Dutch lose their nerve ...

... Wilders, January 21: ” A Black Day for Freedom”. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Here's a fine chance for any number of American writers to speak truth to power.

See also Bruce Bawer's Submission in the Netherlands. (Also from Dave.)

The appalling decision to try Wilders, the Freedom Party’s head and the Dutch Parliament’s only internationally famous member, for “incitement to hatred and discrimination” against Islam is indeed an assault on free speech. But no one who has followed events in the Netherlands over the last decade can have been terribly surprised by it. Far from coming out of the blue, this is the predictable next step in a long, shameful process of accommodating Islam—and of increasingly aggressive attempts to silence Islam’s critics—on the part of the Dutch establishment.

See also The War on Wilders.

It does not exaggerate the case to say that Wilders is being accused of nothing more than holding an opinion with which the court’s judges disagree. (One cannot call it an unpopular opinion since, if recent polling is any guide, majorities of the Dutch public share Wilders’s apprehensions about Islam and Muslims' ability to assimilate.)