Arab states condemn Geert Wilders for push to relocate Palestinians to Jordan

Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League on Saturday condemned statements by Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right politician who won this week’s election in the Netherlands, that Palestinians should be relocated to Jordan.

The Palestinian Authority labeled the statements as “a call to escalate the aggression against our people and a blatant interference in their affairs and future,” the Wafa news agency reported. 

Jordan issued a separate condemnation and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Yemen, and the Arab League did the same, Arab News reported.

Dutch Election Results Put A Crack In The Far-Right’s Populist Narrative

A few years ago, a far-right anti-Islam party winning the second most seats in the Netherlands’ election would be a cause for panic in the European Union. In 2017, it’s being hailed as a great victory for liberalism.

The Dutch elections on Wednesday saw center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte fend off a challenge from far-right populist Geert Wilders and gain the largest share of the vote. The result sets up lengthy coalition talks between Rutte and some of the dozen-plus parties that managed to gain seats in Parliament, which will create a ruling government certain to exclude Wilders.

Dutch Vote in Droves — But Not for Geert Wilders, Breitbart’s Candidate for Prime Minister

Votes are being counted by hand in the Netherlands, to assuage fears of tampering by Russian hackers, but exit polls and partial returns suggest an overwhelming rejection of Geert Wilders, whose anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric thrilled American racists but appealed to a narrow minority of Dutch voters in Wednesday’s parliamentary election.

Who votes for Geert Wilders?

As the Dutch parliamentary election edges closer, traditional parties fear a victory by Geert Wilders and his far-right Party for Freedom (PVV). But attempts by these parties to win back voters only seem to have strengthened Wilders' nationalism.

There are only a few days left until the Dutch cast their votes. Many are still in doubt, but a steady group of angry voters have already made up their minds. They will vote for Geert Wilders and his PVV. Of the 150 seats that the parliament offers, Wilders is predicted to win almost a fifth of them, a huge gain in a parliamentary system that is built for 12 to 15 parties.

The “Dutch Trump” Is Even More Toxic Than the Real Thing

PITY THE DUTCH, if you can. The party led by a far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Islam populist named Geert Wilders is on course to gain the most votes in next week’s parliamentary elections in the Netherlands. But the journalists who have dubbed Wilders “Holland’s Trump” and “the Donald Trump of the Netherlands” may owe the U.S. president an apology.

California Nonprofit May Have Violated Tax Law By Donating to Anti-Muslim, Far-Right Dutch Candidate

The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a controversial California-based nonprofit that sponsors virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant campaigns in the U.S., has quietly played a prominent role in financing Dutch far-right nationalist Geert Wilders’s People’s Party for Freedom (PVV). The PVV’s platform calls for an end to Muslim immigration and the closing down of mosques and Islamic schools in the Netherlands — and polls suggest it may win the largest number of seats in the Netherland’s parliamentary elections this month.

Geert Wilders, Reclusive Provocateur, Rises Before Dutch Vote

SPIJKENISSE, the Netherlands — He wants to end immigration from Muslim countries, tax head scarves and ban the Quran. He is partly of Indonesian heritage, and dyes his hair bright blond. He is omnipresent on social media but lives as a political phantom under police protection, rarely campaigning in person and reportedly sleeping in a different location every night.

He has structured his party so that he is the only official, giving him the liberty to remain, above all things, in complete control, and a provocateur and an uncompromising verbal bomb thrower.

Far-right leader Geert Wilders calls Moroccan migrants ‘scum’

The Dutch populist leader Geert Wilders sparked outrage on Saturday when he launched his election campaign with a stinging attack on the country’s Moroccan population. The anti-immigration MP called them “scum” and said he wanted to make the Netherlands “ours again”.

Wilders, 53, was surrounded by police and security guards when he made his remarks during a walkabout in his party’s stronghold of Spijkenisse, part of an ethnically diverse industrial area just south of Rotterdam.

Europe’s far-right coalition in the works

Geert Wilders, the supremely quotable and cartoonish platinum blond leader of the Dutch far right, made headlines again recently. For Dutch journalists, it was about time. Wilders had gone strangely silent in recent months: Not a peep about marauding Muslims or the decline of white Europe. Then, apparently feeling emboldened by gains his Freedom Party (PVV) had made in recent municipal elections, came this at an election rally in The Hague on March 19: “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in this city and the Netherlands?”

Supporters: “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”

Wilders: “We’ll take care of that.”

Right-Wing Dutch Politician Geert Wilders May Face Legal Action After Promising ‘Fewer' Moroccans In The Netherlands

A conservative Dutch politician is being sued following a party meeting in which he told supporters he would ensure there were ‘fewer’ Moroccans in the Netherlands, according to Reuters.

Geert Wilders was speaking before supporters of the right-wing Freedom Party (PVV) on Wednesday when he asked the crowd whether they wanted the Netherlands to have “more or fewer” Moroccans.

Geert Wilders Says There's No Such Thing as Moderate Islam

A couple of years ago, a billboard appeared outside Columbia, S.C., looming above Interstate 26. Beady eyes stared out from a black balaclava emblazoned with an inscription from the Quran—clearly the eyes were meant to be those of a terrorist—and next to them were these words: “ISLAM RISING ... BE WARNED.”

Erected by the Virginia-based Christian Action Network, the sign advertised the group’s documentary about a charismatic Dutch politician with dyed-blond hair, a mysterious past, and a platform of paranoid hate. South Carolina seemed to offer a ready audience for Geert Wilders’s dire warnings against the Muslim religion. Today, with the Republican road show encamped in the state for the Jan. 21 presidential primary, the 48-year-old Dutchman is more than ever a man who needs to be watched and listened to carefully. At home in the Netherlands, his explosive theme of unrelenting hostility to Islam has built his xenophobic Party for Freedom, founded in 2005, into the country’s third-largest political party; across the Atlantic his message packs serious resonance in an American heartland still shaken by the 9/11 attacks. Wilders’s name and message have been invoked repeatedly in South Carolina and at least a dozen other state legislatures as they debate measures to ban an imagined threat: Islamic law.

So does he worry about the violence his rants could inspire? Wilders is a master at capitalizing on real fears and conjuring false ones—and then dodging responsibility if people’s lives are ruined or lost. “I am responsible for my own actions and for nobody else’s actions,” he says. In a wide-ranging interview at the offices of the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, Wilders complained to Newsweek that the “naive” Obama administration wasn’t doing nearly enough to combat what Wilders regards as the Islamic threat. Expanding on his claims that the Quran should be banned, just as Mein Kampf has been in some countries, he said the United States should be “getting rid of Islamic symbols—no more mosques—and closing down Islamic schools.”

There’s no such thing as moderate Islam, Wilders insists, and he’s tired of hearing that radical Islam is something different from the mainstream faith. It means nothing to him that among Muslim believers there are many different sects and currents. “He makes no distinctions whatsoever,” says Robert Leiken, author of the just-published study Europe’s Angry Muslims. “He wants to throw out the whole Quran because of some things that are objectionable—but you could say the same thing about the Book of Joshua.” Wilders refuses to concede the point. In his view, those who follow the Quran are deluded or worse. “Totalitarian fascist ideology,” he calls it. “I have nothing against the people,” he says. “I have something against Islam.”