a stage with me because their leftie pals weren’t there for them. All your liberal friends who went to the Amnesty and PEN fundraisers and bored the pants off you with that bit of apocryphal Voltaire – “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – stayed utterly silent.
