‘O holandês voador‘ e a derrota da liberdade de expressão no Reino Unido, in Guardian, 13 de Fevereiro de 2009

Editorial

We live in censorious times: the Dutch MP Geert Wilders has been turned back at Heathrow, Prince Harry is attending a racial awareness course, Carol Thatcher is still puzzling over the offence implied by "golliwog" and, in what is surely a case of otiose activity, the General Synod of the Church of England has formally proscribed membership of the BNP for its clergy. It is also 20 years tomorrow since Ayatollah Khomenei issued the notorious fatwa on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, renewed by the Majlis in Tehran yesterday. The tension between free expression and respect for racial and religious sensitivities is always present.

Setting the boundaries to this is invidious. Any attempt risks becoming a victim of a battle for sectional capture as faith vies with faith in a league table of offence. That is why free speech is only limited by its potential to cause harm to others. But even that limitation has to be exercised with extreme caution, if at all. Take the latest example. Mr Wilders is an egregious example of a racist provocateur. But his principal campaign is not his claimed struggle to defeat the ideology of Islam. It is to promote himself by exploiting the ordinary if unlikable human mistrust of strangers. Look back 20 years and see how the row over The Satanic Verses was inflamed by political ambitions within Muslim communities. Mr Wilders and his opponents are up to the same tricks.

Few would ever have heard of him, let alone his hectoring exercise in filmic propaganda, had he not set out to promote it as a test of what was permissible. He openly declared his intention of depicting the Qur'an as a violent and warmongering text. He has done so (and faces prosecution in the Dutch courts as a result). A Ukip peer, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, invited him to show the film in the House of Lords. On Tuesday the government warned Mr Wilders that he threatened community harmony and told him he would be refused entry to the UK, but of course he came anyway. The consequences of the entry ban are greater than those of allowing his nasty film to remain unknown. Responding to the fear of violence does not always reduce disorder; it can make it more likely. Any faction might now see the potential of making alarming noises. Meanwhile Mr Wilders's deliberately distorted view of Islam has been widely circulated.

It was Mr Rushdie himself, 20 years ago, who argued that people "understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men." He was right. Mr Wilders should have been allowed to come. His film is offensive. The ban is a defeat for the freedom of expression.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/13/free-speech-geert-wilders
JPTF 2009/02/13