Geertje Wilders – Page 6

Fitna: attention seeking moron got his wish again

Published on March 27, 2008

As I said earlier this week, if you follow this blog you should know Wilders by now for building a career by exploiting Islamophobia and drawing attention to himself with media stunts. The most recent of which being his anti-Islam movie, Fitna, which he had threatened to release since the middle of last year, but which only released an hour ago, via Liveleak. It had to be done that way because he couldn’t find any Dutch broadcaster to show it and his own website got taken off the air by his American provider. Actually, there was one broadcaster that did want to see it, but that was a Muslim broadcaster, who wanted to show it during an evening of debate with Wilders, but this was just a little bit too scary for him…

I don’t really want to pay too much attention to his silly little film, because it is nothing but the usual warmed over Islamophobic cliches. You know the drill: the Islam is threatening your freedom, it wants to subjugate the entire world and kill all the unbelievers, it leads to terrorism (cue images of the September 11 attacks) and so on. Bo-oring.

It’s just the impact this will have that I’m worried about. Not so much the inevitable reaction of Muslim hotheads, but there’s already a climate of fear and hatred surrounding Islam in the Netherlands and this movie is deliberately throwing oil on the fire. Wilders is intelligent enough to make use of the wave of unreasoning hatred that followed the September 11 attacks and the murder of Fortuyn to make his political career, so he should be intelligent enough to know his movie is one big lie. The question is, is he cynically using this lie just to further his career, or does he wants a Reichsdag fire? What’s he going to do with all the media attention coming his way?

A thought experiment

Published on March 26, 2008

Last Saturday there was a big anti-Wilders demonstration in Amsterdam, which unfortunately had a disappointing turnout, partially due to the weather and partially due to crap organisation and promotion; I only heard about it on sunday. Wilders, as you should know if you’ve been following this blog for any length, is the Islamophobic bigot who has built a political career on stoking fear of and hatred of Muslims, soon to climax in the public showing of his anti-islam movie. He himself denies he’s a racist, that he has anything against Muslims –here largely people of Turkish or Moroccan descent– but that he just dislikes their religion as inherently backwards and evil. As you can imagine this has made him the darling of the sort of people who dislike “Islam” enough not to want Ayaan Hirsi Ali as their spokesperson.

Wilders enjoys the support of a frightingly large part of the Dutch population, not just the kind of racist Lonsdale wearing meatheads you’d think would be suggestable to a good bit of Islamophobia but also various kinds of more respectable people, including not a fair few media people. Free newsrag De Pers (motto: “free but not cheap”) for example can always be counted on to give him or his party a friendly hearing. Not that these people are racists of course, no they’re just frightfully concerned with the problems of integration and fanatical Islamism and if Wilders might be a bit too extreme in his rhetoric, at least he’s addressing these problems.

so some anonymous genius at Saturday’s demonstration had an idea: create a pamphlet with various Wilders soundbytes, but everytime he mentions “Muslims” or Ïslam” replace it with “Jews” or Jewry” and see what happens. The result? He got arrested. Which is odd when the same remarks about Muslims had never gotten Wilders into trouble with the police, despite numerous complaints …

It’s official: Holland is Islamophobic

Published on February 13, 2008

So says the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance:

The new report from the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance said Islamophobia in the Netherlands has ‘increased dramatically’ since 2000. ‘The criminal justice system, and notably the police, still needs to enhance its role in monitoring and countering racially-motivated offences,’ the report said.

‘The tone of Dutch political and public debate around integration and other issues relevant to ethnic minorities has experienced ‘dramatic deterioration,’ the report say and goes on to warn of a ‘worrying polarisation between majority and minority communities’. It criticises the official approach to integration for focusing too much on the ‘perceived deficiencies’ among the minority population.

The Netherlands Muslims – around 6% of the population – face ‘stereotyping, stigmatising, outright racist political discourse and biased media portrayal,’ the report continues. Anti-semitism is also on the rise.

The report calls on the Dutch authorities to take the lead in promoting a public debate on integration that avoids ‘polarisation, antagonism, and hostility’. It calls on ministers to take steps to counter the use of ‘racist and xenophobic discourse in politics’ and review a number of policies which it says result in direct and indirect racial discrimination.

All of which, to be honest, isn’t news to me or anybody else who has paid attention to what has happened here in the last decade or so. If you’ve read this blog for a while you have seen me write about this before. That the report also singles out Geert Wilders is not a surprise either. Wilders entire career has been built on xenophobia. Which of course also means that there is an audience for his xenophobia, which is worrying.

More worrying is the general acceptance of Wilders and his followers. We’ve had periods of xenophobia before, most recently in the mid eighties when the economy had tanked and the extreme rightwing Centrumparty managed to get some seats in parliament by blaming guest workers. What’s different is that polticians and the media then formed a solid block against the racists, not giving them the “oxygen of publicity”, not working or even engaging with them in Parliament, etc. This time, not so much. Wilders gets a lot of publicity for his views and is largely treated as if what he says is or may be wrong, but within the boundaries of acceptable debate, with his more extreme remarks dismissed as publicity stunts.

I’ve long found this trend worrying, as it has moved the boundaries of what’s acceptable closer and closer to naked racism and xenophobia and has helped create a climate of intolerance in the Netherlands against Muslims and other “foreigners”, where just being a Muslim is reason for fear and suspicion. The attempts by the government to come to a burka ban are a symptom of this disease.

Hopefully this report will serve as something of a wakeup call for those politicians and journalists who have been content to disapprove of, but not oppose Wilders. If not, I fear we are heading for some of what happened in France two years ago…

Wingnuts over Holland

Published on February 7, 2008

The socalled “freedom party” is a Dutch extreme righwing party founded by professional Islamophobe Geert Wilders. In an effort to prove that all Wingnuts over Holland, it has now proposed to force women undergoing abortion to pay for it themselves and so stop the government subsidising abortion clinics. This proposal is so absurd that even the main anti-abortion organisation in the Netherlands, the VBOK, has rejected it. They prefer (sex) education in schools and practical support for unplanned pregnancies as ways to minimise the number of abortions.

The Netherlands, which has always had a large population of conservative Christians, was late in legalising abortion, only doing so in 1984. Since then it had largely stopped being a controversial subject, playing little to no role in politics, with none of the battles waged against it as seen in the US. Opponents largely concentrated either on limiting the need for abortions through sex ed and use of birth control or on providing support for women going through unplanned pregnancies.

With the worldwide return of conservatism since 2001 however wingnut ideas about abortion have been introduced here as well. It’s not just a fringe party coming up with such ideas to make abortion more difficult, the government as well has floated ideas to make it harder, Dutch police has taken an interest in prosecuting women for undergoing “illegal” abortions abroad, etc. The wingnut right thinks it’s in the ascend, so is now much more confident in attacking hardwon liberties.

Socialists win Dutch elections

Published on November 22, 2006

I know y’all are waiting with bated breath for the results of the Dutch parliamentary elections, as the tensions and excitement of that tough election campaign slowly ebb away. Good news, the SP, the one true Dutch socialist party has won big, with 25 seats after about forty percent of the votes have been counted, almost tripling from their 2003 results of nine seats. The biggest losers are the freemarket liberals VVD, who lost about a third of their seats and became the fourth party after the SP. In other words, the socialists have won out over the liberals, especially as the other liberal party, D66, lost half its seats.

Meanwhile the Christian Democrats, traditionally the largest party in the Netherlands, have also lost but much less than their coalition partner VVD, going back from 44 seats in 2003 to 40 seats now. Profiting from their loss is the more outspoken Christian / leftist ChristenUnie, who may be against abortus and gay marriage but who at least remember Christ instructions about feeding the hungry and clothing the needy…

On the rightwing asshole front, the LPF (the grave robbers of Fortuyn) is finally going to disappear from parliament, but unfortunately the man with the hair, cryptoracist Geert Wilders, has picked up the LPF votes, with 9 seats for his Partij voor de Vrijheid, the Party for the Freedom of Anybody but Muslims. Another of the rightwing firebrands, Marco Pastors, has also picked up a seat. Though it’s disappointing these demagogues will enter parliament, at least the various splits on the right kept them from gaining more.

In the centrum of politics, the social democratic PvdA and Green GroenLinks, have lost just as big as the liberals have, reversing the situation in the 2003 elections when the social democrats picked up many of the votes the SP seemed to have in the bag until a few weeks before the election. Then people voted strategically and saw their hopes of a centrist government dashed, now they’ve realised it’s better to vote for the party they really support.

Some commentators have already said this is an election in which the middle has been deserted for the far left and rightwing fringes. They are wrong. It was the true left, the SP, who won to the disadvantage of not just the centrist left, but also the centrist right, while on the rightwing
fringe the seats have just been rearranged, rather than any having been gained. Wilders just picked up the votes lost by the LPF as well as some of the more rightwing of the VVD votes, but did not gain anything beyond it.

This is encouraging. It means that not just have the neoliberal policies of the CDA/VVD government been rejected, but the voters have not chosen for the easy, populist and bigoted siren call of the extreme right, but rather for principled leftwing parties. Not just for the SP, but also the Christen Unie and the Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the Animals), all parties that chose a principle course. A true rejection of the neoliberal consensus that has ruled the Netherlands for the past 25 years.

All of which however does not make the formation of a new government any easier. Neither the left nor the right is able to form a government on their own, so some sort of left-right coalition has to be formed, with my money being on a CDA-PvdA-SP coalition, or maybe a VVD-CDA-PvdA coalition. It’s going to be interesting.