A collection of mosques and Islamic organisations filed a complaint against Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders on Monday, accusing the populist politician of inciting hatred and violence against Muslims.
Veteran anti-Islamification campaigner Geert Wilders has once again riled the feathers of Muslims in The Netherlands, with a group of 14 Islamic groups and mosques accusing the PVV leader of echoing Nazi propaganda against Jewish communists in the 1930s.
The complaint, which accused Wilders of “sedition” and of inciting hatred and violence against Muslims, was sparked by a post on August 4th by the populist leader featuring an apparently AI-generated image of two women, one an attractive young blonde woman and the other, an old and angry woman in a hijab.
Referencing the upcoming October 29th general election in The Netherlands, Mr Wilders captioned the post: “You can choose on 29/10”.
According to Dutch broadcaster NOS, the national discrimination hotline, Discriminatie.nl, received over 12,500 reports in relation to the post. “People find the image’s implicit message hurtful and it evokes feelings of exclusion and insecurity,” the organisation said.
In a letter decrying the post and calling for prosecution, the lawyers representing the 14 Muslim groups wrote: “Through this stark contrast, we-they thinking is deliberately amplified and Muslims reduced to ‘the other’. The Muslims are portrayed as a threat to the Netherlands. The message is clear: anyone who votes for the PVV chooses the ‘good’ and ‘own’; Anyone who votes for GroenLinks-PvdA (GreenLeft–Labour) chooses the ‘bad’ and ‘strange’.”
“We see worrying similarities to the way Jews were portrayed in Nazi Germany: as inhuman, threatening and unwanted, with overly negative characteristics and linked to the idea that they posed a danger to society. Then this propaganda served to structurally exclude and dehumanize a population group; now we see the same mechanism towards Muslims,” they added.
Responding to the outcry, Mr Wilders, who leads the largest party in the country, described it as “madness” and said, “I fight for freedom and the truth, my entire life, and I bow to no one.”
The PVV leader was previously convicted of discrimination by a Dutch court in 2016 over supposedly insulting a group of Moroccans at a campaign rally in 2014 when he asked his supporters if they wanted more or fewer Moroccan migrants in the country. “Fewer, fewer, fewer,” his supporters chanted, and he replied, “We’re going to take care of that.”
The ruling was upheld on appeal by the Supreme Court in 2021, which found that his comments were “unnecessarily hurtful” and had gone beyond the boundaries of free speech.
As one of the leading critics of radical Islam and Muslim migration in Europe, Wilders has been forced to move between various safe houses and live under 24-hour security for over two decades, and faces frequent death threats and fatwas from Islamists.
Writing exclusively for Breitbart London last year, the PVV leader said: “I have always been a firm defender of freedom of speech. It is the bedrock of a free society and a functioning democracy. I will never be silenced. Fatwas, death threats, being on the death list of the Taliban and ISIS, nothing will ever stop me from telling the inconvenient truth.”
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