The Dutch House of Representatives passed a motion from populist leader Geert Wilders advocating for the ban of the Muslim Brotherhood and its “affiliated organisations” amid increasing warnings over Islamist infiltration across Europe.
While Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) have attempted multiple times to pass a motion calling for the government to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, previous attempts have all ended in failure. However, with the socially conservative Christian Union and the centrist 50Plus parties reversing their past opposition, the motion finally passed on Tuesday at the Hague.
The motion was also backed by the centre-right establishment People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB), and the right-wing populist Forum for Democracy (FVD), among other smaller parties. Even still, the motion only passed with 76 votes, the slimmest possible majority in the Dutch parliament, De Telegraaf reported.
The text of the motion called on the government to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and its “affiliated organisations in the Netherlands”. It cited the bombshell French government report released last year, which detailed the decades-long campaign waged by the Islamist group to infiltrate institutions and governments across Europe with the aim of subverting the West and instituting Sharia Law in Europe.
The move by the Dutch House follows a similar vote held in the French National Assembly in January, in which a non-binding resolution called for the European Commission to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation.
Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department designated the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Sudan as a foreign terrorist organisation, citing its “unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology.” The State Dept. further said that many of the group’s fighters, who were trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have also conducted mass executions of civilians.
It comes after the Trump administration announced in November that it would be examining various Muslim Brotherhood outposts for potential classification as terrorist groups, including the Islamist network’s founding chapter in Egypt.
Ahead of the vote on Tuesday, Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders, who has been forced to live with round-the-clock security for decades over Islamist threats against his life, lamented that the Dutch political establishment has imported over a million non-Western migrants to the Netherlands over the past ten years.
“Our country is unrecognisable. We see headscarves everywhere, we see the rise of antisemitism. We have seen it in the Netherlands and in the rest of Europe… It is an incredible disgrace,” he said.
However, it remains to be seen if the liberal Dutch government, led by Democrats 66 Prime Minister Rob Jetten — the country’s first openly homosexual leader — will heed the call of the House of Representatives and actually ban the Muslim Brotherhood.
Opponents of the motion argued that, because there is no legal or formal group in the Netherlands named the Muslim Brotherhood, it is impossible to ban it. Similar arguments have been made during debates over banning the intentionally diffuse far-left Antifa network.
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