As reported by the ABC's chief political correspondent, Simon Cullen, this morning.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-02/geert-wilders-to-get-visa-to-come-to-australia/4290330

'Bowen won't deny visa for controversial Dutch MP'

'Immigration Minister Chris Bowen will not deny a visa to controversial anti-Islamic Dutch politician Geert Wilders, declaring Australia's democracy is strong enough to withstand a visit by the "extremist commentator".

This, after having sat dithering on Wilders' visa application for six weeks, whilst having granted without any visible delay a visa to Taji Mustafa, spokesman for Hizb ut Tahrir, who at a Muslim conference in Sydney - to hundreds of people - openly promoted the goal of a global caliphate in which the sharia of Islam would be the only law. - CM

'Mr Bowen has described the right-wing MP's views (there's that silly epithet, 'right'wing'; the proper wording would have been, 'the Dutch MP's' - CM) as wrong (really? everything Wilders says about Islamic doctrine and practice is checkable, and it all checks out as accurate - CM) and offensive (to Muslims, perhaps, who don't like having their cult's uglier practices and aggressive intentions openly described, rejected, and opposed; but not to me nor to many another non-Muslim who has done his or her homework and who, personally, find it much more offensive to know that Muslims are taught to view us as najis kuffar, 'filthy unbelievers'  - CM) and only decided to grant him a visa after long and careful consideration of the case.

"I've taken the view that he's a provocateur who would like nothing more than for me to reject his visa so that he could become a cause celebre", Mr Bowen told ABC radio's AM program.

Wrong.  Had you denied him entry, he would have been deeply saddened to see yet another supposedly-free non-Muslim western country behaving like a sharia state in which all questioning and critique of Islam is 'blasphemy!'  And many, many ordinary Australians who have been looking forward to meeting him and hearing him speak in person, and asking him their own questions, would have been very disappointed; and also angered that their right to make up their own minds and exercise their own judgement rather than meekly swallowing whatever you, Mr Bowen, or the ABC deigned to tell them about him, had been obstructed.  - CM

"I'm not going to give him that opportunity to be the cause celebre for his cause which is radical and extremist".

So Mr Wilders - simply because he wants to defend our free and open societies against cultists who on a sunny Sydney Saturday feel it proper to give their three-year-old a placard to hold up in public which reads "Behead those who insult the prophet! - is 'radical' and 'extremist'? - CM

"I think our society's robust enough, our multiculturalism strong enough, and our love of freedom of speech entrenched enough   that we can withstand a visit from this fringe commentator from the other side of the world.

'Our love of freedom of speech entrenched enough'.  It hasn't been looking like that, lately, what with all the anxious tippy-toeing around the sensibilities of They Who Must Not Be Named, those members of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage, that our journalists, politicians and religious leaders have been engaging in.  - CM

"We should defeat his ideas with the force of our ideas (what ideas? the idea that Muslims in Australia, if their numbers continue to swell, will behave any differently from the way Muslims are now behaving in Europe, having gained sufficient numeral and political clout? - CM) and the force of our experience (what experience? - all those vicious Muslim gang rapes of Aussie girls that we had some years ago?  all those jihad plots that keep on being discovered? the rioting Muslims in central Sydney?  the Muslim male mobs who ran amok in the eastern suburbs of Sydney in December 2004/ January 2005? the fact that we had to create a special 'Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad' that catches many more Muslims than it does any other variety of 'middle easterner'? - CM) not by the blunt instrument of keeping him out of Australia".

'Mr Wilders has been invited to Australia by a group called the Q Society, which says it is concerned by the "Islamisation" of the country.

'Its website states that "aggressive or stealth proselytizing and brazen imposition by Islamic organisations and Islamic religious fanatics were our call to arms".

This sentence in the ABC report requires to be compared, very carefully, with the original on the Q Society website. There, the full sentence reads as follows, with original punctuation: "Aggressive or stealth proselyting and brazen imposition by Islamic organisations and Islamic religious fanatics were our 'call to arms'."  Note well the quotation marks around 'call to arms', quotes indicating its metaphorical meaning, quotes which Simon Cullen and the ABC staff have slyly omitted.  And Cullen and the ABC do not quote the very next sentence in Q Society's mission statement, which reads:  "In upholding and defending Australian values, we use reasoned words and ideas, as well as political and democratic processes."  That is, the ABC can be rightly accused of having attempted to represent Q Society as encouraging its members to literally take up arms, when in fact the entire mission statement expressly excludes the resort to vigilante-style group or individual violence.   The next sentence after the two I have already cited, reads "We will never resort to violence, the threat of violence, or the use of lies, profanity, and insults". - CM 

'Mr Wilders is due to speak at events in Sydney and Melbourne later this month.

'He has compared the Koran to Hitler's Mein Kampf (having observed a similarity that was also observed, before him, by Winston Churchill, who is recorded as having called Mein Kampf "the new Koran of faith and war", and also by Carl Jung and Karen Blixen, both of whom are on record as having said that they thought Hitler's Nazi movement reminded them of Islam - CM), called Islam an ideology not a religion (it is indeed a total and totalitarian ideology, a political system and a system of laws, Muslims themselves are fond of calling it 'a complete way of life' - CM), and called the Prophet Mohammed (that should be 'the Muslims' 'Prophet Mohammed'" - CM) a paedophile (on the basis of the demonstrable fact that the Muslims texts state, and Muslims firmly believe, that Mohammed took Aisha as his wife when she was six, and commenced marital relations with her when she was nine - CM) among other things.

"Mohammed was a warlord (true; it's plainly obvious from the most cursory examination of the canonical Islamic accounts of his career - CM), he was a terrorist (true - see the Hadiths which represent him as having said "I have been made victorious by terror" - CM) and maybe a terrorist worse than Bin Laden ever was at the time, look at what he did in his time in the past, in his Medina time - this is not the example to follow", he [Wilders] told Foreign Correspondent last year.

'Last month, the ABC's 7.30 [program] reported that the processing of the Dutch MP's visa had stalled.

'the Dutch MP'.  Much better, O ABC.  Keep to the plain fact.  Just call him that, and let's leave out that Homeric epithet, 'right-wing', which seems to attach itself like a bit of unwanted sticking-plaster to absolutely anybody in the modern west who utters the smallest criticism of Islam, shall we? - CM

'His staff and security were approved within days, but Mr Wilders was still waiting after a couple of weeks.

'As one of the world's most prominent anti-Islam campaigners, his visa application sparked a notification on the Movement Alert List - a database of people of concern to Australia.

And why, pray, should a person's having publicly and rationally expressed critique of Islam put them on the list of 'people of concern', as if they were a major criminal or a potential or actual political assassin?  - CM

'It meant his application was held up at the Department of Immigration headquarters in Canberra while more thorough checks were done.

I wonder how thorough were the checks they did in connection with the visa application of that Hizb ut Tahrir jihad gang boss who visited a little while ago? He seemed to have been wafted on through without the smallest hitch. - CM

'He is on the list because of his previous brushes with authority abroad.

'In 2009 he was refused entry to the UK (because the gutless authorities were scared stiff that there would be thousands of sharia-crazed Muslims running amok in the streets of London, or that some Muslim assassin would blow things up - CM) but appealed and won.

In other words, the UK authorities rethought, and decided to allow freedom of speech, after all,  to prevail over the Thug Veto that Muslims such as one 'Lord Ahmed' were attempting to deploy.  - CM

'He was also tried and acquitted in the Netherlands on hate charges over his controversial public comments".

He was acquitted.  That is the word that matters.  Acquitted.  He has committed no crime, he is a duly and legally-elected member of the Parliament of a free Western country, and I see no reason whatever why his visa application should have taken so very long to process.  - CM