The Blond Freedom Fighter
By Gregory Crouch
New York Times, March 22, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
For more than two decades, Geert Wilders, the controversial
anti-Islam member of the Dutch Parliament, has dyed his hair a platinum blond.
He has built a career — and a new political party — on a risky and defiant
outlandishness that encompasses everything from his hairstyle to his
anti-Islamic rhetoric.
Mr. Wilders, 44, is in the news for a 10-to-15-minute film he says he has made
depicting the Koran as the inspiration for terrorist attacks and other violence.
Having failed to persuade a single Dutch television network to broadcast the
film in its entirety, he said he planned to release it on the Internet by the
end of this month.
He routinely equates the Koran with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, saying it should be
banned in the Netherlands, and he declared in an interview that the Prophet
Muhammad could be compared to the German dictator. Mr. Wilders said he made the
film to show that "Islam and the Koran are part of a fascist ideology that wants
to kill everything we stand for in a modern Western democracy."
Some here see Mr. Wilders’s film — titled "Fitna," Arabic for civil strife — as
a potential hate crime and have already filed police complaints in various Dutch
cities, concerned that his past statements and the film will polarize religious
groups and foster discrimination. His supporters say he protects traditional
Dutch values. His critics say he is a right-wing extremist risking his country’s
good name for his own political gain.
Mr. Wilders, who lives under constant police protection in an undisclosed
location, is undeterred by threats from the Taliban to escalate attacks against
Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan if the film is released. Nor is he moved by Dutch
expatriates abroad who, remembering the fallout from the Danish cartoons
featuring the Prophet Muhammad, worry that the film may make their lives harder,
or even dangerous.
Framing himself as a defender of free speech, Mr. Wilders said there would not
be such a fuss about his film if it were about the Bible. "We can never allow
people who use nondemocratic means, people who use violence instead of
arguments, people who use knives instead of debates, we can never allow them to
set the agenda," he said.
After the 2004 release of a short film here that graphically portrayed the abuse
of women in the Islamic world, the director, Theo van Gogh, was killed by a
Muslim extremist. Mr. Wilders, already in the Dutch Parliament for six years at
that point, was not associated with that film, but he went briefly into hiding
when government security forces feared he might become the next target.
Two years later, memories of the van Gogh murder — coupled with concerns about
Muslim immigration — helped Mr. Wilders and his newly formed Party for Freedom
capture 6 percent of the seats in Parliament. Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million
residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are
guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here
decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.
Mr. Wilders says he detests Islam but not Muslims. He was raised Roman Catholic,
but is no longer religious. He traveled and worked his way through the Middle
East for two years after his high school graduation. Since then, he said, he has
visited Israel at least 40 times and maintains close contacts there.
Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started
wondering if it is a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that
Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist. Mr. Wilders insists the film is
every bit as real as his long-held belief that Islam is a danger to Dutch and
other Western societies.
Dutch Establishment Threatens to Prosecute Wilders
By Thomas
Landen
The Brussels Journal, March 12, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who is making a 10-minute
movie about Islam , has had to cancel the March 28 press conference where he
intended to show his film. The Nieuwspoort press center in The Hague wanted
Wilders to pay 400,000 euros for extra safety measures. No Dutch broadcaster has
been willing to show the film.
Dutch international companies, fearing a boycott of their products by Muslims,
have announced that they intend to hold Mr Wilders responsible for a loss of
profits and markets in the event of a boycott. Lawyers have already lodged some
fifty formal complaints against the politician for "incitement to racial hatred
and discrimination of Muslims" because Mr Wilders expressed the opinion that the
Koran is "a fascist book which should be banned in the Netherlands."
Last November, when Wilders announced he was going to make a movie expressing
his view on Islam and the Koran, Doekle Terpstra, a member of the board of
directors of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, told the Dutch media that
"Geert Wilders is evil, and evil has to be stopped." Mr Terpstra called upon the
Dutch to "rise in order to stop Wilders from preaching his evil message."
Mr Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament, has been living under police
protection for almost four years. Muslim fanatics have threatened to assassinate
him for his outspoken criticism of Islam. The politician has no fixed residence
and has to live in army barracks or other heavily secured premises.
Radical Muslims have threatened to indiscriminately kill Dutch citizens or
retaliate against the Netherlands with a terror attack if Mr Wilders' movie is
released.
Last week, leading Dutch journalist Henk Hofland proposed that the Dutch
authorities lift Geert Wilders’ police protection. Mr Hofland asserted that, if
Dutch citizens get murdered in retaliation for Wilders' opinions on Islam, not
the assassins are to be blamed, but the politician. This declaration did not
lead to widespread indignation, which indicates that Mr Hofland is not the only
Dutchman willing to deliver Mr Wilders and other critics of Islam to those who
want to murder them.
Perhaps Mr Wilders is on a suicide mission. In an interview last week, Wilders,
who is married but has no children, said that he is prepared to die for his
opinions. He is not endangering the lives of others. It is his Islamist enemies
who are threatening others with death.
Maybe it is Mr Wilders' preparedness to fight and die that bothers and enrages
the Dutch business and media establishment. If so, many of them will be relieved
when Mr Wilders gets killed by his enemies. They might be quite happy to
continue advocating free speech for everyone except those who are critical of
bullies who threaten kill anyone who does not agree with them.
The Dutch showed what stuff they were made of two years ago, when they made life
impossible for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an elected member of their parliament, just like
Mr Wilders. Her neighbors sued to get her removed from the apartment where she
was living under police protection. The court of appeal ordered Ms Hirsi Ali to
leave her house within four months, invoking the European treaty for Human
Rights, because Muslim fanatics threatened her, thereby causing her neighbors to
"feel less safe in their own house."
Photo AP / Spiegel Online
The Wilders Controversy
By Thomas
Landen
The Brussels Journal, March 4, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
Europe is anxiously awaiting Geert Wilders' movie on the Koran.
The Dutch government fears that the release of the movie might lead to terror
attacks on the Netherlands or on Dutch citizens abroad. There are rumours that
the government may seek to ban the film. NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer told Dutch television that he fears retaliations against Dutch NATO
troops in Afghanistan.
Last week Wilders complained that the Dutch authorities are putting him under
pressure not to release his 10-minute film. Yesterday, a poll showed that the
governing Dutch Christian Democrats of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende are
losing popularity because of their attempts to tone Wilders down.
Westerners do not seem to have a clue about what Muslims consider to be
blasphemous. Wilders likes to point out that the Koran is "as intolerant and
dangerous as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf." If his movie shows praying Muslims next
to marching Nazis, or if it compares Koran verses to antisemitic rants by
Hitler, that may seem outrageous to Western eyes. But it will hardly affect
Muslim radicals, who tend to agree with Hitler and who will in all likelihood
take the comparison as a compliment rather than an insult.
If Mr Wilders were a wiser man he would have focused on the question whether
Muslims belong in the Netherlands rather than on whether or not the Koran is an
intolerant book. He is putting his own life at stake as well as that of millions
of his compatriots, while if he had campaigned as an advocate of deportation of
Muslims his liberal compatriots would not have had to fear for their own lives.
AR If they are to be true to their own principles, Dutch liberals need to wake up and support a native freedom fighter.
