Update II: The Dilemma Of The Dhimmi

To condemn or not to condemn a “man [who is] behaving … just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six-year-old girl Aisha”—that is the question. An NIS News Bulletin, Via Jihad Watch, reports that the heroic Dutchman Geert Wilders—one of the few political leaders in the West to reject dhimmitude— “has compared the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.” What prompted the fearless leader of the ascendant Party for Freedom (PVV) to pipe up recently?

Over to NIS News:

Geert Wilders has seized on a news report from Saudi Arabia for peppery [sic] written questions to the cabinet. In these, he compares the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.

Wilders has requested clarification from Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen on a marriage in Saudi Arabia between an 80-year-old man and a 10-year-old child. The child had run away from her elderly husband, but was brought back to him by her father, the English-language website Arab News reports based on a Saudi newspaper.

Wilders asks the minister if he shares the view that “this man is behaving like a pig, just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six year old girl Aisha.” The PVV leader wants Verhagen to summon the Saudi Arabian ambassador to express his repugnance.

ROBERT SPENCER ponders the dhimmi’s dilemma:

[T]his puts those who will condemn Wilders in a peculiar position. If they take issue with his characterization of Muhammad, they will either be excusing the Muslim prophet’s marriage to a six-year-old and declining to condemn those Muslims who imitate their prophet by taking child brides, or, if they say that Muhammad didn’t actually marry a child, they’re in the position of denying evidence that is in the sources Muslims consider most reliable. Yet as this incident with the 80-year-old and his 10-year-old bride demonstrates ( “my marriage is not against Shariah,” said the codger), many Muslims take that evidence quite seriously.

Update I (August 31): JP writes: Jamie, you cannot try an Arab in his homeland based on Western Laws.

This is a point well taken and worth making. It is clear to me that unlike, say, an America leader, whose admonitions to the Arab world may carry the threat of an invasion, Wilders is merely being provocative. His intention and consistent modus operandi are to expose the West’s self-immolating left-liberalism. I believe the same is the case here. Where are the Hildebeest-type feminists on this?

My mention of Daniel Hannan, the new-found darling of American conservatives and libertarians, in this context, is only tangentially related. Nevertheless, I’ve been meaning to bring Hanna up. Here’s what he had to say about Wilders:

It’s true that Geert Wilders is a controversialist, who takes pleasure in causing offence. He needs 24-hour protection, so serious are the death-threats he has attracted from jihadis. He revels in offending liberals as well as Muslims: his call for the Koran to be banned struck me as rather inconsistent with his stated commitment to civic freedoms. I wouldn’t vote for him if I were Dutch.

My Netherlands-based family are proud supporters of the heroic Wilders, the only man to understand the stakes. Hannan here is very much in the sneering mode of Mark Steyn, who lauds the manner in which America has dealt with fractious immigrant populations, and distinguishes between the American and European melting pots. I don’t know if he is one, but neoconservatives of the deepest dye do not allow for the questioning of immigration policy with respect to the future of western liberal societies.

In “Get With The Global Program, Gaul” I noted:

“When America’s news cartel woke up to one of 2005’s biggest stories—Muslims running riot across France—the response from many a neoconservative was to gloat.

The Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American superiority. It’s not happening here because we’re better. And why are we superior? To listen to their accounts, it’s because we’ve submerged or erased aspects of the American identity. …

Perhaps the threat to both homelands is overplayed. I sincerely hope so—for the French and for us. But even if France isn’t the proverbial canary in the coal mine, shouldn’t Americans be rooting for this once-magnificent European country?

Not according to some prominent neoconservatives, for whom the destruction of 8,400 vehicles, dozens of buildings, and at least one life by the Muslim community of France has served to focus attentions on… the ‘bigoted’ French.” …

[SNIP]

Hannan has generally condemned the hard-right parties of Europe and the UK as “fascist,” which is vintage neoconservatism. (It is possible that this “turn” in Hannan’s politics came about after the savaging he endured for citing “Powell, the Conservative minister who was cast into the political wilderness after warning that open immigration would lead to ‘rivers of blood,” as a major political influence.”) And although I too dislike the protectionism and economic socialism of said parties, they do address the indispensable immigration issue.

Undeniably “exceptionally intelligent,” the man speaks a superb English, something that seduced me initially too. However, I soon discerned that even Hannan’s pronunciations about American liberties sundered under Obama were somewhat shallow, or strategically tailored to his role as a star among Republican TV hosts.
Yes, he knows well and repeats often the principles of dispersion and decentralization of power inherent in the American system. But, like so many neocons, he conveys the false idea that up until recently those principles had been respected. Hogwash. Obama is continuing on the path of his predecessor, and Bush built on the wrecking Clinton did. And before that… well you know the story.

Update II: Via Jamie. It would appear that Hannan does subscribe to the neoconservative concept of a propositional nation. Accordingly, and to quote from my upcoming book, a nation is nothing but a notion (the last is Buchanan’s turn of phrase), “a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.”