Geert Wilders, the far-right MP who likens the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, goes on trial today in a politically charged test of the limits of tolerance and free speech in the Netherlands.
Mr Wilders, 46, leader of the Freedom Party, is charged with incitement and discrimination against Muslims over his outspoken comments attacking Islam and for his film, Fitna, which juxtaposed images of 9/11 and beheadings with verses of the Koran.
He has called the Koran “a fascist book” and described Islamic culture as retarded.
Mr Wilders, who has made no secret of his ambition to become Prime Minister, has called his indictment a political trial but the Amsterdam Court of Appeal decided that it was in the public interest to prosecute him because his comments have been “so insulting to Muslims”.
“I am being prosecuted for my political convictions,” Mr Wilders said this week.
“The freedom of speech is on the verge of collapsing,” Mr Wilders added. “If a politician is not allowed to criticise an ideology anymore this means that we are lost, and it will lead to the end of our freedom. However, I remain combative: I am convinced that I will be acquitted.”
The maverick politician was banned from Britain last February on the grounds that he would “threaten community harmony and therefore public security” but travelled to London in October when the restriction was dropped.
He faces up to two years in prison if convicted but his opponents fear that, win or lose, his Freedom Party will receive a boost in next year’s election where it is expected to challenge the ruling Christian Democrats for the largest party vote.
In last summer’s European Parliament elections Mr Wilders’s party took 17 per cent of the vote, second to the CDA of Jan Peter Balkenende, the Prime Minister, on 19.9 per cent.
Mr Wilders has received numerous death threats for his campaign against the “Islamisation of our societies” views but has built a large following by exploiting a backlash against relaxed Dutch immigration policies, vowing to close Holland’s borders if he comes to power.
“My supporters say, ‘At last there is someone who dares to say what millions of people think’. That is what I do.” Today’s hearing in Amsterdam district court is a formal opening session to determine who will be called as witnesses and whether they will all be heard in public.
A spokeswoman for the Public Prosecution Office said that the demand for the case came from a variety of individuals and organisations which complained about comments made by Mr Wilders.
“The Court of Appeal determined that statements equating Islam to Nazism were a punishable insult to Islamic worshippers and therefore constituted ground for criminal prosecution,” she said.
In its judgment ordering the prosecution of Mr Wilders the Court of Appeal stated: “The court considers this so insulting for Muslims that it is in the public interest to prosecute Wilders.
By attacking the symbols of the Muslim religion, he also insulted Muslim believers. In a democratic system, hate speech is considered to be so serious that it is in the general interest to draw a clear line.”
According to the report the number of Internet users has reached 58 million in the Arab world, of which only users in Lebanon, Algeria and Somalia have Internet freedom.
The report claimed that the relative freedom experienced by Internet users in Lebanon and Somalia is mainly due to the widespread practice of phone tapping in Lebanon and the government’s engagement in a conflict in Somalia.
The report found that Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, countries which allowed Internet freedom in the past, have started to show a repressive attitude towards Internet users, while Egypt has become the Arab world’s most repressive country towards Internet users.
Egypt stopped the policy of blocking websites five years ago, but has heightened its oppression of bloggers and Internet users.
“The number of Internet users and bloggers in the Arab world who actually deal with political issues is only a few thousand,” the report said. “But these activists and bloggers have managed to shed light on corruption and oppression and are getting many forces and opposition blocs on their side.”
The two Arab League members not included in the report are Djibouti and the Comoros Islands, for lack of information on Internet usage in these countries.
Statistics on communications in the Arab world from the report: – 58 million Internet users – 176 million mobile phones – 34 million land lines – 12 million Facebook users – 600,000 bloggers, a quarter of them active – Algeria has the highest numbers of Internet cafes – around 16,000 – Egypt has the highest number of Internet users – 15 million and also the largest number of YouTube users – Mauritania has the lowest number of Internet users, with 60,000 – Countries with the highest number of Facebook users are Egypt, Algeria and Lebanon – The UAE has the highest number of mobile phone users
The Dutch government has so much to be ashamed of in the events described herein.
I have been aware of it since I first read about it on Klein Verzet (The Little Resistance) some time ago. Perhaps two years or more. Where to begin? I would say with the murder of Theo van Gogh, an event which was profoundly hurtful to a good size segment of the Dutch population, perhaps a segment that until then had been unaware of Islam and its true nature.
One man, a Rotterdam artist, Chris Ripke, (who's studio is right next door to the Mosque in the Insulindestraat [the Turkish Iskender Pasa Camii Mosque) decided to do a fairly innocuous protest. He went to Rotterdam, and painted a small mural of an Angel, some Koranic text about peace at the bottom, and the words:" Though Shalt Not Kill" in Dutch across the mural.
A man representing the nearby mosque was of course, offended by the Christian sentiment on the mural and called the city and demanded it be removed. In point form, the city obliged and perhaps most horrifying of all, the police told all media present for the removal of the mural they may not film it and had their film taken away in keeping with the Dutch police of 'non-escalation'. A few days ago, someone sent me a link to a video on youtube of this whole event. Apparently someone decided not to comply with the police request thankfully, and a group of us worked hard to translate and subtitle this as we feel as many people as humanly possible need to see this and understand its importance. Although this event is old, the presence of this tape is new to me and almost certainly new to the English speaking world. Here is the English subtitled video:
Please pass this link around to anyone who cares about freedom of the press, freedom from Government interference in what we may or may not know, and freedom from what is referred to in s video as 'The Political Police" something I bet very few Dutch people even know exist but clearly have a massive impact on what they may or may not know that takes place within their own nation and cities.
What a difference a few years make. When we started this blog, the Dutch had a reputation comparable to the Danes. But now it seems that the Netherlands has joined the madness of the UK, France, Sweden and Norway, in their mad dash to destroy the spirit of the native people, for diversity's sake. Or, as Mark Steyn puts it:
In the Netherlands even the most innocuous statement can get you into trouble. To express his disgust at Theo van Gogh's murder, the artist Chris Ripke put up a mural outside his studio showing an angel and the words "Thou shalt not kill". But the cops thought this was somehow a dig at the local mosque and so came round, destroyed the mural, arrested the TV news crew filming it, and wiped their tape. The Dutch have determined to commit societal euthanasia, and dislike fellows pointing out it might not be as painless as they've assumed.
The staggering injustice of all of this is nicely put into words by Bruce Bawer, in a piece he concluded with these words:
In Dutch Muslim schools and mosques, incendiary rhetoric about the Netherlands, America, Jews, gays, democracy, and sexual equality is routine; a generation of Dutch Muslims are being brought up with toxic attitudes toward the society in which they live. And no one is ever prosecuted for any of this. Instead, a court in the Netherlands—a nation once famous for being an oasis of free speech—has now decided to prosecute a member of the national legislature for speaking his mind. By doing so, it proves exactly what Wilders has argued all along: that fear and “sensitivity” to a religion of submission are destroying Dutch freedom.
There is an interview with the man who was arrested. I hope to add that transcript in English to the rest of this post as well very soon. In the meantime, I am going to have to ask myself as a Canadian,
What is it I am not allowed to hear or know?
How is whatever law is being used to isolate me from reality being selectively enforced as Mark Steyn so clearly points out in his article related to this? Here is the original youtube link with more information on this incident and links to other interviews and information. This may not be spectacularly violent or sexy as fascist expose's go. But that is what makes this so important. We must familiarize ourselves with this and humiliate the Dutch government and thereby all western governments that would make it impossible for their own people to make healthy decisions for themselves by effectively blinding and deafening them. While the cop may not have been wearing jackboots, at least that would have gotten some people upset. With the Dutch policy of non-escalation, no one can know enough to be upset. But after all, isn't that is what 'non-escalation' means?
Huge thanks to V.H. for the amazingly fast and excellent work on the translation, and to a flu ridden Baron over at the gates who despite being bed ridden with the rotten flu that is going around, edited the work before I subtitled it. This gives some idea of the importance many of us feel this has. It also is an amazingly rare exception to the Frank Zappa rule of getting work done. 1. Good 2. Fast 3. Cheap. Pick any 2.
Typically this is really true. However our team did everything well fast and free. Thank you again guys and of course to Klein Verzet for sending me the links and to A Certain Amount of Evil for sending me the original Dutch video in the first place a few days ago. Something I did not know existed. But something that by coincidence, did come up in a recent interview a few weeks ago, between The International Free Speech Society and Morten Meserschmidt
They're doing it, of course, under the cover of criminalizing "blasphemy," but the real agenda here is to compel the West to adopt Sharia norms forbidding criticism of Islam, including analysis of the jihad terrorists' motives and goals.
This, of course, would leave us mute and defenseless before them.
AP thinks that the free nations of the West will oppose this.
But with Barack Obama in the White House, that isn't actually certain.
Here is a chilling interview with the man who invited Geert Wilders to speak at the British House of Lords. ‘This is not a right wing nut’ nor a racist but in fact a liberal in every sense of the word and most importantly, in the true ‘Jeffersonian’ sense of it. Once men of this caliber begin to risk their public profile with opinions which are unfashionable, it is safe to say we have a very real crisis on our collective hands.
Aftershocks from that crisis continue to erode free speech in the West. A recent example was the decision by Yale University Press to cut all images of Mohammad from a book on the cartoons crisis(!).
The stated reason for that move was the publisher’s fear of violent Muslim reprisals.
One of his comments — about the response of U.S. publishers to a book he’s writing on the crisis — was particularly illuminating:
[FR] Yes, I am still in the process of writing this book. Hopefully it will be published in Denmark next year. In fact, I already have had contact with some top publishers in the U.S., but it was my impression—though I can’t prove it—that they were quite positive to the book, but when I said that I couldn’t imagine a book without the cartoons, they lost interest.
I wonder just how much self-censorship is going on today.
Regarding the Yale U.P. book that was stripped of all visual depictions of Mohammad, Mr. Flemming quips that it seems “…Al-Qaeda has been appointed editor-in-chief of Yale University Press.”
To me that aptly names the stakes: until our government takes a principled stand and firmly upholds our right to free speech in the face of intimidation and threats, we in effect subordinate our liberty to Islamic religious dogma.
Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's president, has ordered an immediate end to state censorship of the media ahead of the country's first elections in almost 25 years.
In a decree carried by the official Suna news agency on Sunday, al-Bashir put an end to "pre-censorship", the system where newspapers are screened by state censors before being available to the public.
"We had a meeting with President al-Bashir. He ordered a stop to censorship from today," Ali Shomo, the chairman of Sudan's national press council, the state regulator, said.
Editors gave the announcement a cautious welcome, but some said they would still face pressure over sensitive stories.
Sudan's Ajras al-Huriya newspaper, which is linked to the former southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement, warned that journalists would still face pressure when writing about Darfur and other highly charged topics.
"There is no way they [the security services] are going to tolerate anything about security, about the International Criminal Court," said Faisal Silaik, the paper's deputy editor-in-chief.
Sudan's journalists have complained of regular censorship, saying security officers often visit their offices to check and sometimes remove articles ahead of publication, despite constitutional guarantees of a free media.
Editors say print-runs have been seized and titles shut down, particularly when writers tried to tackle controversial subjects such as the Darfur conflict and the International Criminal Court's war crimes case against al-Bashir.
Fadlallah Mohamed, the editor of independent al-Khartoum newspaper, said the move was "important" ahead of the national election due in April 2010 under the terms of a faltering 2005 peace deal that ended the country's north-south civil war.
"Censorship is contrary to free press in Sudan," he said.
"We are expecting the general election. It is very important to have a free press in such circumstances."
For decades, the profession of journalism has been one of the most dangerous in the Arab world.
The truth and facts are often sacrificed for the sake of “preserving the higher national interests of the people” and “to avoid playing into the hands of the enemies of the people.”
A journalist is taught that his main mission is to be loyal first and foremost to his president or monarch and then to his government and homeland.
In this world, Arab dictators are above any form of criticism. When was the last time one read an article in a newspaper published in an Arab capital that criticized the leader of that country?
Not only are journalists and editors banned from criticizing their leaders, they are also prohibited from publishing any material that may, God forbid, be interpreted as “offensive” to His Excellency or His Majesty.
The official media in the Arab world is often under the control of the Ministry of Information, which appoints editors and journalists, and pays their salaries. Under the Arab dictatorships, there has never been room for freedom of expression.
These dictatorships have their own media, which actually serve as a mouthpiece for the ruler and his family and close friends.
In Morocco, for instance, five local journalists will go on trial later this month after they published articles about King Mohammed VI’s health. The journalists work for Al-Jarida, Al-Ayam, Al-Oula and Al-Mishaal newspapers. Read more here ...
IRAN halted the publication today of a reformist party newspaper after its defeated presidential candidate said he would refuse to recognise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election, its website said.
Former parliament speaker Medhi Karroubi said yesterday that the government emerging from the disputed June 12 election was not "legitimate'' after Mr Ahmadinejad's victory was certified by the nation's top electoral body.
"Last night, after Karroubi's statement was released, representatives of the Tehran prosecutor and the culture ministry prevented the publication of Etemad Melli newspaper,'' his Etemad Melli party said on its website.
"They wanted the statement censored and not published -- so the newspaper will not be published today,'' it said.
The newspaper is one of the few reformist publications to have survived a crackdown under Ahmadinejad's rule.
However, it chief editor Mohammad Ghoochani is among scores of reformist leaders and journalists detained in a crackdown by the authorities on opposition activists and protesters in the wake of the disputed election.
Iran warned the opposition on Tuesday it would not tolerate further protests after the official election watchdog, the Guardians Council, upheld Ahmadinejad's re-election despite complaints of widespread irregularities.
Denying Israel's right to exist is no basis for a settlement
NOT everybody got the message in Barack Obama's Cairo speech, that Middle East peace requires compromise.
The Israelis did, demonstrated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech on Sunday proposing a new peace process. In return for accepting Israel as a Jewish nation he offered the Palestinians a two-state solution. But Israel's opponents are not having any of it. The Palestinian Authority says Mr Netanyahu's speech "torpedoed" peace initiatives.
This was a pointless, posturing response which reflects the mentality of those members of the Palestinian political elite who prefer nihilism to negotiation and are happier denouncing Israel than dealing with it.
And it reflects the mindset of those who want Israel treated as a pariah and who attempt to intimidate any individual or organisation that accepts the Jewish state's right to exist.
It is a mindset that shapes the belief that Israel is an enemy to be destroyed, held in the Hezbollah terrorist training camps in the south of Lebanon, the Fatah government offices on the West Bank and in the Hamas arsenals of the Gaza Strip.
And it is a mindset which permeates perceptions of Israel adhered to by people all over the world who want the Jewish state gone. Including people in Australia who abhor The Australian's commitment to the survival of the state of Israel.
On Saturday this newspaper published an editorial supporting Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard's plan to visit Israel as an opportunity to express Australia's support for a two-state solution.
This outraged members of pro-Palestinian groups who responded with emails that less debated the newspaper's position than demanded it change.
It didn't work. The Australian is pleased to publish well-argued opinion pieces and letters from all sides of the Middle East debate that are temperate in tone. But it has not, does not and will not, ever surrender to intellectual intimidation.
The sheer venom of Israel's enemies this reflects demonstrates how hard it will be for President Obama to broker a deal. Israel wants peace, albeit not at any price. Mr Netanyahu will only accept a deal which acknowledges the country as a Jewish state and which ensures its security against terror attack, outright invasion or obliteration by Iran, where the re-elected Ahmadinejad regime makes no secret of its nuclear ambitions.
And Mr Netanyahu will only accept a peace he can sell to an electorate in no mood for surrender after Hamas used Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2006 to create a new base for terror attacks. And there is no doubting the Israeli Prime Minister will bargain hard on all sorts of issues - from the exchange of land for settlements Israel should give up on the West Bank to the strength of Palestinian police force.
But he is prepared to bargain, just as Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was in Oslo in 1993, just as his successor Ehud Barak was at Camp David in 2000. On both occasions Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat backed away from a two-state solution, but in talking at all he did more than his heirs in the Palestinian factions appear prepared to do now. In rejecting Mr Netanyahu's proposal, the Palestinian leadership is betraying its people who need a permanent peace and functioning economy. Perhaps this is an opening gambit - or perhaps it reflects a permanent Palestinian orthodoxy, baldly stated in the Hamas Charter that Israel should not exist.
Whichever it is The Australian will continue to publish news and opinions, regardless of who we offend.
"Free press" and "the Arab world" are two phrases in direct opposition. Across most of the region, journalists go to jail if they criticize or defy the government.
So ribbon cuttings and airport greeting scenes that journalists call "grip and grin" predominate newscasts. The rest of the airtime is filled with endless loops of political orthodoxy: gruesome images of Israelis mistreating Palestinians or Americans brutalizing Iraqis.
That's not what Muamar Orabi offers on Wattan TV. He's the station's director. Wattan (which means "homeland") is a commercial, secular station broadcasting from Ramallah, West Bank. In the Arab world, that by itself is quite unusual.
"There is another land in Palestine, different from the one portrayed on other Arab TV stations," Orabi said. "We like to focus on internal political news, cultural events, success stories. It's very important to raise the voices of marginalized people, and to make the government accountable for them."
In other words, Orabi's station tries to make the case that Palestinians have a life apart from their interminable conflict with Israel. Children get up every morning and go to school. Shopkeepers welcome customers, and restaurants take lunch reservations. Every day there's a traffic jam in Ramallah's city center. At night, parents read their children a book before putting them to bed.
That's not to say the conflict is absent from daily life. Israeli security checkpoints make traveling between West Bank cities difficult to impossible. The security wall surrounding most of the West Bank in some places divides villages. Israeli settlements continue to gobble up West Bank acreage. And, of course, occasionally a West Bank Palestinian attacks an Israeli, or vice versa.
But to watch the other Arab stations' coverage of the West Bank, you would think that life there is nothing more than an unending, brutal struggle with Israel.
"We present another face of Palestine," Orabi told me.
He is in the United States this month, on an Eisenhower Fellowship, looking for funding and advice. The U.S. Agency for International Development recognizes the value of having an independent station serving the West Bank and Gaza and gave him $500,000 to upgrade his facilities, but it's not enough, he laments.
As it turns out, Wattan is now the most popular station in the West Bank and Gaza because it defies the Arab political orthodoxy that says every consideration of life is less important than the struggle against Israel.
For more than 40 years, Arab leaders have promoted this worldview primarily as a means to distract their subjects from complaining about how poorly they are treated at home. Of course we are concerned about poverty, these leaders aver. But all our thoughts, all our resources, must be devoted to fighting the Zionists, freeing our Palestinian brothers!
Of course, the Arab leaders do nothing for the Palestinians but talk. Still, after 40 years, this mantra has become pervasive, unshakable. So it's no wonder that Arab television continues to play those endless loops showing Israeli soldiers brutalizing children.
That's not to say that Wattan TV never participates in this pandering. It runs a newscast, and often the conflict with Israel is the news.
As it is, Orabi often gets in trouble.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, may put up a pleasant enough face to the West. He talks of democracy; he espouses Western values. But he is no more willing to take criticism than other Arab kings, dictators and potentates.
A few months ago, when Wattan TV aired a piece on the corruption that is endemic to the Palestinian government, Orabi said, Abbas' agents arrested him along with several other staff members.
"They put me in jail and wanted me to sign a paper saying I wouldn't broadcast anymore," he said. "I refused." Eventually they let him go. But that was hardly the first time the government has gone after his station and probably not the last.
A retrograde government is not Wattan TV's only problem. Hamas airs three satellite channels with high-end production values using money supplied by Iran.
And, of course, Abbas has a station of his own, amply funded by the Palestinian government, legitimately or illegally obtained. You can only imagine the carnage shown every day on Hamas TV, while viewers of Abbas' station are encouraged to think that their president does nothing but shake the hands of other world leaders and inaugurate newly paved roads.
Amid all this, a station with an avowed mission to be independent, not a mouthpiece for political leaders or their orthodoxy, deserves to be encouraged.
Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. To comment to him, e-mail brinkley@foreign-matters.com.
A World Association of Newspapers Interview with Mohamad Ali Al-Abdallah, Blogger, Syria. Other interviews, editorials and photographs exposing the harassment, threats and censorship journalists face worldwide, can be seen on this page.
The lack of press freedom in Syria has defined the life of Mohamad Ali Al-Abdallah. He has been detained, his brother is serving a five-year sentence in a secret location, and his father is finishing a one-year prison term. He recently fled Syria and received refugee status in the United States. Al-Abdallah is an outspoken advocate for human rights through his widely followed blog, "I'm leaving, and I'm not coming back." Al-Abdallah is now exploiting the blogosphere to fight for change from across the world. He talks to the World Association of Newspapers.
How is your work contributing to the establishment or defense of press freedom in Syria?
Freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental right, because without freedom of expression we can't demand any other right. However, it goes hand in hand with press freedom, since the press is the most organized and institutionalized voice of the people. Defending journalists and the press is then tantamount to defending our own voice, our own ideas, and most importantly, their expression in the public forum. From attending court hearings to supporting the family of imprisoned journalists, everyone can contribute in their own way, on their own scale.
Of course, my activities as a press freedom supporter were putting me at risk of government retaliation. It eventually hit home when my father was sent to jail after being tried three times in three years, but that has only increased my involvement because I can truly relate to the pain and the fear.
Have blogs and new media in your country been able to bypass government censorship to expose human rights abuses, corruption or taboos? If so, how?
In Syria, blogs, and basically anything on the Internet, are under strict scrutiny by the government, and they will not hesitate to use censorship whenever they can. My brother is in jail for expressing his views online and, two months ago, my blog was censored by the government. I guess we are able to bypass the government thanks to our numbers: anyone can blog and a lot of people have access to the Internet, so censoring everything is impossible. In the face of censorship, quantity is more important than quality
Are bloggers the new actors in the public sphere and how are they challenging traditional media practices?
I think bloggers are not here to challenge traditional media but rather to complement view points, offer different sides to a story, and, to an extent, act as a check on traditional media's historic monopoly over information and fact. For me, the biggest difference between bloggers and journalists is that there are no rules or censorship in blogging. You don't have to worry about the word count of your article and editors hanging over your shoulder telling you what's good and bad. Most importantly, you publish exactly what you want. No one picks your words except yourself. Anyone on the street can now break the story; it's no longer solely in the hands of a media elite.
You also have the ease, online, to create different identities to protect yourself and your work. Journalists still use pen names but it is hard to have twenty different ones; the sky is the limit online. Another important point that has definitely contributed to the legitimacy of bloggers is the fact that we are getting arrested, like traditional journalists, and although it is shameful, it means that we are doing something right. Finally, I think an obvious difference or rather evolution is technology and more specifically access. It takes very little, even in developing nations, to get information out to the world, we can post pictures instantly from the streets with our cell phones, and we can text our article while we are being shot at.
KUWAIT: There cannot be a democracy without a free press, explained MP Saleh Al-Mulla. The Kuwait Journalists Association (KJA) organized a seminar, on Sunday, titled 'The responsibility of the Media in Protecting the Society from the Implications of Conflicts and Crises.' Key speakers included former Minister of Information Dr. Anas Al-Rashid, author Zayed Al-Zaid, and MP Saleh Al-Mulla.
The media holds a great responsibility to the public, Al-Mullah stated in a speech at the seminar, adding that this is the case especially when facing crises and this can only happen through transparency. In addition, he praised the local press and its role in revealing the facts of cases such as the fourth refinery and the Dow chemical partnership. Read more ...
In the war with global Jihad, words and definitions matter, and in fighting anti-freedom ideologies, the free press and media should be America's greatest ally. Yet the confused and inconsistent reporting on Islamism and Islamist terrorism is another key fault line in America's struggles with global Jihad.
Without a precise definition of the enemy by American political leadership, major segments of the American free press have made their own foreign policy decisions as to who is and is not an enemy, made their own decisions on what terms like "Islamism" and "Jihad" mean (if they use such terms at all), and provided mostly "isolated incident"-style reporting on such subjects, with the exception of the largely anti-war colored reporting on Iraq.
So instead of much of the American free press being used to largely address and confront enemy anti-freedom ideologies and their adherents, such media has been manipulated by editorial managers, publishers, and Islamist groups to focus their investigative reporting on the American government's reaction to Islamist terrorism. As much of American government actions are based on a reaction without a defined enemy, there has been plenty of source material for press critiques and for press managers to gain political points against an unpopular administration. Read more ...
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Geert Wilders, the far-right MP who likens the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, goes on trial today in a politically charged test of the limits of tolerance and free speech in the Netherlands. 
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