Liberalism in Netherlands

The first outrage is that a Dutch court has sentenced Mohammed Bouyeri, the slaughterer/murderer of Theo van Gogh, not to death, but to life in prison. There’s no capital punishment in the vast weeny-land known as Europe, so a monstrous cold-blooded killer gets to live a comfortable life under the protective authority of the state, reading the Koran, watching tv, building up his muscles, talking up jihad with his fellow Muslims, while his victim rots in the ground. This is justice, liberal-style. But of course we’re used to that. It’s shocking but not surprising, as the saying goes.

The second outrage is surprising as well as shocking: Bouyeri is being allowed to keep his voting rights while in prison, which will enable him to participate in politics.

[T]he opposition Labour party spokesman on terrorism … fears Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, could win the support of some 60,000 voters if he decided to enter politics from his prison cell.

Sebastiaan Gottlieb, international law editor for Radio Netherlands, said the country’s newspapers seem to share the concern that Bouyeri could gain a political following.

“His actions are not denounced by everyone because some young people especially think what he did was right or can understand why he murdered Van Gogh,” he said.

“They were really upset by his insults to the Islamic religion.”

Unmentioned in the story is the lovely symmetry this arrangement creates between Bouyeri and the members of Parliament Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, who because of threats to their lives made by Dutch Muslims, must spend their nights in state prisons as a security measure. So, Geert Wilders and Mohammad Bouyeri, both “Dutch politicians,” and both sleeping in jail cells. That’s what I call liberal equality.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 27, 2005 02:52 PM | Send