Dildos versus scimitars

Here's Christopher Caldwell writing about the current situation in Holland:

The Netherlands has spent the past several weeks in a political crisis out of a novel by Borges. People are worried that a politician might say something he has already said. And they are divided over how to interpret a film that may not exist. Last August, the anti-immigration legislator, Geert Wilders, wrote in the daily De Volkskrant: "I've had enough of Islam in the Netherlands - not one more Muslim immigrant. I've had enough of Allah and Mohammed in the Netherlands - not one more mosque." Mr Wilders, whose Freedom party controls 9 of the 150 seats in the Dutch lower house, also urged banning the Koran, which he calls "the Islamic Mein Kampf ".

But his announcement in late November that he would make a short film to that effect sent the government into a panic. The cabinet met in secret. It ordered foreign embassies to draw up evacuation plans in case of mob violence. It put the mayors of Dutch cities on alert. It arranged meetings with imams and other Muslim representatives, distancing itself from Mr Wilders' positions. The interior, justice and foreign ministers summoned Mr Wilders to meetings, and the country's terrorism co-ordinator warned him that he might have to leave the country for his own security. The government reportedly investigated whether it would be possible to block or delay Mr Wilders's broadcast.

Not that there is anything illogical about taking precautions against radical Islam. When the director, Theo van Gogh, made a 10-minute film critical of Islam in 2004, he was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam by a Dutch-born Muslim. The printing of cartoons showing the prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten sparked deadly riots around the world. Each time a gauntlet is thrown down, someone will credibly promise violence in the name of Islam. Mr Wilders' film idea was no exception. At the European parliament in Strasbourg last week, Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun, Grand Mufti of Syria, warned that Mr Wilders would be responsible for any "violence and bloodshed" that resulted from his film - and that the Dutch people would, in turn, be responsible for reining him in. Noor Farida Ariffin, the departing Malaysian ambassador, told De Volkskrant: "Compared to what I'm expecting, the riots over the Danish cartoons will look like a picnic."

This kind of thing absolutely floors me. How is it that Western European governments and Western European publics are allowing themselves to be pushed around like this by religious believers alien to the West's traditions? To be held hostage by (a very real) fear of Islamic mob violence? As Caldwell concludes:

We have more religious pluralism than the western liberal system was designed to cope with. This does not necessarily mean that liberalism cannot handle pluralism, but certainly we are in the midst of an experiment. Mr Wilders aims to show that the experiment has failed and that one of the ingredients in our system of freedom of religion - either the liberalism or the pluralism - is going to have to go.

I hope Wilders triumphs, but it will be hollow, I fear. Here's the thing, though. No American visitor to the Netherlands (a wonderful place, all things considered, I must say) can possibly fail to be impressed -- either positively or negatively, depending on one's orientation -- by the openness to sexuality, and the mainstreaming of all forms of sexuality in Dutch society. I remember watching broadcast TV one weeknight there about 10 years ago, and being shocked to see in prime time the kind of material that one only sees on HBO late at night in the US. It really is a different world over there. What the liberal writer Jim Sleeper laments as "the pornification of the public square" is already old hat in Holland.

Today, via Ross, I read a bit from a new piece in the New Yorker in which the artist John Currin talks about how he's begun working in pornography:

A reason presented itself soon enough, in the headlines about riots in the Islamic world over twelve Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. "The response to that totally shocked me," Currin said at dinner that night. "That the Times decided that it was not going to show the cartoons - O.K., they're terrible-ass cartoons from a quality standpoint, but the idea that these thugs get offended and we just acquiesce, that was the most astonishing display of cowardice. And also the killing of Theo van Gogh, the film director, by some jihadist in Amsterdam - all of a sudden the most liberal societies in the world were having intimidation murders happen. That's when it occurred to me that we might lose this thing - not the Iraq War but the larger struggle." When I asked how this tied into his making pornographic paintings, Currin talked about low birth rates in Europe, and people having sex without having babies, and pornography as a kind of elegy to liberal culture, at which point I lost the thread. "I know how right wing this sounds," I recall him saying, "but I was thinking how pornography could be a superstitious offering to the gods of a dying race."

Chilling. The end point of secular liberal hedonism, the finest artistic expression of its ethos, is ... pornography. I am reminded of an afternoon I spent with Prof. Andreas Kinneging of the law school at the University of Leiden. I was reporting a 2002 cover story for National Review, about what multiculturalism and hedonism had done to the Dutch. Prof. Kinneging, who is something of an intellectual godfather to the small, nascent Dutch conservative movement, was unimpressed by the legacy of Pim Fortuyn, the anti-Islamist politician whose assassination had brought me to Holland for the story. The law professor was strongly anti-Islamist, but also unimpressed by Fortuyn's efforts. He told me that Fortuyn only wanted to keep Holland free for unrestrained hedonism. What, exactly, was Pim Fortuyn defending after all?

Ask yourself: how many Islamic societies have collapsed from an excess of Islam? How many hedonistic societies? Fifty years from now, do you think the Netherlands will look more like Pim Fortuyn's hedonistic democracy, or more like something of which the Muslim Brotherhood would approve? What's the spiritual and moral basis for resisting radical Islam? Spiritually and culturally speaking, we're talking dildos versus scimitars.