CANADA FREE PRESS: Last week, the Dutch police raided the home of Gregorius Nekschot (a pseudonym meaning “Gregory Deathblow”). Mr. Nekschot makes rude and often sexually explicit cartoons that poke fun at the multicultural society and at religious people, especially Muslims. The police confiscated his computer and a number of drawings. The cartoonist was also arrested and jailed for 36 hours but has meanwhile been released until his court case is due.
“Gregory Deathblow” – the first name refers to Pope Gregory IX who established the Papal Inquisition – hides behind an alias. The cartoonist was a collaborator of the late Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. He made drawings for Mr. van Gogh’s website until it ceased publication in 2004, after its owner was assassinated by a fanatic Muslim.
The police harrassment of Mr. Nekschot follows a 2005 “islamophobia” complaint by Abdul Jabbar van de Ven, a Dutchman who converted to Islam and subsequently became an imam. This was the same Abdul Jabbar van de Ven who, three weeks after Mr. van Gogh’s assassination, told Dutch television that he had felt happiness when he heard of the murder and that he hoped that anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders would soon die, too. Mr. Nekschot subsequently made a cartoon of the imam, depicting him with sticks pricking out his eyes.
It is indicative of the current situation in the Netherlands that the authorities have not pursued the threatening imam, but arrested the cartoonist following a complaint from that same imam. It took them three years to do so because, as Ernst Hirsch Ballin, the Dutch minister of Justice, a Christian-Democrat, explained last week, it took the police three years to discover the cartoonist’s real identity. He will now be charged with the hate speech crime of drawing cartoons of “an insulting and/or discriminating nature.”
Mr. Nekschot’s reaction to his arrest, however, was equally indicative. He attacked… the Christians. In an interview in Monday’s newspaper Sp!ts he said: “I think it is urgent that we democratically limit the influence of parties such as the Christian Democrat Party, the Christian Union and other religiously inspired parties. These parties are disastrous in all respects.”
Europe is in the middle of a three-way culture war between Christians, secularists and Muslims. Both the secularists and the Christians feel threatened by radical Islam. Anti-religious secularists hold that Islam is dangerous for one reason only, namely that, like Christianity, it is a religion. They fail to grasp that Islam, rather than being a transcendental religion, resembles a totalitarian political ideology in the guise of a religion. It aims to impose Islamic law on everyone, including non-Muslims. Christian values, on the contrary, have long ceased to define society in the Netherlands. Unlike America, Western Europe is a post-Christian society with secularism as its state ideology. The secularists have created a religious vacuum in the heart of European society – which Islam is filling. Cause and Consequence: Deathblow in the Netherlands: Europe is in the middle of a three-way culture war between Christians, secularists and Muslims >>> By Paul Belien | May 22, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – Canada)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback – Canada)
