Yet Another Capitulation in Our Ongoing Cultural Suicide

In two days it will have been twenty years since the senile theocratic leader of a foreign state, Ayatollah Khomeini, sentenced to death a British citizen for the crime of writing a novel. It was Salman Rushdie upon whom the fatwa was placed, and the reward for his death, were he have been offed by a Muslim, was to be a monetary prize and a blessed afterlife. Gratefully the sinister plot failed, though he was forced to spend a better part of the subsequent decade constantly hiding and moving, and various booksellers, publishers, and translators associated with the offending text, The Satanic Verses, were disemboweled, stabbed, or blown up.

Now on the eve of this disgraceful anniversary the UK has banned from passing through its otherwise rather porous checkpoints the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who was to present his short film Fitna in London at the invitation of a member of the House of Lords. The film is apparently a clumsy and ill-mannered diatribe against the Koran, and comparisons are made between that book and Mein Kampf. But the content of speech is never relevant because it is the very act of speech that is protected. Our culture has made freedom to express oneself sacrosanct, and so it should have after the bloody outrages of our past and the undying temptation some have to silence opinions with which they disagree.

Every observer of this fiasco knows why Mr. Wilders has been banned from the UK. The government wants to be seen as sensitive to the concerns of Muslims. Balderdash! No one should spend a second worrying about the sensitivities of anyone else. To do so debases and infantalizes public dialogue. A letter signed by 127 Iranians protesting their government's bounty on Mr. Rushdie is worth quoting here. They wrote, "We insist on the fact that aesthetic criteria are the only proper ones for judging works of art." Let Muslims and their obsequious liberal patrons criticize Mr. Wilders and his film as they please, but don't let a government deprive him of his right to communicate a political idea.