Radical Dutch Party Has Neocon Ties

By Muriel Kane
Published: June 5, 2009
Updated 1 day ago
Courtesy Of The Raw Story

The Freedom Party of Dutch anti-immigration radical Geert Wilders won a major victory in that nation’s voting for the European parliament on Thursday, taking 15% of the vote and four out of a total of 25 seats.

According to the Guardian, this represented a major gain over the 6% that Wilders’ party scored three years ago and brought them into second place, ahead of the Labour Party but still behind the Christian Democrats.

Wilders is well known in Europe for his radical positions. He has called for banning the Koran, deporting immigrants from the Netherlands, abolishing the European parliament, and kicking Romania and Bulgaria out of the European Union. In the United States, however, he has been warmly welcomed by conservative groups, who see him as a champion of free speech.

“The virulence of his anti-Islam and anti-immigrant activities saw him barred from entering Britain earlier this year,” the Guardian explains, “while the Dutch authorities are prosecuting him for inciting hatred. He is also under 24-hour security amid intense hostility to his statements on Islam, likening the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and making a film depicting Islam as a vehicle of violence and terrorism.”

Despite his controversial reputation, Wilders is held in high esteem by American conservatives. When he toured the United States last February, IPS News reported that “his chief sponsors during the trip have primarily been neoconservative organisations such as Frank Gaffney’s Centre for Security Policy, David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre, and Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, which is also helping to raise money for Wilders’s legal defence. An event he held at a Boston-area synagogue was sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition, an influential group whose board members include casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, and neoconservative writer David Frum.”

“He also appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s and Glenn Beck’s popular right-wing TV shows,” IPS continued, “met privately with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and hobnobbed with former U.N. ambassador John Bolton at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).”

More recently, it was reported that a hotel in Nashville, TN had canceled the booking for an “Understand the Jihad” conference — which was to have been held a week ago with Wilders as the keynote speaker — on grounds of safety concerns.

The conference was sponsored by Rebecca Bynum of the New English Review, who writes on such topics as the threat posed by Kurdish and Somali refugees settling in Nashville and establishing Girl Scout and Boy Scout troups as “indoctrination centers for Muslim youth.” In the wake of the cancellation, Bynum’s website posted a statement claiming that the hotel had “succumbed to intimidation.”