(2002-05-07) l

Pim Fortuyn, "the leading politician in the Dutch elections this year", was shot yesterday. Adam Curry is blogging a lot about what's going on. Morning news shows clips of foreign coverage. Most shocking was what I saw from the Bigs in the US. Without fail all three major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) labeled Pim Fortuyn as ultra right and/or racist. Phrases such as "running on an anti muslim platform" or "the Dutch Le Pen" are incorrect. He points to Michael Gove saying He may have been a "cultural protectionist" like Le Pen. But the culture he wished to protect was the Dutch libertarianism (Libertarian) so familiar to many Britons from their weekends in Amsterdam, so congenial to him as a gay man, and so threatened, he claimed, by the incursions of Islam... His quarrel was not with different races, but a belief system he considered incompatible with Western freedoms.