That Dutch fellow is coming Friday, the MP who plans to show his film intercutting footage of 9/11 with quotes from the Koran in the House of Lords. The leader of that well-known bunch of political moderates UKIP invited him. The Government then banned him from coming on the grounds that the public airing of his views would sow seeds of racial and religious discord, but their decision was overturned in court as some sort of unfair restriction on freedom of speech.
He was on the radio this morning making ridiculous generalised statements about Muslims and equating Islam with fascism.The fact that the Bible is pretty extremist in its attitude to diversity and equality too, and there are those who interpret those writings seriously, seems to have slipped his mind conveniently. America had one as president for the last 8 years, and all through the 1980s. Do we imagine that someone is not a racist just because he says he's not a racist? Or a religious extremist because he insists he isn't that?
I find the extremist views of Islamists AND fundamentalist Christians rather frightening, having grown up in a relatively liberal democracy where the evolution of society has been towards equality (even if we haven't made it yet). But banning this Dutch fellow, whatever his name is, would only have added fuel to the martyr complex that white supremacists have about their status in the country already. My hope is that the MPs and whoever else has been invited to the screening of his movie simply won't show up.
Treat an intemperate and dangerous fool by refusing to feed the flames of his intolerance.
Then we should have a conference of world religions as the Ramadan Foundation suggested and really start to understand each other.
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