Geert Wilders, a Dutch member of Parliament, is the most polarizing political figure in Holland.
And for good reason.
His Party for Freedom says things other political leaders might think but would never say out loud.
He wants an end to Muslim immigration. He wants to ban the burka. And he wants swift deportation of radical Muslim preachers.
It’s tough talk — but Holland loves it. Or at least some of them do: Wilders’ party has grown to become the third largest in Parliament, and last year he joined the governing coalition in return for their partial adoption of his policies.
Wilders has been the centre of a growing debate in Holland, and around the free world, because he is ringing the alarm bell the loudest about the threat of radical Islam. But not everyone wants to debate him.
He has been the subject of more than 100 death threats, including by several Muslim radicals armed with grenades who surrendered after a one-hour standoff with police.
Wilders has to travel with a battalion of security guards. It’s not a dramatic flourish; other Dutch political activists who have criticized Islam have been assassinated, including a gay politician named Pim Fortuyn and a feminist filmmaker named Theo van Gogh.
It’s not just terrorists who hate Wilders. Bureaucrats and politicians do, too.
In 2009, the United Kingdom refused to allow Wilders to enter the country, putting him on a list of banned visitors — equating him with terrorists. That ban was finally overturned.
But the lawfare against him — using lawsuits and regulations against him as a weapon of war, or at least instead of debate — hasn’t stopped. Wilders has been accused of “hate speech” because he calls Islam a totalitarian philosophy, and compared its holy book, the Qur’an, with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Leftist and multicultural groups complained to a Dutch prosecutor, who refused to prosecute Wilders, saying although some of his comments may be offensive, they’re protected by freedom of speech. But in an unorthodox move, a higher court ordered the prosecutor to proceed against Wilders, and that case continues now.
It’s quite something for a prosecutor who believes Wilders is innocent to be prosecuting him.
As a proportion of Holland’s population, there are three times as many Muslims there compared to Canada. The challenges radical Islam poses in Holland today are challenges we will face tomorrow — some of them are already here.
You can see women wearing burkas in many Canadian cities. So-called honour killings are becoming more common in Canada, such as the murder of Aqsa Parvez by her brother and father. According to radical imams in Toronto, there are already hundreds of polygamous Muslim marriages in the city. And Canada has home-grown terrorist schemes, like the foiled plot to blow up the CN Tower and Parliament and murder the PM.
We might not agree with everything Geert Wilders has to say, or all of his proposed political solutions. But that’s not the point. He talks about issues that won’t go away, even if we close our eyes and pretend they don’t exist.
Radical Islam, the failure of multiculturalism, the silence of liberals as women’s rights and gay rights are eroded, and the separation of mosque and state are Canadian issues, too.