The Netherlands: Geert Wilders seeking to establish world-wide freedom alliance

"Like many politicians who boast of their own candor, Geert Wilders keeps much of his life and work in the shadows. Apart from the boilerplate official biography that says he was raised a Roman Catholic in the town of Venlo, there’s little on the record from him about his family background, and he flatly refuses to talk about it now. According to his brother, some of the family’s roots extend deep into Indonesia, an outpost of the Dutch colonialist empire for nearly three and a half centuries. Long-ago intermarriage between European settlers and native “inlanders” might possibly account for the slightly almond shape of Wilders’s dull-blue eyes.

As a teenager, Geert was almost out of control, his brother says. Much younger than his siblings (there are also two sisters), Geert was the spoiled baby of the family, and not much of a student. He quit school and went traveling, eventually finding himself in a Jewish farming settlement on the West Bank.

After returning to the Netherlands he worked briefly for the state-run insurance system until he got bored and decided to try politics instead, starting out as a junior staffer with the country’s leading conservative party. Along the way, he visited Iran three times in the 1990s, once even finding it necessary to flee the country in fear for his life, according to his brother, who calls it “a true scare story.” Nevertheless, Paul says, nothing shaped the young man’s hostility toward Islam more than populist politicians in his home country.

In recent years Wilders has become something of a dabbler in U.S. politics, and he’s eager now to expand the market for Islamophobia. “I am working on an international kind of organization,” he told Newsweek. “The U.S. is so important to me, Europe is important. Canada—I was in Canada a few months ago. Australia. New Zealand.” His aim is to build an international organization, an “International Freedom Alliance,” as he calls it. Even so, he declines to name the U.S. politicians he likes—or those who favor him. He knows how toxic his reputation is. “If they were to be my friends, I probably would not help them by acknowledging it,” he admits.

Wilders-style anti-Islam rhetoric, only slightly modified, has long been echoed by the U.S. presidential hopefuls Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who have found it useful to paint previous opponents as weak on “radical Islam.” Back in 2010, Gingrich publicly issued a fatwa of his own against Islamic law: “I believe Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States.” Wilders says he has no contact with Gingrich. The two of them were scheduled to speak on the same platform on Sept. 10, 2010, to denounce the so-called Ground Zero mosque, but Gingrich didn’t show.

Gingrich aside, Wilders has no shortage of influential and outspoken allies in America. When he was brought to trial last year in the Netherlands under the country’s hate-speech laws, he beat the charge with the help of American contributions to his defense fund. Conservative columnist and scholar Daniel Pipes assisted him, and has written of Wilders as “the most important European alive today.”

The Atlas Shrugs blogger Pamela Geller positively gushes over Wilders in print, and posted a YouTube conversation with him she calls “the interview of the century.” And Wilders’s incendiary documentary film Fitna, attacking the Quran as a manifesto for violence, was given a special screening on Capitol Hill in 2008, hosted by Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

Europe, however, is where Wilders continues to have the most influence—and where he raises the worst fears. Among the large and growing number of fire-breathing European politicians riding to prominence on waves of hostility toward mostly Muslim immigrants, Wilders has emerged as the most important—and some critics would say most dangerous—voice on the continent.

This xenophobic movement is often characterized as “radical right-wing,” but the actual situation is much more complicated than that. “These parties do not fit easily into the traditional political divides,” says a recent report from Demos, a British think tank that conducted an innovative study of 10,000 Facebook supporters of various European movements.

“Formerly on the political fringes, these parties now command significant political weight in the parliaments of Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden, Latvia and Slovakia, as well as the European Parliament.” In addition to the formal political parties, there are protest groups like the English Defense League in Britain and CasaPound in Italy, known for their ugly street fights.

Wilders himself is a mass of contradictions. He says he abhors violence, even though his diatribes undoubtedly have fired up many others who are out for blood. One admirer he’s at particular pains to disavow is Anders Breivik, the self-styled Crusader who went on a killing spree in Norway last summer, slaughtering 76 people before he quietly surrendered. In a 1,500-page anti-immigrant manifesto written before the rampage, Breivik referred to Wilders more than 30 times.

Although much of the relatively liberal European press depicts Wilders as promoting all sorts of racism and bigotry, the fact is he’s very particular about whom he hates. In fact, Wilders’s pro-Israel sympathies are so open, and his trips there have been so frequent, that some political enemies claim he’s backed by the Mossad, which he disavows. Dutch law does not require him to make his records public, so he doesn’t. “We are very poor,” he insists. “Geert doesn’t seem to take responsibility for the potential consequences,” says his brother. “But I would add that with his growing support and popularity, he’s starting to believe his own message.”

EU-Digest