Geert Wilders: The Saga Continues

Just in case anyone thought I was exaggerating with this older post on Wilders, here's a few excerpts from a recent interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper.

A TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. 'Islam is not a religion, it's an ideology,' says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, 'the ideology of a retarded culture.'

The Dutch politician, who sees himself as heir to a recent string of assassinated or hounded mavericks who have turned Holland upside down, has been doing a crash course in Koranic study. Likening the Islamic sacred text to Hitler's Mein Kampf, he wants the 'fascist Koran' outlawed in Holland, the constitution rewritten to make that possible, all immigration from Muslim countries halted, Muslim immigrants paid to leave and all Muslim 'criminals' stripped of Dutch citizenship and deported 'back where they came from'. But he has nothing against Muslims. 'I have a problem with Islamic tradition, culture, ideology. Not with Muslim people.'

[...]

He shrugs off anxieties that his film will trigger a fresh bout of violence of the kind that left Van Gogh stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street and his estranged colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali in hiding, or the murderous furore over the Danish cartoons in 2005.

The Dutch government is planning emergency evacuation of its nationals and diplomats from the Middle East should the Wilders film be shown. It is alarmed about the impact on Dutch business. 'Our Prime Minister is a big coward. The government is weak,' says Wilders. 'They hate my guts and I don't like them either.'

And if people are murdered as a result of his film? 'They say that if there's bloodshed it would be the responsibility of this strange politician. It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. They're creating an atmosphere. I'm not responsible for using democratic means and acting within the law. I don't want Dutch people or Dutch interests to be hurt.'

But he does want to create a stir. 'Islam is something we can't afford any more in the Netherlands. I want the fascist Koran banned. We need to stop the Islamisation of the Netherlands. That means no more mosques, no more Islamic schools, no more imams... Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all terrorists are Muslims.'

Free speech or hate speech? 'I don't create hate. I want to be honest. I don't hate people. I don't hate Muslims. I hate their book and their ideology.'

First of all, I don't think it's quite fair to put him on the same plane as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali is an intellectual, an incredibly astute and thoughtful person, who would never say something as deliberately insulting and provoking as calling Islam a "retarded culture". Hirsi Ali was fighting against the subjugation of women in the name of Islam; Wilders is fighting to ban the religion from his country. That's quite a difference.

Wilders' film hasn't been shown yet, but he says it will be eventually.

I think it's hard for a North American to quite grasp the racial tensions present in Europe until you visit (more evidence). The influx of large numbers of illegal and/or very poor immigrants from Middle Eastern and African counties is a huge problem. Notice Wilders' emphasis on banning the building of more mosques: there are plenty of people here who sense that Islam is gaining demographic ground very quickly and worry about what this means for their secular traditions.

It is of course unfair to assume that all Muslims view their religion as a political philsophy, but there are plenty who do and they come particularly from poor, third world countries--the exact same countries which are sending scores of refugees into Europe.

People in Canada get worked up over Little Mosque On The Prairie, talking as if we have a clash of cultures going on in our country that's in danger of getting out of control. Trust me, until you've been to Europe, you ain't seen nothing. It sounds isolationist of me to say this, but we should feel incredibly lucky to have huge oceans between us and most of the developing world--it gives us a control over our country's borders that the Netherlands can only dream about.