Geert Wilders: “Right-Wing Extremist”

Our Flemish correspondent VH has compiled a report on the latest hatchet job attempted on Geert Wilders by the Dutch government. He has translated several articles on the topic, and includes this introductory note:

These articles concern the scandalous (and ridiculous) attempt by the Dutch government via the extreme left-wing Minister of the Interior — who herself is a threat to democracy, since she scrapped the planning for an elected Mayor and recently called for a revolt of the elite — to smear Wilders as “extreme right” and “a danger to national security.”

By the way, the party of the Minister of the Interior, the PvdA (Socialists), have been plunging in the polls for the last couple of months, and are in a state of crisis. They fear possible elections in the event that PM Balkenende (CDA, Christian Democrat), who, having failed in the Netherlands, may quit prematurely for a much more attractive job that avoids all hassle from the electorate in the EU (appointed President). If that happens, the PVV and perhaps other parties will demand elections.

The first translation is from De Telegraaf:

Wilders furious for being labeled ‘extreme right’

Geert Wilders is furious with three scientists who would characterize the PVV as an extreme-right party that undermines democracy. “I’m really furious. They have become totally bonkers. What idiocy. We are democrats to the backbone,” he said Saturday.

The PVV leader responded to a report in the left-wing newspaper De Volkskrant about a study of radicalization and polarization, commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior. According to a spokeswoman for the ministry, the research is in its final phase, and the advisory committee and the researchers are still debating the usual definitions. There is no disagreement, according to her.

The spokeswoman did not want to anticipate the conclusions. But according to the newspaper, the researchers Hans Moors, Bob de Graaff, and Jaap van Donselaar call the PVV the one far-right party that mobilizes Islamophobia and hatred against the government, and thus undermines democracy and social cohesion. Wilders rejects those qualifications. “We are democratically elected and use only democratic means,” he said.

“This is yet another shameful and pathological attempt by the elite to demonize us and an attempt to silence the PVV and all our constituents. But they will never succeed! If there is anything that undermines democracy, then it is this leftist elite — including such fake researchers — and Islamization,” Wilders said. What’s more, he finds it deplorable that the very “nonsensical qualifications” of the “scientists” might encourage people to use violence against him. The member of Parliament has been strictly protected for many years due to continuing threats.

Researcher Moors last Saturday was unpleasantly struck by the news of the report. According to him it is in a draft version and has not yet been discussed with the Ministry, and therefore also there cannot be any disagreement about the conclusions. Furthermore, things are much more nuanced than they are presented in the news, the scientist said. Thus, Wilders’ PVV is not called an extreme right-wing party. Instead, it states that Wilders’ position on Islam can more and more be classified “in the direction of the far-right family”.

Minister if the Interior, Guusje ter Horst [PvdA, Socialists — who recently called for a revolt by the elite] will send the report as expected to Parliament in December.

VH adds this analysis:
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The newspaper De Volkskrant writes: “The ministry, according to sources, wants these conclusions to be weakened because of ‘political sensitivity’. The researchers — Hans Moors, a radicalization researcher, professor of (counter-)terrorism Bob de Graaff, and the expert on the extreme right Jaap van Donselaar — want to stick to their guns.” Moors: “The minister must determine her position based on our report. She can say that Van Donselaar, De Graaff, and Moors are round the bend. But she cannot touch our research.”

“Most ‘explosive’ of all,” writes De Volkskrant, “is that Wilders, according to the researchers, undermines social cohesion and democracy. Ergo: he is a danger to national security. Hereby the researchers express what many in government circles find, but no one dares utter in public, as De Volkskrant found after a general inquiry. The fear here is that Wilders will cash in on this by stating that the authorities are trying to gag him.”

“Various government departments are totally ‘fed up with Wilders,’ terrorism researcher Edwin Bakker of the Clingendael Institute says. ‘He creates a certain degree of threat. Not only abroad with Fitna, but also because he mobilizes fear in the Netherlands. Wilders is a danger to national security.’”

“There is a curious paradox, insiders say. The authorities are much better prepared for a terrorist attack than five years ago when Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri. But society, however, partly due to the actions of the PVV, has become more vulnerable. An attack now could, as they fear, lead to social disruption. Wilders was not available for comment.”

Translated from Het Vrije Volk:

Bob de Graaff, Jaap van Donselaar and Hans Moors bring science into disrepute

By Hans Besseling

Both Dutch and Western civilizations are being threatened by a naïve leftist multiculturalism.

In the newspaper De Volkskrant on October 31, the self-identified “leftist” gentlemen, as summed up in the title, are presented as scientists. The disciplines “radicalization” (Hans Moors) and “terrorism” (Bob de Graaff) are themselves not objectively definable, and thus reside outside the scope of science. The subject that preoccupies Jaap van Donselaar, the extreme right, involves a word pollution, with which “leftist” circles have for some time kept themselves busy since the bankruptcy of state socialism. By assigning these men to a study on radicalization, the narrow vision of our Home Secretary becomes public.

The Anne Frank Foundation, which is a leftist stronghold that avoids any democratic control, without any consequence has published in their “Monitor Racism & Extremism” (sic) [the ‘Monitor” is Jaap van Donselaar’s project — translator] that they classify the PVV as an extreme-right party, although not of the classic anti-Semitic sort, as it added.^[1] Some opinion leaders were raised with the notion that the “left” is good and the “right” is bad, to such an extent that the extreme left is extremely good and the extreme right is obviously extremely bad. The thesis by the “cultural anthropologist” Jaap van Donselaar was about the extreme right.

I have no further knowledge of his thesis, but I assume he counts the Fascism of Mussolini and the National Socialism of Nazi Germany as extreme right. When he then studies the far right after World War II, he should notice that these dictatorial ideologies in Western Europe no longer acquired any meaningful followers, as opposed to the extreme left set of ideas. Because, while there have hardly been any significant incidents of reported violence by the right against the constitutional state, political development in Western Europe is tainted by left-wing extremist violence (RAF, animal activism, university occupations, squatters movements, etc.), with, as a sad low in the Netherlands, the murder of the democrat and innovator Pim Fortuyn.

I fear that with Jaap van Donselaar we are not dealing with an expert on the work of Jacques Kadt in using the term fascism. When the concepts of extreme right and extreme left are detached from the justification of violence by the left and the right, there then remains but one qualification with which one tries to demonize political opponents. And the association of the term “far right” with Fascism and National Socialism then is a conscious denial of the content of these leftist ideologies.

The Left stands for: the organization and financing of charitable and other social activities by the government, redistribution of wealth and income, control of trade and industry by the government, subordination of the individual to the community as an expression of the mutual solidarity of the citizens. And, even in a democracy, the Left always tends to impose subordination to the state from the top down (yes: dictatorship), nicely packaged as the abused concept of solidarity.

Now Dutch and Western civilizations are threatened by a naïve leftist multiculturalism. An increasing proportion of the population are having their eyes opened to the ideological, dictatorial nature of Islam. The Muslims in our country are usually on the side of their co-religionists in the rest of the world (quite understandable if you belong to the same club), although the vast majority prefer a peaceful and prosperous existence as long as they are not forced to choose: rejection and repudiation of the mixture of state with religion, or bringing the laws of the country more into line with their Sharia.

I repeat: “We may consider ourselves fortunate to have a Geert Wilders, who in principle is disassociated from any form of violence. The breeding ground for mutual violence is already present in a number of countries in the EU. In the Balkans we have the example of Bosnia for the inhumane acts that may result from it. We lack the profound, reckless viewpoints of someone like Jacques de Kadt, though it must be admitted that then as now, unwelcome thoughts are simply ignored.”

Our Home Secretary should realize that not Geert Wilders, but the three gentlemen mentioned in the title, with their qualifications for scolding the extreme right wing, not only offer an excuse to the extreme left wing for their beloved violence against the PVV, but deny the essence of democracy: the periodic submission of government policy to the discretion of the electorate.

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Note:

[1] Encina Navan of HetVrijeVolk.com wrote last year on Jaap van Donselaar (excerpt):

Van Donselaar is an associate professor in Leiden in the Administration section. It is difficult to understand how such a function prepares one to study the extreme right. From 1981 to 1992 he was associated with an advisory committee for the policy on minorities. This board concluded each year that the minorities policy had failed (it indeed had, but the Netherlands was aware of that even without any study) and each time begged for more money with the aim of continuing those failed policies. But after having proved a sufficient mastery of the function of a government parrot, Van Donselaar was allowed to take on another job.

In 1990, when the CD [Center Democrats, an anti-multicultural policy party] gained representation in a number of municipalities and Parliament, that was reason enough to put Van Donselaar on the subject of ‘the extreme right’. As an independent researcher, of course. From 1991 Van Donselaar published a number of reports. After the growth of the CD in 1994, Van Donselaar began in 1996 with the ‘Monitor,’ an annual report on the situation of the extreme right in the Netherlands. In 2000 he became involved with the creation of the European version of the ‘Monitor’.

Since the early nineties Van Donselaar has been working closely with the Anne Frank Foundation, which used the WWII hiding place of the Jewish [Holocaust victim] Anne Frank to promote a multicultural society. In the 1980s The Anne Frank Foundation (also known as AFstichting) was called a crypto-communist organization by a member of the government, who afterwards had to withdraw the statement. The publications of the AFstichting do not beat around the bush. There is no doubt that the AFstichting is an extreme left-wing organization, whose goals go far beyond battling anti-Semitism. Anyone who works together with it has abandoned all objectivity [The Anne Frank Stichting also filed the case against the book “The Downfall of the Netherlands”, and managed to have the “writer”, Mohammed Rasoel (a stand-in for the real writer), sentenced and the book banned — translator].

Donselaar not only has questionable allies, but also questionable methods. On various forums he is active under pseudonyms, in the vain hope of squeezing out “information”. A drowsy little course, but methodologically almost totally irresponsible.

The third point against Van Donselaar are his employees. His partner Carien Nelissen, also an anthropologist, co-wrote the first two issues of the Monitor (1997 and 1998), because “chatting to the left, filling your pocket to the right” [leftz whinin’, righty pocket linin’] with two pockets goes even faster. In 1981 they together wrote an “anthropological” study of the ‘Nederlandse Volksunie’ [Dutch People’s Union, anti-multicultural party]. In short, the kind of people who have nest eggs everywhere and still maintain the pretense that they are independent.

The fourth point arguing against Van Donselaar is perhaps the most deadly one. On radio and television, he proclaims that three elements in the PVV indicate an extreme-right ideology:

1.		Pride in the Dutch character;
2.		The dislike of the foreign, of political opponents, and of established policy in general;
3.		A taste for the authoritarian.

(source: Monitor Racism & Extremism 2008, p.170)

These “features” are features of every self-interested group. For each individual strives to maintain his own characteristics, and without any pride it is hard to have a sure perception of those characteristics. Van Donselaar is actually saying here that anyone with a culture (which is everyone) by definition tends to extreme right-wing behavior when he is confronted with different ideas. This is a perfect way for van Donselaar always to be right: if you deviate from his analysis, you are extreme right (and hardly anyone wants to be called that), if you agree with him, you must share his vision.

The devil is in the word “dislike”. Van Donselaar leaves it vague of how much dislike there must be to earn the label “extreme right-wing”. He does give a sort of explanation, but it is actually a justification of his chosen methodology.

In fact, Van Donselaar explains the position of the PVV from his own chosen method using only two concepts, namely: national-democrats and racial revolutionaries (p. 171). The latter is according to Van Donselaar the hard-core of the extreme right. They want the association of the Netherlands with Flanders, disapprove of the arrival of foreigners — and that includes Western foreigners — and do not a priori disapprove of violence, because the system is seen as fundamentally wrong. With the national-democrats the boundaries are differently drawn: this group is against the arrival of non-Western foreigners and is not immediately prepared to use force.

After this introduction, Van Donselaar indicates that social reality is more complicated (p. 173), an academic cliché to indicate that one does not take responsibility for errors in the image-building caused by an incorrect methodology

[…]

It is shameful that a scientist lets himself misuse so much for political purposes. Van Donselaar is a typical example of intellectuals who have betrayed science in exchange for political involvement, as Julien Benda described in 1927.

The government then pays a “scientist” to publish an “independent” report, after which the court then may refer to the “scientific” findings. Only the Gulag Archipelago is missing.