{"id":3725,"date":"2012-05-06T00:00:33","date_gmt":"2012-05-06T05:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=3725"},"modified":"2012-05-06T11:00:22","modified_gmt":"2012-05-06T16:00:22","slug":"pim-fortuyn-ten-years-after","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2012\/05\/06\/pim-fortuyn-ten-years-after\/","title":{"rendered":"Pim Fortuyn: ten years after"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/pictures\/wissewords\/pim-fortuyn-murdered.jpg\" width=\"426\" height=\"282\" alt=\"the body of Fortuyn after he was murdered\" class=\"aligncenter\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\nTen years ago <a href=\"\/wissewords2\/2002\/05\/06\/pim-fortuyn-killed\/\">Pim Fortuyn was killed<\/a> by an animal rights activist who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/2003\/mar\/28\/thefarright.politics\">wanted to save Dutch Muslims<\/a> from prosecution at his hands. Ironically a study earlier this week showed that six in ten high school students actually think that he was murdered by a Muslim&#8230;\n<\/p>\n<p>\nWhich was actually my greatest fear when I heard the news of his murder back then, before we knew the murderer had been arrested and turned out to be a white Dutch man. Had the murderer be a Muslim, <a href=\"\/wissewords2\/2002\/05\/07\/more-on-pim-fortuyn\/\">the anger and fear<\/a> many people felt in the wake of the murder might have been transformed into something very nasty; already there had been people setting fire to the parking lot inside the parliamentary grounds. Who knows what could&#8217;ve happened.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nReality was bad enough anyway. Dutch politics were already shifting rightward anyway, of which Fortuyn&#8217;s rise was one symptom, but with his death the dam burst. We got a media climate in which Islamophobia was no longer a taboo and and a long line of politicians exploiting this, with Geert Wilders as the end result. We&#8217;ve become much more open about our racism, with opinions that would&#8217;ve been anathema fifteen years ago now openly discussed in the media. What Fortuyn and Wilders have been saying about Islam and &#8220;non-western immigrants&#8221; this decade was also said by Hans Janmaat in the eighties, but he was treated as a pariah for them, not feted.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nFortuyn&#8217;s murder was therefore counterproductive to what his murderer tried to achieve: instead of abating Islamphobia, it encouraged it. Had Fortuyn lived it might&#8217;ve never become as prevelant as it has been this last decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ten years ago Pim Fortuyn was killed by an animal rights activist who wanted to save Dutch Muslims from prosecution at his hands. Ironically a study earlier this week showed that six in ten high school students actually think that he was murdered by a Muslim&#8230; Which was actually my greatest fear when I heard [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,656],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dutch-politics","category-pim-fortuyn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3725"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3730,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3725\/revisions\/3730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}