In the lead story in FrontPage this morning I discuss how Geert Wilders is being denied a fair trial — although of course the very fact that he is on trial at all indicates that it is not a fair trial.
The Stalinist-show-trial aspect of the Geert Wilders “hate speech” trial in the Netherlands was thrown into sharp relief last week when the Amsterdam District Court refused to allow Wilders to call fifteen of the eighteen witnesses he had hoped to bring forward in his defense. Wilders in response was characteristically direct: “This Court is not interested in the truth. This Court doesn’t want me to have a fair trial. I can’t have any respect for this. This Court would not be out of place in a dictatorship.”
The three witnesses the court allowed Wilders are the Dutch Islamic scholars Hans Jansen and Simon Admiraal, along with the Wafa Sultan. Hans Jansen’s work on Islam is superb and groundbreaking, and he will be an excellent witness, as will Admiraal and the exemplary freedom fighter Wafa Sultan.
Nonetheless, this decision indicates the hollowness of Dutch justice and the court’s bias against Wilders. For some who would have been Wilders’s most effective witnesses were disallowed. He had wanted to call Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh.
Why Bouyeri? Wilders, in the bizarre inquisition that has replaced justice in the Dutch courts, is accused of offending Muslims by pointing out that Muslims invoke the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example to justify violence. However, Bouyeri quoted the Qur’an in the note threatening Wilders and others that he stabbed into Van Gogh’s body, and invoked the Qur’an repeatedly during his trial as well. “Kill them, and Allah will help you and guide your hand,” he said. “There’s no room there for doubt or interpretation there.”…