S
simple_language@yahoo.com
Guest
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/17/netherlands.islam/print
A TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers
kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims.
He just hates Islam. Or so he says. 'Islam is not a religion, it's an
ideology,' says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, 'the
ideology of a retarded culture.'
The Dutch politician, who sees himself as heir to a recent string of
assassinated or hounded mavericks who have turned Holland upside down,
has been doing a crash course in Koranic study. Likening the Islamic
sacred text to Hitler's Mein Kampf, he wants the 'fascist Koran'
outlawed in Holland, the constitution rewritten to make that possible,
all immigration from Muslim countries halted, Muslim immigrants paid
to leave and all Muslim 'criminals' stripped of Dutch citizenship and
deported 'back where they came from'. But he has nothing against
Muslims. 'I have a problem with Islamic tradition, culture, ideology.
Not with Muslim people.'
Wilders has been immersing himself in the suras and verse of seventh-
century Arabia. The outcome of his scholarship, a short film, has
Holland in a panic. He is just putting the finishing touches to the 10-
minute film, he says, and talking to four TV channels about screening
it.
'It's like a walk through the Koran,' he explains in a sterile
conference room in the Dutch parliament in The Hague, security chaps
hovering outside. 'My intention is to show the real face of Islam. I
see it as a threat. I'm trying to use images to show that what's
written in the Koran is giving incentives to people all over the
world. On a daily basis Moroccan youths are beating up homosexuals on
the streets of Amsterdam.'
Wilders is lucid and shrewd and the provactive soundbites trip easily
off his tongue. He was recently voted Holland's most effective
politician. If 18 months ago he sat alone in the second chamber or
lower house in The Hague, his People's Party now has nine of 150 seats
and is running at about 15 per cent in the polls. His Islam-bashing
seems to be paying off. And not only in Holland. All across Europe,
the new breed of right-wing populists are trying to revive their
political fortunes by appealing to anti-Muslim prejudice.
A few months ago the Swiss People's Party of the pugnacious
billionaire Christoph Blocher won a general election while
simultaneously running a campaign to change the Swiss constitution to
ban the building of minarets on mosques. Last month in Antwerp, far-
right leaders from 15 European cities and from political parties in
Belgium, Germany and Austria got together to launch a charter 'against
the Islamisation of western European cities', reiterating the call for
a mosque-building moratorium.
'We already have more than 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only
a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalisation, some financed
by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran,' argued Filip Dewinter,
leader of Belgium's Flemish separatist party, the Vlaams Belang, who
organised the Antwerp get-together. 'Its minarets are six floors high,
higher than the floodlights of the Feyenoord soccer stadium,' he said
of a new mosque being built in Rotterdam. 'These kinds of symbols have
to stop.'
Where a few years ago the far right in Europe concentrated its fire on
immigration, these days Islam is fast becoming the most popular
target. It is a campaign that is having mixed results. In Switzerland,
the Blocher party has been highly successful. In Holland, Wilders is
thriving by constantly poking sticks in the eyes of the politically
correct Dutch establishment. But when Susanne Winter ran for a seat on
the local council in the Austrian city of Graz last month by branding
the Prophet Muhammad a child molester, she lost her far-right Freedom
Party votes.
For the mainstream centre-right in Europe, foreigner-bashing is also
backfiring. Roland Koch, the German Christian Democrat once tipped as
a future Chancellor, wrecked his chances a fortnight ago by forfeiting
a 12-point lead in a state election after a campaign that denounced
Muslim ritual slaughter practices and called for the deportation of
young immigrant criminals.
Wilders echoes some of the arguments against multiculturalism that
have convulsed Germany in recent years. Like many on the traditional
German right, he wants the European Judaeo-Christian tradition to be
formally recognised as the dominating culture, or Leitkultur. 'There
is no equality between our culture and the retarded Islamic culture.
Look at their views on homosexuality or women,' he says.
But if Wilders shares positions and aims with others on the far right
in Europe, he is also a very specific Dutch phenomenon, viewing
himself as a libertarian provocateur like the late Pim Fortuyn or Theo
van Gogh, railing against 'Islamisation' as a threat to what used to
be the easy-going Dutch model of tolerance.
'My allies are not Le Pen or Haider,' he emphasises. 'We'll never join
up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I'm very afraid of being
linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.' Dutch iconoclasm,
Scandinavian insistence on free expression, the right to provoke are
what drive him, he says.
He shrugs off anxieties that his film will trigger a fresh bout of
violence of the kind that left Van Gogh stabbed to death on an
Amsterdam street and his estranged colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali in
hiding, or the murderous furore over the Danish cartoons in 2005.
The Dutch government is planning emergency evacuation of its nationals
and diplomats from the Middle East should the Wilders film be shown.
It is alarmed about the impact on Dutch business. 'Our Prime Minister
is a big coward. The government is weak,' says Wilders. 'They hate my
guts and I don't like them either.'
And if people are murdered as a result of his film? 'They say that if
there's bloodshed it would be the responsibility of this strange
politician. It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. They're creating
an atmosphere. I'm not responsible for using democratic means and
acting within the law. I don't want Dutch people or Dutch interests to
be hurt.'
But he does want to create a stir. 'Islam is something we can't afford
any more in the Netherlands. I want the fascist Koran banned. We need
to stop the Islamisation of the Netherlands. That means no more
mosques, no more Islamic schools, no more imams... Not all Muslims are
terrorists, but almost all terrorists are Muslims.'
Free speech or hate speech? 'I don't create hate. I want to be honest.
I don't hate people. I don't hate Muslims. I hate their book and their
ideology.'
For more than three years, Wilders has been paying for his 'honesty'
by living under permanent police guard as the internet bristles with
threats on his life. He has lived in army barracks, in prisons, under
guard at home. 'There's no freedom, no privacy. If I said I was not
afraid, I would be lying.'
There is little doubt that if Wilders's film exists - and it's
shrouded in secrecy - and is broadcast, it will be construed as
blasphemy in large parts of the world and may spark a new bloody
crisis in relations between the West and the Muslim world.
He does not seem to care. 'People ask why don't you moderate your
voice and not make this movie. If I do that and not say what I think,
then the extremists who threaten me would win.'
A TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers
kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims.
He just hates Islam. Or so he says. 'Islam is not a religion, it's an
ideology,' says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, 'the
ideology of a retarded culture.'
The Dutch politician, who sees himself as heir to a recent string of
assassinated or hounded mavericks who have turned Holland upside down,
has been doing a crash course in Koranic study. Likening the Islamic
sacred text to Hitler's Mein Kampf, he wants the 'fascist Koran'
outlawed in Holland, the constitution rewritten to make that possible,
all immigration from Muslim countries halted, Muslim immigrants paid
to leave and all Muslim 'criminals' stripped of Dutch citizenship and
deported 'back where they came from'. But he has nothing against
Muslims. 'I have a problem with Islamic tradition, culture, ideology.
Not with Muslim people.'
Wilders has been immersing himself in the suras and verse of seventh-
century Arabia. The outcome of his scholarship, a short film, has
Holland in a panic. He is just putting the finishing touches to the 10-
minute film, he says, and talking to four TV channels about screening
it.
'It's like a walk through the Koran,' he explains in a sterile
conference room in the Dutch parliament in The Hague, security chaps
hovering outside. 'My intention is to show the real face of Islam. I
see it as a threat. I'm trying to use images to show that what's
written in the Koran is giving incentives to people all over the
world. On a daily basis Moroccan youths are beating up homosexuals on
the streets of Amsterdam.'
Wilders is lucid and shrewd and the provactive soundbites trip easily
off his tongue. He was recently voted Holland's most effective
politician. If 18 months ago he sat alone in the second chamber or
lower house in The Hague, his People's Party now has nine of 150 seats
and is running at about 15 per cent in the polls. His Islam-bashing
seems to be paying off. And not only in Holland. All across Europe,
the new breed of right-wing populists are trying to revive their
political fortunes by appealing to anti-Muslim prejudice.
A few months ago the Swiss People's Party of the pugnacious
billionaire Christoph Blocher won a general election while
simultaneously running a campaign to change the Swiss constitution to
ban the building of minarets on mosques. Last month in Antwerp, far-
right leaders from 15 European cities and from political parties in
Belgium, Germany and Austria got together to launch a charter 'against
the Islamisation of western European cities', reiterating the call for
a mosque-building moratorium.
'We already have more than 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only
a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalisation, some financed
by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran,' argued Filip Dewinter,
leader of Belgium's Flemish separatist party, the Vlaams Belang, who
organised the Antwerp get-together. 'Its minarets are six floors high,
higher than the floodlights of the Feyenoord soccer stadium,' he said
of a new mosque being built in Rotterdam. 'These kinds of symbols have
to stop.'
Where a few years ago the far right in Europe concentrated its fire on
immigration, these days Islam is fast becoming the most popular
target. It is a campaign that is having mixed results. In Switzerland,
the Blocher party has been highly successful. In Holland, Wilders is
thriving by constantly poking sticks in the eyes of the politically
correct Dutch establishment. But when Susanne Winter ran for a seat on
the local council in the Austrian city of Graz last month by branding
the Prophet Muhammad a child molester, she lost her far-right Freedom
Party votes.
For the mainstream centre-right in Europe, foreigner-bashing is also
backfiring. Roland Koch, the German Christian Democrat once tipped as
a future Chancellor, wrecked his chances a fortnight ago by forfeiting
a 12-point lead in a state election after a campaign that denounced
Muslim ritual slaughter practices and called for the deportation of
young immigrant criminals.
Wilders echoes some of the arguments against multiculturalism that
have convulsed Germany in recent years. Like many on the traditional
German right, he wants the European Judaeo-Christian tradition to be
formally recognised as the dominating culture, or Leitkultur. 'There
is no equality between our culture and the retarded Islamic culture.
Look at their views on homosexuality or women,' he says.
But if Wilders shares positions and aims with others on the far right
in Europe, he is also a very specific Dutch phenomenon, viewing
himself as a libertarian provocateur like the late Pim Fortuyn or Theo
van Gogh, railing against 'Islamisation' as a threat to what used to
be the easy-going Dutch model of tolerance.
'My allies are not Le Pen or Haider,' he emphasises. 'We'll never join
up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I'm very afraid of being
linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.' Dutch iconoclasm,
Scandinavian insistence on free expression, the right to provoke are
what drive him, he says.
He shrugs off anxieties that his film will trigger a fresh bout of
violence of the kind that left Van Gogh stabbed to death on an
Amsterdam street and his estranged colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali in
hiding, or the murderous furore over the Danish cartoons in 2005.
The Dutch government is planning emergency evacuation of its nationals
and diplomats from the Middle East should the Wilders film be shown.
It is alarmed about the impact on Dutch business. 'Our Prime Minister
is a big coward. The government is weak,' says Wilders. 'They hate my
guts and I don't like them either.'
And if people are murdered as a result of his film? 'They say that if
there's bloodshed it would be the responsibility of this strange
politician. It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. They're creating
an atmosphere. I'm not responsible for using democratic means and
acting within the law. I don't want Dutch people or Dutch interests to
be hurt.'
But he does want to create a stir. 'Islam is something we can't afford
any more in the Netherlands. I want the fascist Koran banned. We need
to stop the Islamisation of the Netherlands. That means no more
mosques, no more Islamic schools, no more imams... Not all Muslims are
terrorists, but almost all terrorists are Muslims.'
Free speech or hate speech? 'I don't create hate. I want to be honest.
I don't hate people. I don't hate Muslims. I hate their book and their
ideology.'
For more than three years, Wilders has been paying for his 'honesty'
by living under permanent police guard as the internet bristles with
threats on his life. He has lived in army barracks, in prisons, under
guard at home. 'There's no freedom, no privacy. If I said I was not
afraid, I would be lying.'
There is little doubt that if Wilders's film exists - and it's
shrouded in secrecy - and is broadcast, it will be construed as
blasphemy in large parts of the world and may spark a new bloody
crisis in relations between the West and the Muslim world.
He does not seem to care. 'People ask why don't you moderate your
voice and not make this movie. If I do that and not say what I think,
then the extremists who threaten me would win.'
