Superior Culture?

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEWNOVEMBER 28, 2008, 11:45 P.M. ET
GEERT WILDERS
'Our Culture Is Better'
Champion of freedom or anti-Islamic provocateur? Both.

By JAMES TARANTO

By his own description, Geert Wilders is not a typical Dutch politician. "We are a country of consensus," he tells me on a recent Saturday morning at his midtown Manhattan hotel. "I hate consensus. I like confrontation. I am not a consensus politician. . . . This is something that is really very un-Dutch."

Yet the 45-year-old Mr. Wilders says he is the most famous politician in the Netherlands: "Everybody knows me. . . . There is no other politician -- not even the prime minister -- who is as well-known. . . . People hate me, or they love me. There's nothing in between. There is no gray area."

To his admirers, Mr. Wilders is a champion of Western values on a continent that has lost confidence in them. To his detractors, he is an anti-Islamic provocateur. Both sides have a point.

In March, Mr. Wilders released a short film called "Fitna," a harsh treatment of Islam that begins by interspersing inflammatory Quran passages with newspaper and TV clips depicting threats and acts of violent jihad. The second half of the film, titled "The Netherlands Under the Spell of Islam," warns that Holland's growing Muslim population -- which more than doubled between 1990 and 2004, to 944,000, some 5.8% of the populace -- poses a threat to the country's traditional liberal values. Under the heading, "The Netherlands in the future?!" it shows brutal images from Muslim countries: men being hanged for homosexuality, a beheaded woman, another woman apparently undergoing genital mutilation....

Having his own party liberates Mr. Wilders to speak his mind. As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."

He acknowledges that "the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people." But he says "it really doesn't matter that much, because if you don't define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change -- all the freedoms we have will change."...

His own view of Islam is a fundamentalist one: "According to the Quran, there are no moderate Muslims. It's not Geert Wilders who's saying that, it's the Quran . . . saying that. It's many imams in the world who decide that. It's the people themselves who speak about it and talk about the terrible things -- the genital mutilation, the honor killings. This is all not Geert Wilders, but those imams themselves who say this is the best way of Islam."

Yet he insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: "I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don't subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to." He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.

His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: "You have to give up this stupid, fascist book" -- the Quran. "This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book."...

Tell the far right fundamentalists to give up their fascist Bible and see what kind of cooperation this gets.

If you want to change someone over to your side, you don't call their kid an ugly bastard.

Christians don't teach children that women are vile and unpure. They don't teach them that they are "half" as important as men. They don't teach them submission in all things, and in fact teach them that we should stand up for what is right and good. We do not earn our way to heaven by accepting beatings by our husbands. We are not considered "evil" if we are raped. Strange men don't come into our homes to beat the crap out of us for wearing the wrong thing on the street.

IMO the culture of tolerance has it's genesis in secularism not religion.

Once again, read "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirisi Ali. She is a Somali Muslim who moved to Holland to escape to oppression of Islam.

IMO the culture of tolerance has it's genesis in secularism not religion.

Once again, read "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirisi Ali. She is a Somali Muslim who moved to Holland to escape to oppression of Islam. She's lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Holland.

She insists a free country, which supports human rights, cannot justify allowing the Muslim religion to abuse and traumatize their own people in the name of "religious freedom". She says it is a contradiction in everything that a free society stands for, and the idea of putting up with violence and repression in the name of "tolerance" is ridiculous.

And that is the difference. Christians don't teach children that women are vile and unpure. They don't teach them that they are "half" as important as men. They don't teach them submission in all things, and in fact teach them that we should stand up for what is right and good. We do not earn our way to heaven by accepting beatings by our husbands. We are not considered "evil" if we are raped. Strange men don't come into our homes to beat the crap out of us for wearing the wrong thing on the street.

She was born in a Muslim family who never practiced the religion.

And states herself that she never was a muslim.

You have a source for these claims, or did you just pull them out of your ass?