Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Geert Wilders: The ‘Prophet’ Who Hates Muhammad
Less than 24 hours after the recent terror attacks
in Paris, I caught a train in Amsterdam bound for the Binnenhof, the
elaborate lakefront complex at The Hague and home of the Dutch
Parliament. I was there for a hastily arranged meeting with Geert
Wilders, a veteran member of the House of Representatives and Islam’s
arch-nemesis in Europe.
Security was tight that
afternoon. Twice on the labyrinthian route to his office, I emptied my
pockets, walked through metal detectors and watched as guards dug
through my camera bag. Behind the key card-controlled door to his
office, I was a little surprised to find Wilders, alone and standing
behind his desk.
No fan of understatement, Wilders wore
a shiny black Armani suit and a bright green tie. But it was his
trademark platinum-blond pompadour that stood out, a haircut that many
in the Netherlands compare to Donald Trump’s rat’s nest. Wilders may
look just as cartoonish as The Donald. But unlike Trump, he’s a
legitimate force in politics. For nearly a decade, he’s served as the
leader of Holland’s anti-Islamic political party, and he regularly uses
his platform to denounce not only violent jihadists but all of Islam.
It’s an understandable
response for a guy who has spent the better part of a decade wearing a
bulletproof vest and being shuttled between safe houses to avoid
assassination. “I’m not in prison,” he says. “But I’m not free, either.
You don’t have to pity me, but I haven’t had personal freedom now for 10
years. I can’t set one foot out of my house or anywhere in the world
without security.”
Wilders’s name is on the same Al-Qaeda hit list as
Stéphane Charbonnier, an editor who was shot and killed during the
jihadist assault on Charlie Hebdo, the French
satirical magazine, that left 12 dead earlier this month. The massacre,
along with the subsequent killings at a kosher supermarket in Paris, was
a tragic day for the France. But for Wilders, it only added to his
appeal. Since the attack, his Freedom Party has surged in national
polls. It was already the most popular party in Holland, but if the 2016
parliamentary elections were held today, he’d pick up 31 seats out of
150, more than double his current figure.
If he found
the right coalition partner, Wilders could even become Holland’s prime
minister, a once unthinkable prospect. Ten years ago, his proposal to
ban the construction of new mosques in the Netherlands was mostly seen
as the ravings of a fearmongering extremist who compares the Koran to Mein Kampf. Now reporters call Wilders a “populist,” and they no longer dismiss his xenophobic rants as rubbish.
His
consolidation of power here isn’t a foregone conclusion, but Wilders’s
growing popularity in Holland is emblematic of a larger trend: Europeans
are becoming increasingly hostile to both native-born Muslims and the
recent wave of immigrants flooding across their borders. Islamophobes
are burning mosques in Sweden, marching by the tens of thousands in
Germany and ceding more and more control to those politicians who speak
the loudest against the Muslim faith.
Wilders insists he derives no pleasure from his newfound influence, but in the hours after the Charlie Hebdo
shootings in Paris, he tweeted “This is war” to his 380,000 followers.
By war, he tells me, he means a war with all of Islam. “The
Islamification of our society is what’s causing this,” he said of the
assault on Paris. “And it’s all inspired by the Koran.”
Wilders
clearly knows that this is his moment, his chance to waggle his finger
and proclaim “I told you so” to European politicians who haven’t, in his
view, taken the threat of terrorism seriously. As he puts it, “They
refuse to define the elephant in the room, which is Islam.”
DYED HAIR, DISGUISED ROOTS
Wilders
will tell you that it’s about the religion, not the people; that he
hates Islam, not Muslims. But as he addressed a crowd in The Hague last
March after a successful showing by his party in local elections, he got
a little more personal. Flanked by two bodyguards, he walked to a small
podium as “Eye of the Tiger” played on a cheap PA system, to scattered
cheers. “I ask all of you,” he said, waving his finger at the crowd, “do
you want in this city, and in the Netherlands, more or less Moroccans?”
His audience gleefully chanted, “Less! Less! Less!,” to which Wilders
replied with a smile, “Then we will arrange that.”
The
comments earned Wilders a comparison to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi
propaganda minister who in 1943 asked a crowd of Germans if they were
ready for “total war.” (Their response: “Yes! Yes!”) Not long after
Wilders addressed that crowd, a local prosecutor filed charges against
him for hate speech. He faces a trial this year.
Wilders
insists he did nothing wrong and said nothing new that day. His party’s
official platform implicitly advocates “less Moroccans” in the
Netherlands by halting emigration from Islamic countries, promoting a
voluntary exodus of Muslims (back to their native lands) and expelling
Moroccans who commit crimes on Dutch soil. “Eighty percent of the Dutch
jihadists who go to Syria are Moroccans,” he says. (Other experts think
the figure is slightly lower.) “We have an enormous problem with
Moroccans; everybody has known this for 10 years.”
This sort of racial rhetoric regularly
earns Wilders comparisons to fascists, but he remains uncowed. “The
biggest disease we have faced in the last decades in Europe is cultural
relativism, the idea by liberals and leftist politicians that all
cultures are equal. They are not,” he told me. “Our culture, based on
Christianity, humanism and Judaism, it’s a better culture. We don’t
settle things with violence—well, sometimes we do, but mostly we don’t.
Cultural relativism has made it so people don’t know who they are
anymore.”
And who is Wilders? Born in the southeastern
Holland town of Venlo 100 miles from Amsterdam in 1963, he’s the
youngest of four children. He was raised Roman Catholic but has since
left the Church and calls himself agnostic. The son of a printing
company director, Wilders studied at the Netherlands’s Open University
and traveled extensively in Israel and throughout the Arab world during
and after his compulsory military service in the Dutch Army.
At
17, he lived in the Jordan Valley, a few miles above Jericho, and while
he was “a teenager, more interested in Israeli girls and beers,” he
decided that Islamic countries were dysfunctional and violent, and began
to see Muslim immigrants as a destructive force in Europe. “I’m not
against immigration because I believe all the people who immigrate are
bad people,” he says. “But they bring along a culture that is not ours.
Islam is not there to integrate; it’s there to dominate.”
As
Wilders grew older, he found new reasons to hate Islam. In the 1990s,
he ventured into politics as a speechwriter for the center-right Dutch
Liberal Party, under the tutelage of Frits Bolkestein, the party’s
leader and an outspoken opponent of mass immigration. Wilders was
elected to the Utrecht City Council in 1997 and joined the parliament a
year later. In Utrecht, he could afford to live only in the city’s
poorest—and majority-Muslim—neighborhood, Canal Islands.
“I’m an
elected politician,” he says. “If you don’t agree with me, vote for
somebody else. What did I do, except for expressing my views?”
Despite what he told me about his time in Israel
and Utrecht, some critics say Wilders’s antipathy for Islam runs deeper.
Dutch anthropologist Lizzy van Leeuwen has been researching the origins
of Wilders’s political philosophy since 2009, while working on a book
about the colonial history of Holland. She discovered some material in
the national archives and published an article later that year that
revealed a secret Wilders had long kept hidden from the public eye: his
Indonesian roots. Van Leeuwen is of similarly mixed blood, she said, and
she was always bewildered at her mother’s support of Wilders and his
anti-Islam positions. At the close of the colonial era, Dutchmen were
driven from the Indies by Muslims, many of them settling in places like
the Netherlands, so when van Leeuwen discovered Wilders’ Indonesian
heritage, she grew curious.
“There’s lots of bitterness
among these old generations of colonial migrants,” she says. “That’s
why Geert Wilders is a hero to them. He knows why people don’t feel
comfortable in this society of migrant groups.”
Van
Leeuwen’s mother hides Wilders’s books when her daughter comes now, but
she is among many with an Indonesian background who admiringly call
Wilders a “Branie,” an Indonesian term for a man with chutzpah, with the
balls to say what he thinks. “They were chased from their beautiful
paradise in the sun,” the researcher told me. “Now here’s this guy
saying it too, after everyone has been silent for 50 years, and he’s
their hero.”
Van Leeuwen discovered that Wilders’s
grandfather was a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Dutch colony of
Indonesia. Johan Ording, she says, went bankrupt several times in the
Indies. He was fired while on holiday in Holland in 1934, warned not to
return to the colony and later denied a pension. Mired in poverty, he
and his family were forced back to the Netherlands in the middle of a
harsh Dutch winter.
“You can call it cheap psychology to
link these things, but I think this has meaning for somebody like Geert
Wilders,” Van Leeuwen says. “He is lost.”
Wilders has
responded to van Leeuwen’s findings only once, in a television
interview, saying her thoughts about him were “twisted,” and he insists
to me that he’s not seeking revenge against anyone. But as he gestures
emphatically from the safety of this fortified office a day after the
tragic massacre in Paris, it’s clear Wilders isn’t the least bit
mournful. He’s fired up.
HOLLAND’S TEFLON DON
In
November 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was biking to work in
central Amsterdam when a Dutch-born Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri
attacked him, shooting him once and stabbing him several times. The
filmmaker stumbled across the street, and Bouyeri followed, shooting and
stabbing him again before slitting van Gogh’s throat with a butcher
knife, then lodging the knife in his chest with a letter attached to it.
The attacker fled on foot, but was eventually arrested and sent to
prison.
Van Gogh had been receiving death threats ever
since he made an anti-Islam film called “Submission.” But he wasn’t the
only enemy of Muslim extremists in Holland. His partner on the film,
ethnic Somali lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali, also received death threats, as
did a rising politician she collaborated with on a letter in 2003 that
called for a “liberal jihad” against Islamic radicalism: Wilders. A few
months later, grenade-wielding attackers staged an hour-long siege of a
building in The Hague, in an attempt to murder both Wilders and Ali.
Since
then, Wilders and his Hungarian-born wife, a former diplomat to the
Netherlands, have lived under constant guard, sheltered in a safe house
with a panic room and driven to and from home in an armored police
vehicle. When I met him at the Binnenhof, I couldn’t tell if he was
still wearing a bulletproof vest. But his office is strategically
positioned deep in the parliament building so would-be attackers can
approach it only from one corridor. Beyond that, Wilders wouldn’t
comment on what his security measures include. “That would make me only
more vulnerable,” he says. “Sometimes [the security is] more, sometimes
it’s less. Now it’s certainly not less.”
It’s hard to
know to what extent that attack affected Wilders’s politics, but it
clearly was a factor. From 2000 to 2006, he moved increasingly to the
right, calling for a ban on head scarves in public and the sale of the
Koran in general. A year later, he left his more mainstream party over
its support for Turkish entry into the European Union and formed the
Freedom Party, which surprised the country by winning nine of the 150
seats in the parliament.
“Try to imagine being attacked
by a group of ideologically or religiously motivated people,” says
Meindert Fennema, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam.
“People tend to underestimate the fact that he is permanently under
protection.”
Wilders’s rise has continued over the past
nine years, and as he shored up political power, he also mastered the
art of media manipulation. In 2008, he posted online a 17-minute film
called Fitna, using excerpts from the Koran and statements of radical
Muslims to paint a dark picture of Islam. The next year, the British
government banned Wilders from visiting the United Kingdom to show his
film, and prosecutors in Holland charged him with inciting hatred and
discrimination (a Dutch court later dismissed the charges). Both the
film and the ban generated headlines across the globe. In 2010, in
perhaps his most well-known publicity stunt, Wilders visited Ground Zero
in New York on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, then spoke
at a rally against the construction of an Islamic community center near
the site.
“He’s definitely playing the media,” says Anno
Bunnik, a Ph.D. fellow at Liverpool Hope University in the U.K., who
specializes in politics, extremism and intelligence in the Middle East.
“His positions are so polarizing…. Some say, ‘Yes this guy is right,’
and others say he’s a total menace, and almost everything he says is
automatically picked up.”
For
all the stunts, Wilders also owes his success to a nuanced, Tea-Party
brand of Islamophobia. He’s the first anti-Islam politician in Europe
who doesn’t come from an extreme right, nationalist background, says
Fennema. He’s liberal on issues like gay rights, which makes him
appealing to a wider cross section of Europeans and helps him ally with a
budding legion of politicians bashing Islam.
In recent
years, politicians on both sides of the spectrum have employed
Islamophobia as a rallying tactic. In France, Marine Le Pen’s
anti-immigrant Front National party is now the country’s third largest.
In Denmark, the Danish Folk Party works actively to prevent a
“multi-ethnic society” by lobbying against immigration. Not unlike
America’s Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement, this new breed
of “populists” are critical of the political elite and believe
government is no longer listening to the people. Experts say this
combination of populism and nativism is a fruitful one because it
provides a bogeyman for growing fears about globalization: the
job-stealing, maybe even terroristic immigrant, and the established
politician who shelters him.
In the past, Wilders tried
to distance himself from Europe’s nativist movement and instead focused
his anger on Islam, says Matthijs Rooduijn, a political science
professor at the University of Amsterdam. But in 2013, he decided to
form an alliance with Le Pen in an attempt to cobble together a
coalition to influence the European Parliament.
Wilder
says he’s convinced that if something isn’t done to stop the spread of
Islam across the West, our whole way of life will vanish and we’ll all
live in Muslim-ridden slums, assaulted for our Christianity and love of
free speech. To make his case, Wilders regularly takes politicians from
around the world on tours of majority-Muslim neighborhoods in the
Netherlands, offering them a glimpse of their future if they don’t beat
back Islam.
Despite his antipathy toward Muslims,
Wilders is clear that he doesn’t advocate any kind of violence, and he
insists he isn’t responsible for attacks on peaceful and law-abiding
followers of Islam. “If you set fire to a mosque, you’re a criminal and I
hope you go to jail for years,” he says. “We should be tolerant to
people who are tolerant to us. We should be intolerant to people who are
intolerant to us.”
How to stop the intolerance? Wilders
has some ideas: immediately halt all emigration from Islamic countries,
allow anyone who wants to leave the Netherlands to wage jihad overseas
to leave, and pull out of the agreement with 25 other European countries
that allows travelers to pass freely from one nation to the next. It’s
hard to say if these proposals are more likely to gain traction in the
wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack. His party has performed well
in opinion polls over the past 10 years, but that hasn’t always
translated to gains in the parliament. Even if his party does lock down
the largest blocs of seats in the next election, he would have to
convince another group to form a coalition in order to acquire any real
sway. And because his views are so extreme, most political observers
here find that unlikely.
“Other parties have said, ‘We
don’t touch him, even if he is the biggest,’” Wilders acknowledges. “But
I think anything is possible.”
Not everyone is so sure
Wilders will continue to have such a large audience. On the surface, the
attacks in Paris may give him an easy chance to make a point, but van
Leeuwen hopes that Wilders’s grandstanding will backfire, that people
will see it as a cheap attempt to seize power over the bodies of dead
journalists. “There’s a risk in talking the way he does in this moment,”
she says. “It’s too obvious, too easy to declare all Muslims extremists
and terrorists. Too many people will see through that. He has to be
very careful.”
In fact, many think his status in The
Hague is increasingly secondary, that his bully pulpit may eclipse his
day job. It’s his notoriety, the attention he gets when he speaks out
against Islam and immigrants, that could have a far greater impact on
the ongoing debate about immigration here. That is perhaps why he seems
so eager for his hate speech trial to begin; why he gave several
interviews immediately after the Paris attacks; and why he’s planning a
trip to Australia, he says, to help right-wingers in that country start a
political party modeled after the Freedom Party.
“The more famous he gets,” Rooduijn says, “the less he needs to be a politician anymore.”
Wilders
is taking his message global. “This is not a national fight,” he says.
“The fight with Islam has no borders. The war has no borders. The fight
for freedom has no borders.”
As Wilders escorts me out
of his office, I notice the life-sized portrait of Winston Churchill
hanging on the wall. Churchill is one of Wilders’s idols, in no small
part because of his criticism of Islam. Next to the painting is another
figure Wilders clearly admires. It’s a small, cartoonish sculpture
enclosed in an acrylic case, a gift from some of his colleagues after a
recent electoral victory. The sculpture is of himself.
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