Mark Steyn on Geert Wilders

Please read this entire piece and post it and share it wherever you can.  As Mark stays, while you can.

I have no desire to end up living like Geert Wilders or Kurt Westergaard, never mind dead as Fortuyn and van Gogh. But I also wish to live in truth, as a free man, and I do not like the shriveled vision of freedom offered by the Dutch Openbaar Ministrie, the British immigration authorities, the Austrian courts, Canada’s “human rights” tribunals, and the other useful idiots of Islamic imperialism. So it is necessary for more of us to do what Ayaan Hirsi Ali recommends: share the risk. So that the next time a novel or a cartoon provokes a fatwa, it will be republished worldwide and send the Islamic enforcers a message: Killing one of us won’t do it. You’d better have a great credit line at the Bank of Jihad because you’ll have to kill us all.

As Geert Wilders says of the Muslim world’s general stagnation, “It’s the culture, stupid.” And our culture is already retreating into pre-emptive capitulation, and into a crimped, furtive, (Blair again) subterranean future. As John Milton wrote in hisAreopagitica of 1644, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience.” It is a tragedy that Milton’s battles have to be re-fought three-and-a-half centuries on, but the Western world is shuffling into a psychological bondage of its own making. Geert Wilders is not ready to surrender without exercising his right to know, to utter, and to argue freely — in print, on screen, and at the ballot box. We should cherish that spirit, while we can.