Anti-Muslim Dutch politicians in hiding after death threats

Steve 41oo wrote:

I think that's an amazing statistic. So much that I would like to know exactly what the question was. Islam is not prohibited in Spain. They can worship quite freely, yet 2% feel they have a right to use violence to spread their beliefs!

Unless it was a survey of a massive scale, 2% is a near-meaningless number. Say the margin of error in the poll was what it is in US election polls, about 3%, then it's a number that might represent up to 5% of Muslims, or might well represent 0%.

Eg: say the survey was of 1,000 people - I have no idea, but that would be a fairly typical polling sample - then we're talking 20 respondents who said that the use of violence to spread their beliefs is in principle OK; and then you'd in turn talk about a fraction of that again who would themselves be willing to use it - i.e., 0 or 1 persons in the sample.

There's just not much to read stuff into on that count, here. The survey must have yielded lots of info about what the mainstream of Spanish Muslims think, the majority of them or respective significant minorities of them on any one question -- but result groups constituting one or two or three percent of the sample, that's akin to meaningless.

It was a representative sample. Therefore the results are representative. Overall there may not be 20,000 muslims in Spain who think violence is justified, it may be more or it may be less, but it aint zero[/i], and the results from the poll are statistically significant or no polling organisation would use them or publish them for fear of being totally discredited.

Violence fear over Islam film
Counter-terrorism alert as a Dutch right-winger launches a movie that will denounce the Koran

Jason Burke, Europe editor
Sunday January 20, 2008
The Observer

The Dutch government is bracing itself for violent protests following the scheduled broadcast this week of a provocative anti-Muslim film by a radical right-wing politician who has threatened to broadcast images of the Koran being torn up and otherwise desecrated.

Cabinet ministers and officials, fearing a repetition of the crisis sparked by the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper two years ago, have held a series of crisis meetings and ordered counter-terrorist services to draw up security plans. Dutch nationals overseas have been asked to register with their embassies and local mayors in the Netherlands have been put on standby.

Geert Wilders, one of nine members of the extremist VVD (Freedom) party in the 150-seat Dutch lower house, has promised that his film will be broadcast - on television or on the internet - whatever the pressure may be. It will, he claims, reveal the Koran as 'source of inspiration for intolerance, murder and terror'.
Dutch diplomats are already trying to pre-empt international reaction. 'It is difficult to anticipate the content of the film, but freedom of expression doesn't mean the right to offend,' said Maxime Verhagen, the Foreign Minister, who was in Madrid to attend the Alliance of Civilisations, an international forum aimed at reducing tensions between the Islamic world and the West. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other towns with large Muslim populations, imams say they have needed to 'calm down' growing anger in their communities.

Government officials hope that no mainstream media organisation will agree to show the film, although one publicly funded channel, Nova, initially agreed before pulling out. 'A broadcast on a public channel could imply that the government supported the project,' said an Interior Ministry spokesman.

Demonstrations are also expected from those opposed to Wilders beyond Holland's Muslim community - a number of left-wing activists have already been arrested - and from his supporters. Members of a group calling itself Stop Islamisation of Europe are planning to travel to Amsterdam. 'Geert Wilders is an elected politician who has made a film, and that he is under armed guard as a result is absolutely outrageous,' said Stephen Gash, a UK-based member, yesterday. 'It is all about free speech.'

In November 2004, anger and violence followed the stabbing and shooting by a Dutch teenager of Moroccan parentage of the controversial film-maker Theo Van Gogh, a distant relative of the artist.

The attacker said the killing was in response to a film about Islam and domestic violence that Van Gogh had made with the Somalian-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, then an MP, which showed images of naked veiled women with lines from the Koran projected over them.

From her self-imposed exile in Washington, Hirsi Ali last week criticised the new film as 'provocation' and called on the major Dutch political parties to restart a debate on immigration that has split Dutch society in recent years, rather than leave the field to extremists.

Wilders announced his plans last November, saying he was making a film to show the violent and fascist elements of the Muslim faith. The maverick politician's remarks about Islam have become increasingly radical. In February last year he said that if Muslims wanted to stay in the Netherlands, they should tear out half of the Koran and throw it away. In parliament he then called for the Koran and Hitler's Mein Kampf to be banned, a proposal that was rejected.

Job Cohen, the left-wing mayor of Amsterdam, echoed Hirsi Ali's words and called for a debate 'so that the moderates can make themselves heard'.

During a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week, Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun, the Grand Mufti of Syria, said that, were Wilders was seen to tear up or burn a Koran in his film, 'this will simply mean he is inciting wars and bloodshed ... It is the responsibility of the Dutch people to stop him.'

Two young Dutch journalists experienced the many sides of Geert Wilders while writing a biography of the Dutch politician. It's called 'It can't get much crazier', a phrase Wilders himself often uses during debates.

... ... ...

Author Jonathan van Melle says Wilders is a politician pur sang.
"He loves politics, he can't live without politics. So if the Freedom Party loses all its seats, then Wilders has no life anymore."

Both van Melle and Blok say Wilders fully operates based on a principled belief that what he's advocating is the right thing to do. But they also agree that Wilders knows better than anyone how to communicate those beliefs to a broad audience. So far, Geert Wilders has played his cards very well. If a snap election was called, he would almost certainly get more votes than in the last election. But even for someone who likes pushing the envelope, it can't get much crazier.

Staged provocations intended to shift such boundaries are sometimes acts of bad faith. ... No right is unimaginable and no tradition too venerable to be revisited. Such cases are artificial, but the law they make is real. Mr Wilders is something of a bogeyman in polite Dutch society now. He should not be. His perfectly legal effort resembles the kind of mischievous testing of boundaries that civil libertarians have engaged in whenever they have sought to hasten social change in the face of an indifferent or hostile electorate.

Where a few years ago the far right in Europe concentrated its fire on immigration, these days Islam is fast becoming the most popular target. It is a campaign that is having mixed results. In Switzerland, the Blocher party has been highly successful. In Holland, Wilders is thriving by constantly poking sticks in the eyes of the politically correct Dutch establishment. But when Susanne Winter ran for a seat on the local council in the Austrian city of Graz last month by branding the Prophet Muhammad a child molester, she lost her far-right Freedom Party votes.

For the mainstream centre-right in Europe, foreigner-bashing is also backfiring. Roland Koch, the German Christian Democrat once tipped as a future Chancellor, wrecked his chances a fortnight ago by forfeiting a 12-point lead in a state election after a campaign that denounced Muslim ritual slaughter practices and called for the deportation of young immigrant criminals.

Wilders echoes some of the arguments against multiculturalism that have convulsed Germany in recent years. Like many on the traditional German right, he wants the European Judaeo-Christian tradition to be formally recognised as the dominating culture, or Leitkultur. 'There is no equality between our culture and the retarded Islamic culture. Look at their views on homosexuality or women,' he says.

But if Wilders shares positions and aims with others on the far right in Europe, he is also a very specific Dutch phenomenon, viewing himself as a libertarian provocateur like the late Pim Fortuyn or Theo van Gogh, railing against 'Islamisation' as a threat to what used to be the easy-going Dutch model of tolerance.

'My allies are not Le Pen or Haider,' he emphasises. 'We'll never join up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I'm very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.' Dutch iconoclasm, Scandinavian insistence on free expression, the right to provoke are what drive him, he says.

Maryam Namazie: What we are seeing though is a Left, or what is called the Left, actually apologising for Islam, calling any sort of criticism of Islam 'Islamophobic'. We have heard recently that the editor of the Socialist Workers' Party paper has even implied that secularism is Islamophobic!

Will Turkey's revision of sacred islamic texts catch on?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7264903.stm

Well, nothing has been actually published yet.

But let me ask you a question. Do you hold any skepticism that the final document will conform to the information in this article?