Islam Online reports that police in the Netherlands have arrested a 17-year-old man suspected of trying to burn down an Islamic school against a backdrop of a mass rally in Amsterdam protesting against rising racism in the country, particularly against Muslims. The marchers carried banners reading “Islam is not an enemy”, and “Hatred is not the solution”.
Category Archives: Netherlands
Wilders unveils policies
AMSTERDAM — Independent right-wing MP Geert Wilders has unveiled an election programme said to be “plagiarised” from Pim Fortuyn. In it, Wilders calls for general tax cuts, a reduction in bureaucracy, improved safety and a significant cut in immigration.
Announcing his intention to run at the 2007 election, Wilders said he was “independent” of the “self-satisfied political elite who lost their way long ago and are at the point of saying farewell to age-old Dutch roots in exchange for multiculturalism, culture relativism and a European super state”.
Wilders — whose party (www.geertwilders.nl) stands to win four seats in Parliament if an election was held now — said he was in favour of a smaller government. This means reduced regulations, tax cuts and cuts to social security to prevent the collapse of the economy.
He called for billions of euros in cuts to the overseas development budget — retaining only emergency aid — abolition of the Education and Economic Affairs ministries and reducing the public service by 50 percent. Child allowance payments should also be reduced.
Wilders claimed that scrapping minimum wage laws and liberalising redundancy legislation would lead to greater employment, news service NOS reported on Monday.
Designed primarily to prevent marriage and family unification migration, he urged for Dutch borders to be closed for five years to non-western immigrants. No more asylum seekers should be allowed to enter the country.
Focusing on integration, Wilders said the present non-committal integration policy should be scrapped. Instead, those who do no integrate adequately and do not have Dutch citizenship should be forced out of the country immediately. Islamic schools should also be abolished, he said.
Islamic veils should be banned during public functions, Wilders said.
Muslims under fire in Netherlands
After the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh on November 2, 2004, the organized and unorganized extreme Right took their chance and attacked mosques, Islamic schools and immigrant organizations with bombs, Molotov cocktails, stones and paint. The police counted 96 “incidents” against Islamic targets.
On Theo Van Gogh’s assassination
“I must admit when I heard the news I did not know Theo van Gogh and had not read anything by him. I read and found out that he had criticised Islam and made a film, which exposed Islam’s misogyny.”
Ajar Majedi of the Worker Communist Party of Iran backtracks from her expression of solidarity with the late Dutch racist Theo van Gogh.
WPI TV broadcast, 7 November 2004
So, to be fair, Ajar Majedi didn’t consciously endorse Van Gogh’s racist views – she just heard he was against Islam, and that was good enough for her.
‘Another murder committed by political Islam’
“Yesterday Theo van Gogh, a journalist and a filmmaker, was brutally murdered in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was murdered because he cared and dared to expose the inherent misogynism in and the brutal nature of Islam. An act, which sadly, nowadays calls for great courage …”
Azar Majedi of the Worker Communist Party of Iran solidarises with the anti-Muslim racist Theo van Gogh.
Organisation for Women’s Liberation-Iran statement, 3 November 2004
Turkey’s Muslim millions threaten EU values, says commissioner
A European commissioner set off a furious row yesterday after warning that Europe’s Christian civilisation risked being overrun by Islam.
Fritz Bolkestein, the single market commissioner and a former leader of the Dutch liberals, said the European Union would “implode” in its current form if 70 million Turkish Muslims were allowed to join.
He predicted that Turkish accession would overwhelm the fragile system and finish off any lingering dreams of a fully-integrated European superstate.
In a speech at Leiden University, he compared the EU to the late Austrian-Hungarian empire, which took so many different peoples on board in such a haphazard fashion that it eventually became ungovernable.
Calling demography the “mother of politics”, he said that while America had the youth and dynamism to remain the world’s only superpower, and China was the rising economic power, Europe’s destiny was to be “Islamised”.