Dutch far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders walked away from hate speech and discrimination charges on Thursday for statements made attacking Islam, calling his acquittal a victory for freedom of speech. “You are being acquitted on all the charges that were put against you,” Judge Marcel van Oosten told Wilders who has been on trial in the Amsterdam regional court since October last year.
The flamboyant MP faced five counts of hate speech and discrimination for his anti-Islamic remarks on websites, Internet forums and in Dutch newspapers between October 2006 and March 2008, and in his controversial 17-minute movie “Fitna” (“Discord” in Arabic).
He also compared the Koran with Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” while in “Fitna” he used shocking images of the September 11 attacks in the US and other onslaughts against Western targets interspersed with verses from the Muslim holy book.
