Dutch MP Geert Wilders “Magical Mystery USA Tour” a dismal failure heavily promoted by anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller, Wilders links to Vlaams Belang group Former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali Says Ban Them.

 

 

Dutch MP Geert Wilders “Magical Mystery USA Tour” a dismal failure heavily promoted by anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller, Wilders links to Vlaams Belang group Former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali Says Ban Them.

 

Dutch MP Geert Wilders is known for campaigning to ban the Koran, Islamic attire, and Islamic schools from the Netherlands, and for proclaiming that “moderate Islam does not exist.” Dutch MP Geert Wilders appears to link to the racist, white supremacist political group Vlaams Belang (VB) of which Former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has called for the VB to be banned, saying that “it hardly differs from the Hofstad [terrorist] group.

  

Between 2003 and 2006, members of the so-called Hofstad group planned various terrorist attacks inside the Netherlands, including the assassination of controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Amateurish in its modus operandi and composed mostly of second-generation Muslim immigrants, Hofstad perfectly exemplifies the new terrorist networks that are growing in most European countries.

Racist Dutch MP Geert Wilders chief sponsors during the USA trip have primarily been neoconservative organizations 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 defense.

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, who attended Wilders’s Friday event in Washington.

His (Geert Wilders) trip has also been heavily promoted by conservative blogger Pamela Geller, who sponsored a reception for him in Washington on Friday. Geller is perhaps best known for alleging during the 2008 presidential campaign that now-President Barack Obama is the illegitimate child of the late Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X; she also continues to argue that Obama is a secret Muslim.

A less well-known but key backer of Wilders’s trip has been the newly-formed International Free Press Society (IFPS), which is headed by Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard and upon whose advisory board Geert Wilders sits. The IFPS has been instrumental in promoting Wilders’ case as a free-speech issue, joining him in calling for an “International First Amendment”, and it was a co-sponsor of Friday’s event at the National Press Club.

Wilders might seem to be an unlikely free-speech martyr – he famously called for the Netherlands to ban the Koran in an August 2007 op-ed, on the grounds that it was hate speech no different from Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’ Wilders and his defenders now claim that he is actually in favour of the repeal of all hate speech laws, although he made no mention of this issue in the original op-ed.

While the IFPS has strong ties to neoconservatives – its staff includes members of Pipes’s and Gaffney’s organisations – it also has ties to the European far right, and specifically the Belgian rightist party Vlaams Belang (VB), or Flemish Interest.  The IFPS’s vice president Paul Belien is married to Vlaams Belang MP Alexandra Colen, and has been a fierce defender of the party against its critics.  Paul Belien, born 1959, is a Flemish journalist and founder of the conservative-libertarian blog The Brussels Journal of which anti-Muslim conservative blogger Pamela Geller quotes on her blog frequently.

In 2007, Hedegaard and Belien – along with IFPS board members Bat Ye’or, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, and Sam Solomon – appeared with VB leader Filip Dewinter at the CounterJihad conference in Brussels. Although “the VB did not organise the conference, it provided an important part of the logistics and the security of those attending,” according to Belien.  So all in all this happy little family of right wing bloggers in the USA and in Europe see no harm in the white supremacist political group Vlaams Belang because they are all linked in one way or another (financially) to the VB.

These VB ties among some of Wilders’s most important backers may raise difficulties for the politician, who has taken care to differentiate himself from far-right leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen of France and the late Joerg Haider of Austria. In particular, they may complicate his efforts to market himself to mainstream Jewish groups, which have traditionally been suspicious of the European far right due to its reputation for anti-Semitism and fascist tendencies.

“My allies are not Le Pen or Haider,” Wilders told the Guardian in 2008. “I’m very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups”. However, this past December he told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he would consider an alliance with the VB.

The VB is the successor to the Vlaams Blok, the Flemish secessionist party that was banned by Belgian authorities in 2004 for violating the country’s racism and xenophobia laws.

The party’s defenders reject the characterisation of the VB as far right or neo-fascist. “The implication that Vlaams Belang is somehow neo-Nazi or racist is salacious,” Pamela Geller told IPS. “They are the only party in Belgium that is staunchly pro-Israel.”

VB leaders have insisted that their party is philo-Semitic and free of neo-Nazi elements, but Belgian Jewish groups have criticised the party for failing to sufficiently dissociate itself from Nazi sympathisers and other extremists.  The party’s outreach to Jews has also been hindered by the December 2008 conviction of senior VB leader Roeland Raes on charges of Holocaust denial.

The party has drawn a great deal of criticism even from figures known for being outspoken critics of Islam. Former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, has called for the VB to be banned, saying that “it hardly differs from the Hofstad [terrorist] group” and that its “way of thinking will lead straight to genocide.”

Though the VB members have not committed any violent crimes yet, they are just postponing them and waiting until they have an absolute majority. On many issues they have exactly the same opinions as the Muslim extremists: on the position of women, on the suppression of gays, on abortion. This way of thinking will lead straight to genocide.”

Huff-Po Piece…Because Wilder was too controversial to get a speaking slot at CPAC proper, anti-Muslim conservative blogger Pamela Geller - who continues to declare Obama a Muslim and accuses “President Be Hussein” of leading a Nazi revival – teamed up with Jihad Watch blogger Robert Spencer, and David Horowitz in personally shelling out the money to get Wilders in front of a crowed. Geller’s blog, which has banner ads to donate to Wilders’s legal defense, has been among the very few hubs of his feverish defense in the U.S..

Before the CPAC event, things heated up at the Press Club when I, Ali Gharib, asked Wilders a question about contacts Gellar and Spencer – among others from the International Free Press Society (IFPS), co-sponsor of the Press Club event and apparent front for defending Wilders’s “free speech” – had with far-right European parties, (Vlaams Belang) that Wilders has been careful to distance himself from in the past.

My colleagues and I had uncovered some the connections between some of Wilders’s most vocal (but less widely known) supporters and the Vlaams Belang (VB) party in Belgium. Geller and Spencer, among others, had attended a Counter Jihad 2007 conference connected to the VB, a Flemish nationalist party that fellow anti-Jihad crusader and American Enterprise Institute fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali has credited with a “way of thinking [that] will lead straight to genocide.”

Charles Johnson of the widely-read conservative blog Little Green Footballs has been a particularly harsh critic of the VB, which he calls “neo-fascist.” He has also warned of “the incredible amount of support for the Vlaams Belang among U.S. white power and neo-Nazi groups.”
While no one is accusing Wilders or his backers of anti-Semitism, the VB connection illustrates the difficulties involved in forging a transatlantic coalition against Islam. Many of the most influential critics of Islam in the U.S. are neoconservatives, such as Pipes and Gaffney, who are also strongly pro-Israel; by contrast, anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe is often manifested in far-right parties whose views are anathema to much of the U.S. population, particularly Jews.

Wilders’s success and influence will likely depend on how well he can straddle the two camps, retaining his popular base of support in Europe while cultivating right-wing elites in the U.S.

Bill Warner

private investigator