Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-15-Speech-3-020"
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"en.20060215.2.3-020"2
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"Mr President, all in all, I think it is a disgrace how little solidarity most European governments have shown towards Denmark in this situation. It is equally shameful how today again, in a grovelling and cowardly fashion, the most carefully chosen words of solidarity are immediately followed by all kinds of caveats so as not to offend the Islamofanatics.
We should all feel Danish, because the criminal campaigns mounted against embassies, the boycott of Danish products, the threats and violent demonstrations are, in fact, directed against freedom and against the West as a whole. Anyone who responds to this threat with a scantily disguised appeal for self-censorship becomes, in fact, an ally of terror.
Can I, in fact, repeat in this Chamber the question for which the editor-in-chief of a Jordanian newspaper was arrested and put behind bars? What would cause more prejudice against Islam – the publication of a few caricatures, or images of Islamic hostage takers who cut the throats of their victims in front of the camera? Can I also ask the question whether anywhere in the world, there is one Islamic country where atheists or people adhering to other faiths are given the respect that Muslims demand from us?
To ask the question is to answer it, and it is therefore high time we stopped beating about the bush and asked Muslims who live in Europe and who, by the way, enjoy freedom of religion, the free expression of opinion and all the blessings of social security, quite rightly so, to take themselves less seriously and to realise that democracy is about differences of opinion and sometimes clashing viewpoints.
Anyone who cannot live with this would do well to use their freedom to move to one of the many countries where the inflexible and often very cruel laws of Islam already apply.
I would like to quote the Danish Queen Margarethe II, with whom I am in complete agreement and who appears to be much more spirited than most European leaders put together: ‘These days, we are being challenged by Islam nationally and internationally. We have left this issue unaddressed for far too long, because we were tolerant or even perhaps complacent. We must show our opposition to Islam and accept the risk of being given unfavourable labels at times’.
Let us therefore defend, tooth and nail, the free expression of opinion. Let the European countries where laws inimical to liberty are already in place to curb the free expression of political opinion – Belgium for example – take the initiative to abolish these laws which muzzle people and thereby send a strong message to anyone who combats freedom.
We should also draw lessons from this for the negotiations with Turkey, because Turkey can never become a European Member State, simply because it is not a European country, and also because the basic principles of Islam are incompatible with the European values of freedom, separation of church and state and gender equality. It is time we mustered the courage to say this, certainly now Prime Minister Erdogan has been arrogant enough to seek to impose restrictions on the free expression of opinion.
On a final note about this Danish issue, I should like to add an impressive quote from Mrs Doornaert’s column in the Flemish newspaper
: ‘Europe appears to be unable to shake off its tendency for appeasement. It should have learnt by now that it is impossible to appease a totalitarian monster. The more you feed it, the more insolent it becomes’. Mrs Doornaert and her newspaper certainly do not think along the same political lines as I do, but those are prophetic words and we would do well to ponder them very carefully."@en1
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