He looked like a nice enough guy. He didn’t have a bomb in his hat—he wasn’t wearing one. He had a smile on his face and he was as blonde as all get-out. He could have passed for Brigitte Bardot’s kid brother or Paris Hilton’s uncle. Maybe he was too blonde, too Aryan. Some people called him a Nazi. All he wanted to do was sit down in the House of Lords for a few minutes, comment on the deteriorating world situation—on immigration, religion, the freedom of speech and show the Lords his movie.

He was a filmmaker, not on the order of Michael Moore or Al Gore but he had a way of mixing sound tracks with vigorous real-life action scenes and then blending them with quotes taken from religious tracts. His films could be quite scary for those who had never heard “Allahu akbar” taken in vain.

He should have been let into the country when his plane set down at Heathrow. After all, England was the land of Gladstone and Churchill and Thatcher, a bastion of freedom of speech—that phrase again—but the gendarmerie was there to turn him away.

Why?

He wasn’t carrying the Bubonic Plague or the Black Death; he had all his shots; he was impeccably dressed; Benny Hill would have pronounced him a handsome man in a virile sort of way. He could have been somebody’s Dutch uncle. But there were those, who thought he had come to England to meddle in the country’s affairs; others thought he hoped to stick his finger in the UK’s leaky immigration dike.

He was met at the airport by a veritable lynch mob waving banners and posters that said Holland Go To Hell and Geert Wilders Is The Christian Terror. He looked like a nice enough guy.

Well, at least he wasn’t taken down and cuffed on the tarmac by MI5 or a Muslima in a headscarf. It was sort of like the first meeting between Shane and Wilson. There were great expectations but nothing happened.

“I am in the detention center at Heathrow,” he reported from the airport.

“I will not be allowed to enter the country. They will send me back within a few hours. It is a very sad day, not only for me, but for freedom of speech."

Couldn’t they have let him in without his film? The Earps let rowdy cowboys into Dodge City and Tombstone if they checked their guns at the Marshall’s Office and Geert is anything but rowdy. He is cerebral; he is scintillating; he doesn’t make things up; he could check his film with the Queen or Rowan Williams and instead of meeting in the House of Lords with Lord Haw Haw and Colonel Blimp, he could have engaged Islam’s major proselytizers in a no-holds-barred debate on immigration and the freedom of speech.

How about going head-to-head with Anjam Choudary? Choudary is a bona-fide Englishman, a product of the British school system and as Islamic as one can get. Choudary stood outside Westminster Cathedral one day and demanded that Pope Benedict XVI be executed for insulting Islam. “Whoever insults the message of Mohammed is going to be subject to capital punishment,” he said. That is a lot of freedom of speech for a country that slammed the door in Geert’s face.

And there’s Abu Izzadeen, the former Trevor Brooks, another genuine Englishman. Izzadeen has publicly mocked the 9/11 victims, praised the 7/7 bombers and said he wanted to die as a suicide bomber. A debate with either of those rascals would be better than watching Shane call Wilson a lowdown Yankee liar…well, maybe.

Lord Nazir Ahmed, a Muslim Labour member of the House of Lords, called the cancellation of Wilders’ visit “a victory for the Muslim community.”

Yes, it was a victory for the Muslim community but it was a defeat for freedom of speech. It was a very sad day.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department had already sent a letter to Wilders informing him that his presence in the UK would pose a threat to the fundamental interest of society. “The Secretary of State is satisfied,” the letter said, “that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.”

Well, that’s what Shane did—he threatened community harmony, but the sodbusters were smart enough not to send him on his way. In the end though, it was Shane all alone against the community harmonizers, Choudary, Riyadh ul-Haq, Brooks, uh—make that Wilson and company.

Wilders has compared the Qur’an to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He has insisted both books are full of hate speech and seeing as Mein Kampf has been banned in Holland the Qur’an deserves the same fate. But there are those in Holland that would rather ban Wilders. A three-judge panel recently ruled Geert was in violation of free speech: “The court considers this (Wilders’ comments about Islam) so insulting for Muslims that it is in the public interest to prosecute Wilders.”

How fast Holland has descended into a legal Twilight Zone!

Can Mein Kampf be compared to the Qur’an? Can fascism be compared to Islamism? Wilders made the attempt, maxflack will try.

Mein Kampf has been described as turgid and bombastic. (So what’s the difference?) Mein Kampf has been one of the most talked about and least read books in the history of the human race. If any Nazi had tried to memorize Mein Kampf from cover to cover he would have made the Guinness Book of Records and been the laughing stock of Nazi Germany. At this late date (2009) Mein Kampf poses no great threat to the world. The only people, who read Mein Kampf, are college professors hoping to find something to pin on George W. Bush.

The Qur’an is a threat. Hans and Fritz didn’t fly Heinkels and Dorniers into Big Ben and Windsor Palace screaming, “Heil Hitler!” Maybe Wagner’s Valkyries held less appeal for Germany’s stosstruppen than Allah’s 72 virgins held for Atta and Hanjour. Few Germans, if any, crawled into the cockpit of a Stuka or donned a suicide bomber’s belt because of something they had read in Mein Kampf.

But this has little if anything to do with why Geert Wilders was sent packing before he could unpack. Could he have showed up at the wrong time?

The Crown is about to launch a three-months public relations campaign in Pakistan. The object is to improve England’s image in the Asian half of what was once Inja—to round off Andy Capp’s rough edges. The campaign will feature nine 30-second TV commercials and will be supported by radio ads. The commercials will be aimed at 15-25-year-old males described as less than well educated and world wise than the average Pakistani—those susceptible to extremist doctrine, the Allahu akbar set.

The hope is to convince the target audience that the U K is not anti-Islamic and that there is no appreciable difference between the values the average Englishman and the average Pakistani hold dear. The British Foreign Office has sunk 400,000 pounds into a project that amounts to little more than begging Islamic terrorists not to attack England. This is something Neville Chamberlain would not have done.

How would it look if the Brits were wining and dining Geert Wilders while the first ads were running on Pakistani TV? Maybe if Geert weren’t so blonde.