What really angered me when watching Geert Wilders on Newsnight, last night, was his hypocritical attempts to justify his desire to ban the Koran in the Netherlands. This is the man who we wrongly banned from coming into the UK. Whilst his views should not be endorsed, banning him has only led to the BNP and the EDL using him as a hero to promote their fascist right-wing ideology. Banning him was also a serious attack of our civil rights. However, whilst after protest within the UK and from political parties such as the Libdems he was rightly granted access to the UK and was allowed to play his video condemning Islam as a fascist ideology, in the Lords yesterday.

How can he argue on one level that it is against freedom of speech not to allow him into the country and then abuse freedom of speech by wanting to ban the Koran and to arrest any Muslim who does not conform to what he thinks is a ‘true’ citizen? He seems to believe that the Koran is different to other religious texts because it is an ideology. Well if I am not mistaken, all religions to some extent have ideological aspects to them. Furthermore, each religion has different aspects that can be interpreted wrongly – such as within the Bible women are seen as the originator of sin, and impairment is seen as the punishment of sin. Thus, what Geert is practicing is censorship reflecting his prejudice.

He can huff and puff all he wants in his attempts to distance himself from fascists but when it comes down to it, he is just as racist as the BNP and the EDL. He is an abuser of freedom of speech. He should have learnt from his own banning that undermining civil liberties is a fundamental problem within politics and that he is only furthering it with his own hypocritical attitude towards the Koran.