Geert
Wilders’ American connections
What,
apart from the hair, links Dutch far right leader and Donald Trump.
By NAOMI
O'LEARY 2/14/17, 4:01 AM CET Updated 2/16/17, 8:07 PM CET
AMSTERDAM — Geert
Wilders is approaching the Dutch election bolstered by the shock
victory of a like-minded campaign in the United States, and with
something of his worldview reflected in Donald Trump’s White House.
Trump’s order
barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the
United States — currently blocked by the U.S. courts — echoes
Wilders’ calls for countries across the West to stop all
immigration from “Islamic countries,” which he has been
advocating in speeches since at least 2014.
Now, Wilders’ U.S.
contacts are pushing for a meeting with Trump in the hopes that it
would give the Dutchman a new platform for his outspoken challenge to
the European Union from within one of its founding states. For their
part, Trump supporters see Wilders’ campaign as the next step —
following the U.K.’s Brexit vote and the election of Trump — of a
populist revolt that is shaking up the world order.
“I have sent those
messages to the inner circle and encouraged that they communicate
with Mr. Wilders,” Congressman Steve King, an Iowa Republican, told
POLITICO in a phone interview. “It’s important for the Trump
administration and for this White House team to be engaged in an
effort to restore Western civilization.”
Wilders’ Freedom
Party (PVV) is on course to become the biggest in the Dutch
parliament in the March 15 election, although it may struggle to take
any part in government as it is shunned by the political mainstream.
Wilders portrays Islam as a totalitarian ideology locked in an
existential struggle with the West and his election program proposes
closing all mosques and banning the Quran.
Although
historically U.S. Republicans have found little sympathy among Dutch
voters, Trump’s election has boosted the confidence of PVV
supporters hoping for a similar upset to the status quo.
“That’s
definitely made its mark on the political landscape here,” said Tim
de Beer of pollster Kantar.
The PVV were early
admirers of Trump’s presidential campaign. “Donald Trump talks
about immigration. Elites disgusted. Citizens embrace it,” Martin
Bosma, a PVV member of parliament, tweeted back in July 2015.
“What Geert
Wilders was talking about was telling Americans what could happen if
we didn’t act to address the spread of radical Islam” —
Christopher Barron, conservative activist
Wilders got a ticket
to the Republican National Convention to see Trump nominated, and
spoke at a pro-Trump event there alongside alt-right journalist and
firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos.
The invitations came
thanks to years of working the American anti-Islam lecture circuit,
through which Wilders has promoted his views in right-wing circles
from Silicon Valley to Texas.
Here is a breakdown
of Wilders’ U.S. links and how they lead to the White House.
Twinks for Trump
In July, Wilders
delivered his usual message to an atypical crowd: an event called
“Wake Up!” that was billed as “the most fab party at the RNC”
and presented Islam as a threat to LGBT people.
Photographs of slim
men wearing Trump hats — “Twinks for Trump” — hung in the
background as Wilders told the crowd Europe was “collapsing” and
becoming “Eurabia.”
His account gave a
sense of urgency to Trump activists, the organizers said, bolstering
the impression the U.S. could be next to face the dire scenario
Wilders set out.
“What Geert
Wilders was talking about was telling Americans what could happen if
we didn’t act to address the spread of radical Islam,” said
organizer Christopher Barron, a gay conservative activist.
Wilders’ ticket to
the Republican National Convention came from Bill Ketron, a Tennessee
state senator who once sponsored a bill to criminalize Islamic law.
Ketron gave Wilders his single extra ticket, the Tennessee Republican
Party told POLITICO.
The organizers of
“Wake up!” heard that Wilders was coming from Pamela Geller, an
activist who was also to speak at the event. Jim Hoft, the man behind
the conservative Gateway Pundit blog, told POLITICO he sent Wilders
the invitation.
Anti-Islam circuit
Geller is a
long-time Wilders ally. She first invited him to the U.S. in 2009 in
the wake of the controversy over his 2008 film “Fitna,” which has
a strong anti-Islamic message and at one point likens Islam to
Nazism. She brought him to speak at the Conservative Political Action
Conference in Washington in February 2009, and soon after, Arizona
Senator Jon Kyl screened “Fitna” at the Capitol.
Geller is at the
center of a constellation of recurring names and groups linked to
events Wilders has attended in the U.S. Some have given him concrete
support, such as Nina Rosenwald, an heiress who founded The Gatestone
Institute. (Rosenwald told POLITICO she had supported Wilders but did
not give details.)
Another supporter is
Daniel Pipes, who told POLITICO his Middle East Forum paid for
Wilders’ lawyer as he fought hate speech charges over the years.
The David Horowitz
Freedom Centre (founded to battle “the radical left and its
Islamist allies”) has donated €126,000 to Wilders’ party,
according to Dutch newspaper NRC.
In the early 2010s,
Wilders was in the U.S. “every month or every six weeks,” said
Wim Kortenoeven, a former Freedom Party lawmaker who left the party
in 2012 but remains sympathetic to its aims.
The friends and
cheering crowds Wilders found in the U.S. provided a respite from his
life in the Netherlands as a hugely divisive political figure living
under a security lockdown.
“It’s like a
refuge for him,” Kortenoeven said. “Here he is a hunted man.”
When Wilders visited
Tennessee in 2011, as Ketron’s hometown of Murfreesboro was
embroiled in controversy over a planned mosque, he was introduced as
a “world hero” and greeted with a standing ovation.
“Nashville,
Tennessee I love it here :-)” Wilders posted on Twitter from a bar
last year.
King visited
Wilders’ office, Saint Denis in Paris, Rinkeby in Stockholm, and
Molenbeek in Brussels.
His busy U.S.
schedule — in 2015 alone, he met congressmen in April; attended a
Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas in May and spoke in Silicon Valley
in August — stands in contrast to his limited campaigning in the
Netherlands, where security threats and controversy hamper his
ability to hold public events.
‘No-go zones’
Visits sometimes go
the other way. King, the congressman, hosted Wilders at an event in
Washington and held a joint press conference with him, but also met
Wilders in the Netherlands on several occasions, he told POLITICO.
King went to Europe
to investigate what he called “no-go zones” — a repeatedly
debunked notion that some areas are under the control of Muslims who
have forcibly excluded outsiders and imposed Sharia law. King’s
description of them was also at odds with his own account of walking
through the places he named: Saint Denis in Paris, Rinkeby in
Stockholm, and Molenbeek in Brussels, where he was disturbed to see a
street market and people in “Islamic garb”, he told POLITICO.
Ketron made a
similar trip to Europe, visiting London, Brussels, Antwerp and
Amsterdam to learn about “radical Islam.” According to The
Tennessean, it was paid for by the head of the Tennessee Freedom
Coalition — the same group that hosted Wilders in 2011. (It still
sells DVDs of the event on its website, called “Geert Wilders: “A
Warning to America.”)
Ketron sponsored a
bill to combat “no-go zones” in Tennessee in 2015. His worldview
chimes with the rhetoric in Wilders’ speeches.
“Look at Europe’s
inner cities. Visit Europe and you will see that they have come to
resemble Northern Africa and the Middle East. They have become areas
ruled by Islamic Sharia law,” Wilders said in Los Angeles in 2013,
according to a copy of his speech. “Islam is taking over European
societies,” he told a Nashville audience the following year.
(Ketron responded to
a request to speak to POLITICO with a one-line statement: “Geert
has taken a position to stand firm on what the Netherlands has always
stood for — and I respect him for that.”)
Wilders does not
have up-to-date experience of walking the streets of Europe, because
he has lived in a security bubble since 2004, due to threats on his
life. But to several of those who heard him speak, the police
protection added dramatic force to Wilders’ arguments. Wilders
himself is keenly aware of this and emphasizes his police protection
in his speeches. His book is called “Marked for death”.
Bonded by Breitbart
Trump and Wilders do
not have identical views. While Trump has praised Russian President
Vladimir Putin, Wilders keeps his distance from Moscow, which is
widely blamed in the Netherlands for the shooting down of an airliner
over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 that killed nearly 300 people,
including 193 Dutch passengers.
What is clear is
that Wilders’ network are hopeful the success of Trump will play
out in similar victories in Europe.
However, they do
share a connection through the Breitbart website. Wilders writes for
and was interviewed several times by Breitbart when the site was
headed by Steve Bannon, now Trump’s chief strategist in the White
House.
Bannon and Wilders
are also linked by Avi Davis, whom Bannon knew and praised as a
“friend” to Breitbart News in a 2015 obituary. Davis was founder
and president of the American Freedom Alliance and organized the 2009
dinner at which the group celebrated Wilders as a hero of conscience.
Neither camp responded to questions on whether Wilders and Bannon
know each other.
What is clear is
that Wilders’ network is hopeful the success of Trump will play out
in similar victories in Europe.
“Everyone is
finally breathing freely after eight nightmarish years,” Nina
Rosenwald told POLITICO in an email. She added she would be happy to
support Wilders “in any way legally permissible.”
Pamela Geller said
“all those who believe in the freedom of speech” would do the
same. “Both the election of Trump and the soon-to-be election of
Wilders are indications that free people are rising up against the
elites,” she said.
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