Ciarán ONéill tries to understand where Geert Wilders, "the latest hero of the depressingly durable reveille of the right in Holland" is going, and why.

Geert Wilders

I live in Amsterdam West among the flotsam and jetsam of the "Tsunami of Islamisation"  that Wilders so fears (Oct 2006) and it is indeed very unsettling to see a woman in burqa or niqab. However, to raise but one objection to the blunt means Wilders prefers for achieving his ostensibly honourable ends, many of these women (who represent a tiny minority of Amsterdam Muslims) may simply no longer be allowed to leave the house if they can’t don the burqa to do so.

By now Wilders has successfully cast himself as the latest hero of the depressingly durable reveille of the right in Holland. The conspicuously coiffured Southerner's newly founded party, the ironically named Freedom Party (PvV), won nine seats at the last election (Nov 2006) and is therefore a force to be reckoned with.

Despite the fact that the Freedom Party's slogan reads "Lower taxes, better schools, immigration stop", Wilders is not a xenophobe as he, and his party, keep on telling us. He couldn't be; he’s married to a Hungarian. Whatever, he is at the very least a rabid sectarian, as if that was somehow ok. His religion is "The Enlightenment", the religion he hates, Islam.

In an interview in February of this year Wilders informed the Muslims of The Netherlands that they would need to "tear out half of the Koran" to integrate successfully in Holland. According to the Limburger, this is necessary because there is so much of the Koran (which Wilders afterwards had to admit that he had never read) which is in conflict with
Dutch values, which, according to Wilders, are the values of "The Enlightenment". It does not seem to bother him however that the very same could be said of the bible, despite the fact that the vast majority of believers in Holland are Christian. Maybe he hasn’t read that book either.

In the same interview, Wilders, conveniently forgetting that the French Revolution, and its immediate aftermath, the Reign of Terror, represent the bloody dawn of "The Enlightenment", describes Islam as a violent religion. He also states that he would have Mohammed "tarred and feathered as an extremist and deported if he were in Holland today". Why does Wilders feel moved to speak in this fashion while ignoring say, the very violent history of the Roman Catholic Church? Could it be because many of his supporters are members of same? Or is Wilders really only interested in Muslim-bashing?

On 4 March, in the same week that he publicly invited all Muslims to leave The Netherlands, Wilders entered a motion of no-confidence in two of the Labour Party (PvdA) secretaries of state appointed to the new cabinet as they hold double nationality. Nebahat Albayrak (Secretary of State for Justice) who holds a Turkish passport, and greatly respected former Amsterdam alderman, Ahmed Aboutaleb (Secretary of State for Social Affairs) who holds the Moroccan nationality (which he cannot renounce), survived the motion. In fact only Wilders' own party voted in favour.

Wilders perpetually lectures Holland's Muslims that it is their duty to integrate, but, in defending his motion of no-confidence, steadfastly refused to recognise either the obviously successful integration of the two Dutch Muslims in question or the opportunities for improving integration that their membership of the executive (secretaries of state are in not in fact members of the cabinet) may offer, preferring instead to expand on hypothetical conflicts of interest and/or loyalty. 

Wilders is not a stupid man. Though not exactly eloquent he is a capable speaker and undeniably exudes a certain charisma, which he has used, in tandem with his vitriolic populism, to successfully harness the social discontent first identified and exploited by the late Pim Fortuyn.

Like Fortuyn, Wilders is a narcissist. His divisive and destructive prattle is utterly self-serving, the more radically outspoken his intolerance, the more attention he generates. For the narcissist, attention is highly addictive and like the drug addict, the narcissist will go to greater and greater lengths to get his fix, becoming ever more destructive along the way. Ultimately, addiction's primary victim is often the addict themselves; we can only hope that this will be the case with Wilders' evermore reckless sating of his steadily burgeoning appetite for attention.

30 March 2007

Writer Ciarán ONéill also translates texts from Dutch to English.

[Copyright Expatica 2007]