Dutch politics

Wilders in trouble –for copyright infringement?

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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wilders picking his nose

So Fitna debuted yesterday to an universal reception of yawns, though of course there was much navel gazing in the Dutch newspapers today. One thing everybody noticed is how little original material there was in the movie, much of it being news footage from various events like the September 11 attacks, the Madrid bombings etc. There was some speculation online on whether or not all those images were properly licensed. Well, we got our answer: The Danish cartoonist whose Mohammed cartoon was used in the opening and ending parts of Fitna is preparing to sue for copyright infringement:

The Danish Union of Journalists said Friday it will sue Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders for copyright infringement for using a Danish cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in his anti-Quran film.

The union said it will file a lawsuit on behalf of Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who made a controversial drawing in 2005 depicting Islam’s prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb.

“Wilders has the right to make his movie but he has no permission to use my drawing,” Westergaard said in a phone interview with Denmark’s TV2. Westergaard has been living under police protection since an alleged plot to murder him was uncovered last month.

“This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It is all about copyright,” Westergaard said. “I won’t accept my cartoon being taken out of its original context and used in a completely different one.”

So if that wasn’t licensed, how much of the other images were? Was this perhaps why Wilders was asking his supporters to send money, earlier this week?

Fitna: attention seeking moron got his wish again

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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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

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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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 …

Economic orthodoxy

Dutch politics, economic crisis
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Last night the eight o’clock news managed to make us happy by revealing that the Dutch economy will indeed feel the hit of the American credit crisis and grow much less this year and next. Less growth, more unemployement, more inflation and higher pices for everything, dogs and cats living together, a veritable smorgasbord of doom and gloom. though the expert on tap did say that the Dutch economy was robust enough to withstand this storm, he did predict dire consequences if wages and benefits kept rising. Which is typical:

  • In the economic downturn of 2001-2003 we were told we should tighten our belts to keep our jobs
  • Then when the economy started to improve, we were told that wage rises would hurt the recovery
  • Then it was Balkende who said that we had to get the sour first before we’d get to the sweet, confusing everybody until we realised it still mean no wage or benefit increases until an unspecified later date
  • Then the economy boomed again, unemployement dropped and vacancy upon vacancy went unfullfilled and still wages and benefits could not rise, because that would encourage infaltion and we wouldn’t want that.
  • Now the economy is doing slightly less well, mainly through corporate greed and stupidity in the US and of course we cannot have rising wages when prices of everything, including food are going through the roof, because that would hurt the economy and raise inflation and offend the spirits of our ancenstral stockholders.

Meanwhile the idea that companies and stockholders could learn to live with slightly less exuberant profit margins, that’s just insane. No, it’s wage moderation all the way, even if you never catch an economist living on minimum wage. It’s always the workers who have to pay, not the capitalists.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by minister of Finance Wouter Bos, when he presented his plans to target top earners more. He wants to put a thirty percent tax rate on socalled golden parachutes and leaving bonuses over 500,000 euro, change the basic tax rate of hedge fund managers to a higher band and a freeze on stock and option packages of CEOs and directors of companies involved in takeovers. These measures in themselves are not that spectacular, no 100 percent income tax bands for millionaires or something like that, but if enacted are a decisive break with a decades old policy of coddling capital.

It’s official: Holland is Islamophobic

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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So says the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance:

Geert Wilders

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…