Terrific piece in the London Spectator by Anthony Browne on the slaughter of Theo Van Gogh. The whole article is a must, must read, but here’s an extract:

“At least, though, the Left in the Netherlands has seen that there is a clash between liberal democracy and cultural relativism; that some cultures are simply not compatible with Western traditions of freedom and tolerance; and that the old distinction between evil right-wingers and cuddly left-wingers no longer makes sense. It is one thing to turn a Christian church into a mosque, quite another to get radical Islam to accept liberal democracy. Outside the Netherlands, however, the Left has yet to learn these lessons.”

Yes, yes, of course ‘the Left’ is too broad a phrase to describe what is a very broad church (and I’m often guilty of the same offense), but insofar as the author is talking about Europe’s ‘liberal’ consensus, he’s spot on. He’s also right to highlight the fact that the response of many in Europe’s governing classeses to this challenge is to trample on the rights of the many in a gesture to the grievances of the extremist few.

“In Britain,” Browne notes, “the government wants to introduce laws supposedly to ban ‘incitement to religious hatred’ but which will inevitably be used by Islamic activists to silence criticism of their religion and culture.”

Note that this repellent piece of legislation is being proposed in a continent that likes to claim that, by re-electing Bush, the US is rejecting the Enlightenment.

The retreat from free speech is a process that has been taken furthest in Belgium, a country that is, quite simply, no longer a democracy, a country that should, in a just world, have no place in the EU, and should no longer have the privilege of hosting NATO.

Browne explains: “Democracy too is under attack, with Belgium’s largest political party, the Vlaams Blok, banned last week. Attracting a quarter of the vote in the Flemish region, the anti-immigration separatist party was disbanded because it fell foul of anti-racism laws; unable to beat it in public debate or at the polls, its left-wing opponents killed it in the supreme court. In western Europe in the 21st century, the Left is getting courts to ban political parties because they are too popular.”

What, I wonder, would Thomas Jefferson have thought about that?