on Geert Wilders’s big success in the Dutch elections. The article consists of interviews with a Dutch Muslim leader and a liberal researcher in England, both of whom are of course critical of Wilders and the growing anti-Islam sentiment in Europe. Since CNN provides no balance, I provide it with my usual interspersed comments.
Anti-Islam party’s success worries Dutch Muslims
Opinion polls had predicted the anti-Muslim Party for Freedom would do well in Dutch elections this week—but not this well.
Led by the controversial politician Geert Wilders, the party nearly tripled its representation in parliament, from 9 seats to 24, according to exit polls.
That has Dutch Muslims worried.
“We are all concerned now. It’s like we are not welcome any more” [YES! That’s the way, in a sane Western society, Muslims SHOULD feel.], said Ibraham Spalburg, the head of SPIOR, an umbrella organization of Muslim groups around the Dutch city of Rotterdam [Ibrahim Spalburg? A Jewish convert to Islam?].
Once famously tolerant, Dutch “society has changed a lot in a very dramatic way,” Spalburg said. “It’s like Islamophobia. It’s not nice any more.” [Not-niceness to Muslims is niceness to ourselves.]
Holland is not alone in its apparent distrust of its rapidly growing Muslim population.
Switzerland voted to ban minaret construction last year, and France and Belgium are considering bans on Islamic veils such as the burqa.
“Today’s election result in the Netherlands is the latest evidence of rising anti-Muslim sentiment across western Europe,” Lucy James, a research fellow at the Quilliam Foundation in London, told CNN. [Lucy, from your mouth to God’s ear.]
“Far-right parties such as Wilders’ have increasingly targeted anti-Muslim votes by manipulating popular grievances—such as economic recession, unemployment and housing—and laying the blame for these problems on Muslim immigrants,” she said. [I’m not aware of Wilders ever discussing the Islam threat in terms of economics and jobs. He discusses it purely in terms of the Islamic doctrines of jihad and sharia and what they mean for Dutch and Western society. He doesn’t say that Muslim immigration into the Netherlands should be halted and Muslim mosques should be closed because Muslims are taking away jobs. He says these things must be done because the increase in the Muslim population threatens the Netherlands with Islamization. So you liberals can’t get away with the older-than-the-hills liberal ploy, “Nativists are scapegoating immigrants for economic problems,” because Wilders is not blaming Islam for economic problems; he’s saying, very simply, that Islam is the problem. And you liberals can’t handle it.]
“Europe is therefore less witnessing a ‘clash of civilizations’ than a deft manipulation of people’s fears by far-right populists,” she said. The Quilliam Foundation describes itself as a “counter-extremism think tank.” [Nope: Wilders is not “manipulating” people’s fears. He’s not directing their fears about one thing (e.g., jobs) onto another thing (Islam). He’s telling people straight out that Islam is to be feared. So forget about the hackneyed liberal charge of “manipulation of fears.” Either Wilders is correct when he says that Islam is to be feared, or he isn’t. This debate is going to be had, and you liberals can no longer prevent it from being had.]
Negative views of Muslims have become slightly more common in France and Spain in the past half-dozen years, while British and German views are about where they were in the middle of the last decade, according to Richard Wike, associate director of the Pew Global Attitudes Project.
British views toward Muslims are consistently less negative than those found in France, Germany and Spain, he added.
The project has not polled the Netherlands.
Spalburg understands that native Dutch people—especially older ones—may be nervous about the fast growth of the country’s Muslim population. “They see minarets around them, or women with scarves, and they don’t like to see them in the public space,” he said. [Whereas, of course, a rational and mentally healthy human being wouldn’t mind at all seeing his country turn into an Islamic country.]
The Netherlands has just under a million Muslims, representing 5.7 percent of the population, according to “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” an October 2009 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington.
It has relatively low levels of social hostilities related to religion, it found in a separate study, “Global Restrictions on Religion,” in December.
But Wilders is fanning the flames with “propaganda,” Muslim leader Spalburg says.
“Wilders is saying all the time he was wants to stop the Islamicization of Holland,” Spalburg said.
Wilders—a potential kingmaker in the formation of the next Dutch government—faces criminal charges of inciting discrimination and hatred over comments he has made about Islam over the years.
They include an October 2006 interview with the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant in which he said he wanted to stop the “tsunami of Islamization,” and another in September 2007 with Radio Netherlands in which he said the Quran should be banned.
Wilders’ film “Fitna,” which he released online in March 2008 to international outcry, is also named in the charges against him. The film features disturbing images of terrorist acts superimposed over verses from the Quran in order to paint Islam as a threat to Western society.
He is due to go on trial in October.
Last year he said he had “nothing against Muslims. I know the majority of Muslims in our society are law-abiding people.”
“I have a problem with the Islamic ideology, the Islamic culture, because I believe that the more Islam we get in our free societies, the less freedom we will get,” he added.
Spalburg disagrees.
“We don’t want to be the cause of problems in society,” he said. “There are always people who are more radical. We don’t have everything under control, but 99 percent of people are not radical.” [Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.]
There is a possibility that the rise of Wilders’ party will radicalize Dutch Muslims, Spalburg conceded, but he said his organization was working against it.
“We are trying to explain to Muslims, especially to young people, that they don’t have to feel provoked,” he said. “We have to stay calm and we have to show that we are normal people and don’t want to make a problem in society, to show that Islam is a peaceful religion.” [Never forget: a self-described peaceful and moderate Muslim who claims that Islam is a peaceful religion is a liar who is concealing the warlike nature of Islam from naive Westerners. Therefore he is not a moderate but an ally of the radicals.]
He took some comfort from the thought that Wilders still does not have widespread support.
“There are a lot of Dutch citizens even now who are very sympathetic towards us, towards Muslims,” he said. “About 1.5 million people in the whole of Holland are supporting the policy of Geert Wilders,” he said, out of a population of around 16 million.
“The majority are not supporting that, so there is a lot of hope,” he said.
And Muslims were not leaving Holland, he added.
“We cannot go away,” he said. “It is our country as well as the country of the Dutch citizens. [False. If you’re a Muslim, you have only one true country, the Dar al-Islam; and if the Netherlands are not to become a part of Dar al-Islam, the Muslims must leave.] There are people who have been here 40, 50 years. They are Dutch now.” [This guy should read El Ingles’s disturbing but logically argued April 2008 article at Gates of Vienna (summarized by me here) in which he objectively and descriptively (not prescriptively) lays out an apocalyptic future for Europe’s Muslims if they are not made to leave Europe now.]