According to many web pundits, Dutch M.P. Geert Wilder is a hater, an Islamaphobe, a supremacist. He is on trial in his own country for trying to shut down the immigration of Muslims. Here is a typical screed from the politically correct police:

Geert Wilders is among Europe’s more despicable human specimens. He is a hater. That’s his specialty. He’s also a celebrity, a sort of Paris Hilton of bile, but with the added cachet of being a member of the Dutch parliament and weird darling of the Dutch press, which voted him the 2007 politician of the year because he gives great quotes. (Good quotes are, to bad journalists, more valuable than the late Linda Lovelace’s old specialty).

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Wilders appeals to voters’ basest common denominators: nativism, racism, tribalism. He compares the Koran, which he wants banned, to Mein Kampf, he has no problem including “terrorism” on his list of synonyms for Muslims, and he wants Muslim immigration to the Netherlands severely restricted. In 2008 he released a 17-minute film that does what high school sophomores do best: superimpose quotes with images for rancid irony. The quotes were from the Koran. The images were whatever gruesome images Wilders could get his hands on as long as the events portrayed were committed by the more fanatical of the sixth of the world’s population that calls itself, however slanderously in the fanatics’ case, Muslim. It was a 17-minute slander not dissimilar to the kind the Taliban would release about the decadent West, but demagogues are not known for recognizing what they see in the mirror for what it is.

With the recent collapse of the Dutch government, his Freedom Party also is gaining rapidly on its more established rivals: (more…)