Shameful bias

So you’re the leader of the Netherlands’ youngest, and now second-most-popular political party — and the reason you’re doing so well so soon is that your policies strike a chord with many Dutch.

So you’re the leader of the Netherlands’ youngest, and now second-most-popular political party — and the reason you’re doing so well so soon is that your policies strike a chord with many Dutch. You believe in smaller government and lower taxes; you believe nuclear power is a safer bet than nuclear energy; and you believe that creeping Islamisation poses a serious threat to your country’s national identity.

And now someone wants to make a guerilla documentary about you. The production company is a left-leaning, activist outfit called Red Rebel Films; its aim is to insinuate that you are ‘Far Right’, guilty of ‘hate-speech’, mentally unbalanced, a control freak, a conspiracy theorist, a Zionist extremist, an Israeli spy, a fascist and a Nazi. How unreasonable would you have to be to refuse?

Not very unreasonable at all, I’d say, yet the BBC appears to differ. On Sunday night (BBC2) it repeated a documentary in which ‘liberal’ filmmaker Joost van der Valk was shown Michael Moore-style heroically trying and failing to secure an interview with the man billed in the title as ‘Geert Wilders: Europe’s Most Dangerous Man?’ Oh, the courage and tenacity this must have demanded!

Never mind that Wilders has been the subject of numerous death threats, lives in constant fear of his life and has to sleep in a different location every night with round-the-clock security protection. Never mind that he was recently the victim of a most outrageous, politically motivated ‘incitement to hatred’ trial which strove to deny him the right to free speech. In the eyes of the BBC, this impossibly brave, principled, popular, democratically elected politician poses a greater threat to European civilisation than: Albanian drug gangs; paedophile rings; Islamist suicide bombers; Irish republican and Basque terrorists; serial killers; mad axe murderers; animal-rights extremists; Italian and Corsican mafiosi; the whole bleeding lot.