22nd
March 2008
GEERT WILDERS’S bleached-blond hair goes
to the root of his character.
For
more than two decades, Mr. Wilders, the controversial
anti-Islam member of the Dutch Parliament, has dyed his
hair a provocative — some say extreme — platinum blond.
The color makes him stand out in a crowd,
not terribly practical for someone facing periodic death
threats from Muslim extremists.
But Mr. Wilders has built a career — and
a new political party — on a risky and defiant
outlandishness that encompasses everything from his
hairstyle to his anti-Islamic rhetoric.
Days away from releasing a
much-anticipated film critical of the Koran, Mr. Wilders
recalled in an interview the advice he received years
ago from political leaders about how to get ahead.
“First, you have to moderate your voice
about Islam,” he remembered their telling him. “Second,
change your stupid hair.”
He has refused to do either.
“If people push me, I do exactly the
opposite,” he said.
Mr. Wilders, 44, is in the news here
these days for a 10-to-15-minute film he says he has
made depicting the Koran as the inspiration for
terrorist attacks and other violence. Having failed to
persuade a single Dutch television network to broadcast
the film in its entirety, he said he planned to release
it on the Internet by the end of this month.
He
routinely equates the Koran with
Hitler’s
“Mein Kampf,” saying it should be banned in the
Netherlands,
and he declared in an interview that the Prophet
Muhammad could be compared to the German dictator.
“In his Medina time, if he would be alive
today, Muhammad would be treated as a war criminal,
being sent out of the country, being sent to jail,” he
said.
Moderate Dutch Muslim leaders like
Mohamed Rabbae, chairman of the Dutch Moroccan Council,
are exasperated by Mr. Wilders’s standpoint on Islam and
its prophet.
“Wilders is a little bit crazy, if I may
say it in this way, because he is fighting against
somebody who has been living in the sixth century, not
in our time,” Mr. Rabbae said.
Virtually no one knows exactly what is in
Mr. Wilders’s film; even the Netherlands’ worried prime
minister has not been granted a screening. But the
simple fact that Mr. Wilders is its muse makes people
here and in parts of the Islamic world nervous.
Mr. Wilders said he made the film to show
that “Islam and the Koran are part of a fascist ideology
that wants to kill everything we stand for in a modern
Western democracy.”
SOME here see Mr. Wilders’s film — titled
“Fitna,” Arabic for civil strife — as a potential hate
crime and have already filed police complaints in
various Dutch cities, concerned that his past statements
and the film will polarize religious groups and foster
discrimination.
His supporters say he protects
traditional Dutch values. His critics, and there are
many, say he is an out-of-control, right-wing extremist
risking his country’s good name for his own political
gain. Others are even harsher; one former trade union
leader called Mr. Wilders “evil.”
“Of course I am not evil,” Mr. Wilders
responded, looking a little annoyed. “Do I look evil to
you? Maybe I do, but I’m not.”
Mr.
Wilders, who lives under constant police protection in
an undisclosed location, is undeterred by threats from
the
Taliban
to escalate attacks against Dutch soldiers in
Afghanistan if the film is released.
Nor is he moved by Dutch expatriates
abroad who, remembering the fallout from the Danish
cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, worry that the
film may make their lives harder, or even dangerous.
Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign
minister, told a public television reporter that he
found it “irresponsible to broadcast this film.”
“That’s because Dutch companies, Dutch
soldiers and Dutch residents could and will be in
danger,” Mr. Verhagen said.
Such statements spur Mr. Wilders on, and
in his opinion unintentionally prove that Islam is a
rigid, intolerant religion whose followers try to muffle
criticism, often violently. Framing himself as a
defender of free speech, Mr. Wilders said there would
not be such a fuss about his film if it were about the
Bible.
“We can never allow people who use
nondemocratic means, people who use violence instead of
arguments, people who use knives instead of debates, we
can never allow them to set the agenda,” he said.
After the 2004 release of a short film
here that graphically portrayed the abuse of women in
the Islamic world, the director, Theo van Gogh, was
killed by a Muslim extremist.
Mr. Wilders, already in the Dutch
Parliament for six years at that point, was not
associated with that film, but he went briefly into
hiding when government security forces feared he might
become the next target.
Two
years later, memories of the van Gogh murder — coupled
with concerns about Muslim
immigration
— helped Mr. Wilders and his newly formed Party for
Freedom capture 6 percent of the seats in Parliament.
Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million
residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim
descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from
Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came
here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to
raise families of their own.
Occasionally, conflicts arise between
mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage
and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often
more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has
successfully mined the unease between them.
“Ten to 15 percent of the Dutch voters
more or less see him as a new leader, one who dares to
say what he thinks,” said Hugo van der Parre, deputy
editor of the Dutch television news program “Nova.” But
“many people see him, as well, as a nut case.”
MR. WILDERS says he detests Islam but not
Muslims. “I believe the Islamic ideology is a retarded,
dangerous one, but I make a distinction,” he said. “I
don’t hate people. I don’t hate Muslims.
He added: “I am not saying all Muslims
are wrong or are terrorists or criminals. You will never
hear me say that.”
Mr. Wilders, who is married and has no
children, was raised Roman Catholic, but is no longer
religious. The youngest of four children, he traveled
and worked his way through the Middle East for two years
after his high school graduation. Since then, he said,
he has visited Israel at least 40 times and maintains
close contacts there. But he has no real connections
from his time in the rest of the region, admitting he
does not have any Muslim friends.
His claims to the contrary, some Muslims
believe that Mr. Wilders’s animosity toward Islam
extends to them.
“If you say the prophet is a war
criminal, you say, I hate Muslims,” a Dutch newspaper
columnist, Youssef Azghari, said in an interview.
“Because the prophet is a symbol. He was the one who
invented the Islam.”
Since no one has actually seen Mr.
Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it
is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt
devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of
speech cannot coexist.
Mr. Wilders insists the film is every bit
as real as his long-held belief that Islam is a danger
to Dutch and other Western societies.
“I get in so much trouble, both privately
and politically, that if I would do it for publicity
reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.
