Which, with the endless appeals, will be in about 5 years time, in the unlikely event he won.
My only contention is that
is false.
Phrased like that it is but in the real world practical sense it is true for any faintly dubious character we can tar with an extremely broad brush of our own devising.
Quite. The ability to refuse entry into the country “on grounds of public policy, public security or public health” sounds like a deliberately catch all set of criteria you could invoke to cover just about anything.
In practice it’s correct. As others have said, there’s always some clause that any EU state can use to deny entry, and disturbance of public order is probably the one used here. If this were not the case, I think Wilders (who is looking for his luggage at Heathrow airport as we speak) would be on his way to Strasbourg to be filing his complaint against the UK.
Well, this is the country that’s using anti-terrorism legislation to crack down on press photographers at demonstrations taking pictures of the police. This government is on a par with the Thatcher regime for its complete disregard of and contempt for civil liberties.
The assertion “EU or not, the UK is absolutely free to deny entry to whomever it damn pleases to deny entry” is clearly false for any reasonable interpretation of “absolutely free”. The rest is silly interpretations and I am not interested in following such silliness.
I suppose we could say a person is “absolutely free” to take any car he finds parked in the street so long as he is not caught by the owner, the police or other person or as long as he does not mind paying fines and doing prison time. But that is not a reasonable interpretation of “absolutely free”.
The UK could start denying entry to EU citizens on unreasonable grounds but it would have consequences which make it not advisable. But yeah, they “could” decide to become the assholes of Europe. But if they have reasonably complied with the rulings of the European Court up to now I can’t see what would prompt the UK to suddenly go all soviet-style and confront the EU.
That’s easy. The remotest of possibilities of an unfavourable headline in the Daily Mail. 
Besides - it doesn’t have to ‘confront’ it just has to kick it into the long grass of the judicial process.
I dont care if the man is Hitler,Stalin,Malcom X or Phelps,banning free speech because of the threat of riots or any other civil unrest is giving into blackmail and encourages further threats in the future each and every time some extreme group wants to throw their weight around.
It seems to be happening more and more in the U.K. nowadays.
As succinctly stated in the comments in the OP’s 2nd link
Only this one wears a suit and is a bit more media savvy. Scumbag!
Denmark have had some legal problems with expelling (petty) criminals from other EU countries. Already some from anti-immigration parties are saying that if the UK can bar Wilders surely Denmark can expel troublesome citizens from other EU countries on the same grounds.
I must admit to being at sea here. I don’t understand what Wilders has said that is so controversial. I find lots of things like this:
However, my own extensive readings in the Koran have led me to that conclusion independently. The Koran is definitely not a “let’s make nice” manual by any stretch of the imagination. It is anti-women, anti-freedom, anti-forgiveness, and not all that fond of “Jews and Crusaders”, as Bin Laden terms most of the world.
So, while people say things like “freedom of speech is not freedom to cry “fire” in a crowded theatre”, I haven’t found anything like that in any of Wilder’s writings.
What am I missing? What has he done that is so bad that the delicate sensitivities of Westminster need to be protected against him?
What’s considered most controversial here in Holland is his comparison of the Quran with Mein Kampf, his suggestion that it is a fascist book and that Islam is a fascist religion, and his proposal to forbid selling Qurans (as is the case, in the Netherlands, with Mein Kampf). Also, he suggested that Muslims living in The Netherlands should tear out about half of the Quran’s pages in order for them to fit in. At the end of Fitna, you see someone gripping a page in a book that I guess would be the Quran, then everything’s black and you hear the sound of pages being torn out - then it says that it was a phone book you heard. But sources both inside the office of the coordinator for the Fight against Terrorism (poor translation I’ll admit, but that’s roughly it) and from Wilders’s party PVV allege that, in fact, the ending was changed and that originally a Quran was being mauled in the film. Wilders denies this and says its a big scam by the government to make him look weak and cowardly in the face of the Muslims taking over Western civilization and that he would never yield, etc., etc.
One other thing about intention’s quote of Wilders is this: while this in and of itself may not be controversial, the conclusions that Wilders draws go further: he argues that anyone calling himself a Muslim must by force of necessity adhere to all the tenets of the Islam that he so deplores, and that there’s no way you could be a Muslim and still not be sharpening your scimitar to start the international jihad. There’s no liberal Islam in Wilders’s book. Why is this true? Because the Quran says so, and so do the Islamists.
Mind you, while this might go some way towards explaining why Wilders is controversial here (in The Netherlands)(where, as might not be the case on your South Pacific Island, we have a population of roughly a million Muslims (though no one knows for sure, could be a lot less)), I personally still do not think that Wilders’s freedom of speech should be curtailed and I think that both the UK refusing him entry and the Amsterdam court prosecuting him for inciting hatred are foolish actions, although I think the former is by far the most foolish thing.
I agree but the UK has excluded Duke, Farrakhan and other nutters. Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart too. For their criminal records (no pun intended).
Wilders is inflammatory but the current government (which I supported prior to Iraq and know the tories will be even worse but are inevitable) has no respect at all for free speech, civil liberties or when it comes down to it - any inconvenient truth.
He will cause trouble but for me free speech trumps all that, particularly when although I do not agree with his inaccurate and deliberately inflammatory use of he term ‘fascism’, a very strong argument can be made that interpretations of the Koran and substantive popular incarnations of Islam (Wahhibism, funded and spread by our oil rich, arms buying buddies the Saudi’s) are not compatible with British values.
Islamists will riot. But that’s why we have truncheons and water cannon.
I agree, and I would even go so far as to argue that it’s not him causing the trouble, but rather the people that might be rioting or protesting (if you even want to consider that trouble) and sending out death threats that are causing Wilders and many others to lead a life without any privacy and full of fear.
It’s an agreement-fest we’re having here. Free speech has to be fought for and given how damn quick we are to bend the law out of shape to deal with peaceful environmental protesters then violent Islamist protests should be met with a clenched fist.
It’s difficult to tell from anything I’ve read here that anyone has actually taken the trouble to watch ‘Fitna’ or knows what the film contains.
Google has the full sixteen minute version here: Google Video – Fitna
If you don’t want to sit through that brief and quite informative movie you can speed read through a good summary of ‘Fitna’ on Wikipedia. A brief extract from the summary is below.
And so on and so forth.
Frankly, I don’t know what the fuss is all about. Wilders did not make anything up and only quotes directly from today’s leading lights of the Islamic world, Islamic scholars and the holy writings of Islam.
Verily Allah is sublime and wise.
Did anybody manage to catch Newsnight last night? For a brief second, I understood the rage that suicide bombers must feel prior to detonation, when Keith Vaz kept repeating that nobody’s rights were being impinged, as we’re all free to travel to Holland to debate Wilders. Matters weren’t helped by Vaz’s permanent smirk (and the fact that this fuck is still in government after the Hinduja affair).
Bizarrely, Vaz hadn’t even seen the film, but somehow knew that it was inflammatory (and sits on the Home Office Select Committee!). The Muslim guest they had on was close to punching Vaz, not least because the ban on Wilders makes it look like British Muslims cannot defend themselves, and took absolutely no notice of anything that anybody was saying!
What a farce.
Vaz is a slimy bastard. You know from looking at him that he’s as dodgy as a 5 bob note.
He’s just as bad in person. I met him on a visit with my Minister a few years ago and had to spend an entire day with him. Some of the stuff he was saying (when he didn’t have my Minister’s dick in his mouth) was completely outrageous. His flunkies weren’t any better either - his constituency officer was a total knob.