The Snark is at Hand

Geert Wilders is visiting the USA next week. He will be stopping in New York, and then coming to Washington D.C. to speak at the National Press Club.

I’m going to be in D.C. next week, and I hope to catch a glimpse of the notorious blond Islamophobe — if I can see through his ring of bodyguards.

Newsweek has taken this opportunity to sneer at Mr. Wilders in its customary fashion:

The Flying Dutchman

Free-speech hero or an anti-Islamic publicity hound? Geert Wilders is coming to America.

A member of the Dutch Parliament who was banned last week from entering the United Kingdom because of his inflammatory anti-Islamic views is about to be welcomed to the United States by some notable conservatives.

Notice that Mr. Wilders’ views are dubbed “inflammatory”, but there is no mention of the inflammatory nature of Islam in Europe. The hate-preaching in the mosques, the calls for violent jihad, the abuse of women and honor killings, the violent attacks on Jews — those do not exist. There is only the right-wing extremist Geert Wilders and his irrational and inflammatory hatred of Islam.

The article continues:
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Geert Wilders — who has publicly compared the Koran to “Mein Kampf” — is scheduled to make public appearances in Washington next week, including a Feb. 27 press conference at the National Press Club. Wilders is seeking to promote his movie “Fitna,” an incendiary short documentary film that depicts Islam as a religion of terrorists.

Notice once again that Fitna is “incendiary”, but not the Koranic verses and the imams’ hateful incitement that make up almost the entire content of the movie.

Nope, they don’t exist. Geert Wilders, we must assume, made all of that stuff up.

The chief sponsor of Wilders’s National Press Club event is Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official who now runs the Center for Security Policy, a prominent neoconservative think tank. Others who hope to meet with Wilders include David Horowitz, a well-known conservative activist who promotes campaigns to fight Islamic extremism.

But Wilders’s U.S. tour seems to be testing the limits of free speech even among hard-core conservatives. Some seem to be keeping their distance — apparently fearful of associating with a right-wing political figure widely seen in Europe as a dangerous extremist and self-promoter. The organizers of next week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington — a splashy gathering with prominent speakers like GOP Chair Michael Steele and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee — have yet to decide whether Wilders will be welcome to speak.

“People are afraid to deal with him and the issue [of Islamic extremism] in general,” said Robert Spencer, who runs a blog called Jihadwatch [sic]. Horowitz said he was disappointed that Wilders — or somebody allied with his cause — had not been booked on a panel at the CPAC meeting. “How is it possible that a conservative conference does not have a single panel on the threat from radical Islam?” he complained to NEWSWEEK.

David Keene, the president of The American Conservative Union and an organizer of the conference, at first told NEWSWEEK that he could not accommodate Wilders because all the speaking slots were booked. But after conferring with Gaffney over the weekend, he said he would seek to find time for a brief presentation. “If we can free up five or 10 minutes, we’ll see if we can let him speak,” Keene said.

Wilders could not be reached for comment.

All snark aside, Newsweek is at least partially correct in one thing: there are some American conservatives who want nothing to do with the Counterjihad. It makes them apprehensive and uncomfortable.

Not only that, Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist are on the board of CPAC and will be participants at the conference next week.

Draw your own conclusions.