SOME CHOICE:

Islamo-Fascism Rising in Holland (Alexis Amory , 3/6/03 FrontPageMagazine.com)

In an online poll last year asking voters to give their opinions on which would be the first European country to adopt sharia law, France seemed like a shoo-in. After all, it is within 35 years of having Muslim majority – given the respective birthrates of Muslims and the indigenous population – and has a problem with both legal and illegal immigration from Muslim countries.

However, Holland galloped into first place, demonstrating an impressive prescience among the respondents. Long the ne plus ultra of hashish-induced fuzzy thinking, Holland’s drug laws, or lack of them, have assured the country’s position as the munchie attack Mecca of Europe.

Readers may recall the assassination about a year ago of gay activist Pym Fortuyn – a politician often labeled a "hard right-winger" by the fascist lefty media. Far from being a rightist, even in the most generalized sense, Fortuyn feared that Muslim immigrants were getting far too loud a voice in Dutch politics, and he campaigned, and gained widespread support, on a platform of limiting, or stopping entirely, Muslim immigration and opposing any further concessions. He gained widespread support from the public, although the ruling elites and the newspapers castigated him as illiberal. Rotterdam, one of the largest ports in the world and once the pride of Holland, now has a majority Muslim population in this tiny country.

Opponents, predictably, accused him of racism, a charge he effortlessly felled as he pointed to the ethnicities of his many former lovers, and also to the fact that the deputy head of the political party he had founded, was black. What Fortuyn feared was that the Muslims were getting an over-confident voice in Dutch politics and were gnawing at traditional Dutch freedoms in an effort to get Islamic laws incorporated into Dutch law. He feared that Holland’s freewheeling attitudes to drugs and sex - and especially, in his own case, homosexuality – would gradually be encroached upon by the immigrants in the name of "religious freedom" - their religious freedom to bend the rest of the world to the will of Allah.

Yes, well, besides the fact that sodomizing someone can hardly be taken as a mark of respect for them, Mr. Fortuyn was also an advocate of paedophilia, a fact that the libertarian Right seems utterly unwilling to deal with. The continued insistence that he's some kind of martyr to freedom is just bewildering, unless you're willing to say, as they may be, that non-adults are not fully human and don't enjoy the right to "consent" that the rest of their philosophy is based on. This would be consistent after all with their support for abortion and their weird animus towards Abraham Lincoln, motivated at least in part by his taking the "property" of Southerners. As between Fortuynism and Sharia, it is not certain which would be worse for Holland. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2003 8:31 AM