Dutch television has aired a slideshow of Prophet Mohammad cartoons, a month after the series was presented at a caricature competition in Texas that was attacked by two gunmen. Anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders is at the helm of the new scandal.
During a three minute broadcast slot allocated to Wilder’s Freedom Party, the politician promoted the “freedom of speech” action by presenting a slideshow of Mohammad cartoons accompanied by piano music.
According to the right-wing politician, he assumed the responsibility for revealing to the world the taboo nature of Islam after visiting the exhibition in May in the USA. The broadcast coincided with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
“The only way to show terrorists that they are not going to win is to do exactly what they do not want us to do,” Wilders said. “I do not broadcast the cartoons to provoke; I do it because we have to show that we stand for freedom of speech and that we will never surrender to violence. Freedom is our birthright. Freedom of speech must always prevail over violence and terror.”
The populist politician also explained that he was “forced” to air the provocative caricatures after the Dutch Parliament refused to host the exhibition.
Prior to broadcast, the Dutch government took precautionary steps, sending out 140 diplomatic cables worldwide preparing their embassies for the potential ramifications. In their brief, the Dutch government emphasized that the broadcast was Wilder’s private initiative.
Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders said Wednesday he plans to show cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad on Dutch television after Parliament refused to display them.
Wilders said he would show the cartoons during television airtime reserved for political parties, in a move likely to offend Muslims since Islamic tradition holds that any physical depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is blasphemous.
Political parties in the Netherlands get a small amount of airtime each year and broadcasting authorities have no say in what the parties show. Wilders said the broadcast would likely take place in the next few weeks, but an exact date has yet to be determined.
The announcement came a month after Wilders gave a speech at a contest in Garland, Texas, for cartoon depictions of Muhammad. Shortly after Wilders left the event, it was targeted by two men with pistols and assault rifles. Security guards shot and killed the attackers.
Wilders, whose Freedom Party holds 12 of the 150 seats in Parliament’s lower house, told The Associated Press he wants to air cartoons from the Texas competition to support people “who use the pen and not the sword.”
Wilders is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of free speech and targeting Islam. He has lived under round-the-clock protection since 2004 because of death threats.
He was acquitted in 2011 of hate speech as judges said that his anti-Islam rhetoric came in the context of a fierce national debate about immigration and multiculturalism.
Wilders is again facing prosecution for hate speech over a chant last year in which he asked his supporters whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands and they shouted back “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”
Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders rallied thousands of PEGIDA followers in eastern Germany Monday to counter society’s “Islamisation”.
The “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident”, founded half a year ago in the city of Dresden, had aimed to top their previous record from January of 25,000 people joining a rally.
Many were waving Germany’s red-black-gold national flag and yelling their standard chant of “we are the people”.
“Dresden is showing how it’s done,” said the flamboyant Dutch politician with the trademark peroxide blond hair, who has called Islam a fascist religion and compared the Koran to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”.
“We have had enough of the Islamisation of society,” he said, speaking in German to loud cheers from the crowd.
“Immigrants have to adopt our values, not the other way around.”
He also insisted that “we don’t hate Muslims, but they have to integrate” and demanded the reintroduction of border controls within the European Union.
More than 2,000 anti-fascist counter-demonstrators had rallied in the afternoon, away from the PEGIDA protest site which was blocked off by police.
PEGIDA marches, which have also targeted “criminal asylum seekers”, mainstream political parties and the media — began with several hundred supporters last October and peaked in January, just after the deadly Islamist attacks in Paris.
Wilders, 51, who heads the Party for Freedom, was again accused of inciting racial hatred after pledging last year to ensure there will be “fewer Moroccans” in the Netherlands.
The German integration commissioner, Aydan Ozoguz, had warned citizens against attending the PEGIDA event, saying that by inviting Wilders the group had shown its true extremist colours.
“Anyone who still marches behind their flag is joining an openly far-right movement,” Ozoguz told the Welt daily.
Saxony state Interior Minister Markus Ulbig said: “This is not a good day for Saxony. With Geert Wilders they have invited a person who has hate inside him, who is divisive”.
Dresden police declined to provide a crowd estimate for the PEGIDA event.
Support for the anti-Islamic Freedom Party (PVV) of Dutch politician Geert Wilders has jumped to its highest level in more than a year after the Islamist militant attacks in Paris.
Wilders, known for his cool rhetoric, said after the Paris bloodshed that the West was “at war” with Islam, drawing a rebuke from Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Sunday.
If elections were held now, his party would be the single largest in the Netherlands, with 31 seats in the 150-member parliament, more than twice as many as it won in the last elections, according to a Sunday poll.
The governing Liberal and Labour parties, damaged by persistent sluggish growth, would have just 28 seats between them, compared to the 79 they held after the 2012 elections.
The Freedom Party was polling 30 seats just prior to the Jan. 7-9 Paris attacks, in which 17 people including journalists and policemen were killed by three Islamist gunmen who were later shot dead by French special forces.
Wilders this week called in an interview for measures against Islam: “If we don’t do anything, it will happen here,” he was quoted by the newspaper Het Parool as saying.
More than 80 percent of respondents to the De Hond poll said people who left the Netherlands to wage jihad (holy war) in Syria should lose their Dutch citizenship and those returning from fighting in Syria or Iraq should face lengthy jail terms.
The attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo had particular resonance in the Netherlands. In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, known for making anti-Islam remarks that were designed to offend, was stabbed to death by an Islamic radical as he cycled down an Amsterdam street.
Wilders, who has described Islam as a “lie” and the prophet Muhammad as a “criminal”, has lived in hiding and under 24-hour armed guard since van Gogh’s murder.
He is currently facing prosecution over remarks he made at an election rally last year, when he appeared to call for “fewer Moroccans” in the city of The Hague, and later referred in a television interview to “Moroccan scum”.
Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders is riding high ahead of this month’s European Parliament elections, hoping to destroy from within what he calls the ‘monster of Brussels’.
The platinum-haired Wilders in November announced “the start of the liberation of Europe” from the European Union after forming a partnership with French right-wing party National Front (FN).
Like the FN’s leader Marine Le Pen, Wilders wants to take his country out of the EU and to abandon the euro.
The latest Ipsos opinion poll on May 1 ranked Wilders’ PVV third in the Netherlands, just below the ruling coalition partner People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and the pro-Europe D66.
Despite thousands filing police complaints of racism against Wilders, his anti-EU and anti-immigration call still appeals to many disillusioned with crisis-driven budget cuts blamed on Brussels.
The virulently pro-Israel Wilders has been giving extensive interviews, including to pro-Kremlin media, blaming the Ukraine crisis on the European Union.
The Dutch Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) on Wednesday said he was “betraying his principles” by cooperating with Le Pen.
Despite Wilders’ fawning approaches to Nigel Farage, his UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Scandinavian eurosceptic parties have said they would not work with Wilders because of his association with Le Pen.
In order to form a far-right anti-European bloc, Wilders and Le Pen would have to find like-minded politicians in at least a quarter of the EU’s 28 member states and see 25 members elected to the now trimmed-down 751-seat European Parliament.
So far Wilders reportedly wants Italy’s Northern League, Austria’s FPO, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Slovakia’s SNS and the Swedish Democrats on board.
If they become an official European political group, they would benefit from subsidies, offices, a communication budget, seats on committees and speaking time in parliament proportional to their number.
The Netherlands this time only has 27 seats in the European Parliament and with the PVV expected to gain around five seats, it will remain junior to the mightier National Front.
“Indirectly though he’ll have a far greater impact,” said political analyst Andre Krouwel, because of his ability to create doubt and division within bigger parties.
“He’s using it on national level. It is likely to happen on European level as well,” Krouwel said.
Amsterdam residents with a record of harassing their neighbors will be exiled, the city’s mayor announced. After being forced out, they will live under police supervision in special container housing units with only basic amenities.
Authorities in the Dutch capital have formed a task force to identify the worst offenders behind the 13,000 complaints of antisocial behavior the city receives annually, Amsterdam-based daily Het Parool reported.
Those charged who defy a compulsory six-month course in the camps will face eviction and homelessness. Amsterdam Mayor Eberhard van der Laan has allocated an estimated 1.3 million euro to the project, which he argued will protect law-abiding residents from being forced to move by unruly neighbors.
The camp dwellers will supposedly be motivated to change their behavior after they return to the city, authorities said.
“The aim is not to reward people who behave badly with a new five-room home with a south-facing garden. This is supposed to be a deterrent,” a mayoral spokesperson said.
Some have dubbed the camps ‘tuigdorpen’ – ‘scum villages’ – over their similarity to the rhetoric of right-wing anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom. Last year, Wilders said that “repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighborhood and sent to a village for scum.”
The controversial proposal sparked widespread debate, with the term becoming the Netherlands’ ‘word of the year’ in a poll conducted by Van Dale, the leading national dictionary.
The new policy will come into effect in January. There are several small-scale trial projects of a similar nature already underway in the Netherlands, including a location near Amsterdam where 10 shipping container homes have been set up for persistent offenders.
The world has an extensive record of communities evicting those seen as misfits: Jewish ghettos in Europe, Bantustans for blacks in apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union’s unofficial ‘rule of 101 km,’ which banned criminals, dissidents and work-dodgers from living closer than 100 kilometers from large cities.
The Netherlands is no exception – troublemakers in the 19th century were exiled to live in special villages in Drenthe and Overijssel outside Amsterdam. – RT
Shutting the Netherlands down on Sundays, protecting Afrikaans and living a work-free life are some of the more offbeat policies being put forward by Dutch parties ahead of Wednesday’s vote.
A whopping 21 parties are contesting parliament’s 150 seats in the election, the second in just over two years after government collapsed in April over a disagreement on European Union austerity measures.
Should they get their say, the conservative Reformed Political Party (SGP), which currently has two seats in the Lower House, wants to close all shops on Sundays in order for citizens “to go to church”.
The party, which bases itself on strict Christian principles and has never had a woman in parliament since its founding in 1918, advocates a “no work” Sunday, unless the work is an act of charity or an essential service.
In an ideal world the SGP would also like to see an end to Sunday matches that are watched religiously at stadiums and in sitting rooms around the football-mad country because they mean police officers “have to work”, a party official told AFP.
The Sovereign Independent Pioneers Netherlands (SOPN), also known as the “UFO party” after its founder UFOlogist Anton Teuben, wants to give every citizen a “living wage” and do away with the necessity of having a job.
The SOPN also advocates the ban of future land ownership with the total “land area of the Dutch State being seen as the property of Mother Earth. Current owners can use the land provided they look after it,” the SOPN said in its election manifesto.
A “movement” rather than a party, the SOPN predicted winning this election with a “majority of 76 seats or more” but has not managed a single seat since it started in 2003.
In its campaign manifesto, the Party for Freedom (PVV), run by eurosceptic anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders said it wanted to push for the preservation of the Afrikaans language in South Africa and Namibia.
Spoken by white and mixed-race South Africans, Afrikaans has its roots in 17th-century Dutch spoken by early colonial farmers and slaves, with words borrowed from Indonesian and indigenous languages.
“We are defending our Dutch language. Afrikaans is closely related to Dutch… but the language is further being marginalised,” the PVV said.
The Party for Animals (PvdD), currently with two MPs, wants recreational angling banned, demanding also that “fishing lessons” in schools be scrapped.
The party also wants a complete ban on pigeon racing as a sport, saying many of the birds die of exhaustion.
The Dutch Electoral Commission struck down 26 other parties who said they wanted to take part in the polls, but failed to hand in valid candidacy lists.
Of these, the Party for Humans and Other Earth Dwellers said they had no problem with people taking drugs “but in moderation.”
They also advocate free food and drink in supermarkets, financed by income tax gained from citizens.
The Club of Non-voters argued that at least a third of all Dutch citizens were disillusioned with politics and would support their movement.
“Should the movement decide to become a political party and take part in the elections, there would be a big chance that the prime minister would come from our ranks.”
“But in the current political system you have to take part. We won’t.” – AFP
A Dutch political party has demanded action from the Dutch Cabinet in support of the retention of Afrikaans street names in Pretoria.
“The Netherlands Embassy situated in Queen Wilhelmina avenue should refuse to accept a new name,” the “De Partij voor de Vrijheid” (the Party for Freedom), PVV, said in a statement issued in The Hague on Wednesday.
The suggestion was contained in a parliamentay question to Dutch deputy minister Halbe Zijlstra on Wednesday.
Zijlstra was asked if he was aware of the planned name changes and whether he thought the plans were a “slap in the face of the Dutch royal family”.
The PVV said the ANC planned to change 27 Pretoria streetnames, including Beatrix street and Queen Wilhelmina avenue.
Many of the names were a reminder of the anti-colonial struggle of the independent Boer republics against the British empire, the statement said.
“The name Queen Wilhelmina avenue is an ode to the young queen who in 1900 dispatched a Dutch warship to fetch a beleaguered President Kruger,” PVV parliamentarian Martin Bosma said.
Other street names commemorating historical characters were “Voortrekkers” with Netherlands backgrounds who helped establish Pretoria, the PVV politician said.
The PVV is a minority rightwing partner in the current governing Dutch coalition, led by the controversial politician Geert Wilders. – Sapa
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