Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh’s murderer was today sentenced to life imprisonment. This is just as well: killing people for making films is a Bad Thing, irrespective of the films’ content (which is just as well for Michael Winner).

However, I’m somewhat fed up with all the sanctimonious humbug that gets talked about Mr Van Gogh. Even among the reasonably sensible press, and especially among more hawkish, anti-Muslim commentators, he gets referred to as “a critic of Islam” – as if he were someone akin to Irshad Manji, and as if he’d been killed for voicing unpleasant truths about the religion or for suggesting that the religion required reform.
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As a great fan of pornography, I believe that legalising the showing of erections and penetration in the UK was one of New Labour’s more creditable achievements. However, much of my favourite porn is still produced in the US, leaving me concerned on a personal as well as a political level about the US government’s new set of regulations on pornography. While the rules ostensibly serve admirable goals, they are sinister in intent and could prove disastrous in practice.

If you run a US website (or any other kind of publication) depicting anything that could be perceived as porn, you now need to record the name and date of birth (and alias, and maiden name, where appropriate) of all participants. If you didn’t make the film/picture, you need either to keep the same records anyway, or at least to know that the person you acquired the content from has the records. Ingeniously, you also need to publish a physical address where you’ll be available for 20 hours a week, just in case a policeman wants to inspect your paperwork.
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The UK government may soon face a terrible clash of Silly New Laws: not only has it vowed to protect witches from discrimination, it has also vowed to clamp down on witches. The Wiccans are apparently following in the footsteps of their historical predecessors in seeking to slaughter children, although gingerbread houses appear not to be involved this time round.

This clash should be fairly easy to resolve in reality: we’ll come to some kind of compromise. The government will issue empty statements and impose scary new laws as part of its War On Baby Eating, which will make a large proportion of the Wiccan community believe that we fear them and want to burn them at the stake. However, to make sure they don’t lose the Wiccan vote, the government will also issue empty statements that most witches are perfectly OK, and impose scary new laws that make it illegal for anyone to suggest that witches eat babies. Nobody will be prosecuted under any of them, but at least satirists won’t be left short of material.

However, we should be worried about the Metropolitan Police’s clampdown on witchcraft for reasons that go well beyond lame analogies with the War on Terror. The story, according to the Met, is that young boys are being smuggled into the UK from Africa in order to be slaughtered as part of the spell-performing ritual at some of London’s black (as in African, rather than Satanic) churches. I think we can probably agree that this would be pretty awful, if it were happening.
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In the eyes of the drooling clowns who use words like ‘dhimmified’ and who believe there’s a serious chance we’ll end up ruled by sharia unless we Lock Up All Ay-Rabs Now, the Netherlands is on the front line in the Muslims’ attempts to destroy the West through excessive breeding.

According to their narrative, the EU constitution ‘no’ vote was a last-ditch cry from the Dutch Volk against evil Brussels’s attempts to fill Holland with Koran-bashing types. This is a little odd, given that the EU forces member states to impose tough restrictions on extra-community immigration (and given that there aren’t actually any Muslim countries in the EU), but it’s important not to overestimate the power of logic when dealing with a Volk.

The analysis on why the Dutch actually voted ‘no’ has been done to death elsewhere. More interesting is where the narrative of “Holland besieged by immigrant plague” came from in the first place. We know who brought it to the fore – a nasty bigot who, largely because he was queer, didn’t get treated with the contempt he richly deserved [*]. But does it have any real-life backing?
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