RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wilders-message-from-the-netherlands-9224c43d?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Dutch elections rarely stir much excitement abroad, but the voting in the Netherlands Wednesday marks an exception. The big winner was Geert Wilders, a veteran right-wing campaigner, and the freakout his victory has triggered across Europe is something to behold.

Mr. Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) won a plurality of 37 seats in the 150-seat legislature. His next nearest competitor, a Labor-Green coalition led by Frans Timmermans, won 25 seats. Politicians will now negotiate to form a governing coalition, a process that often takes months in the Netherlands’ highly fragmented electoral system, and Mr. Wilders may not emerge as prime minister. But voters have sent a clear message.

To wit: Voters are fed up with a stale consensus on issues such as immigration and climate policy. The PVV’s biggest campaign issue for two decades has been immigration. Some 400,000 immigrants arrived last year in a country with a total population of nearly 18 million. While last year’s number may have been skewed by refugees from Ukraine, immigration has exceeded 200,000 every year since 2016.

This creates a substantial fiscal burden under the generous Dutch welfare state and strains the housing market. It’s also becoming a culture-war issue as voters worry the country isn’t properly assimilating Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Wilders can present himself as a tribune of these fears, having lived under police protection since an Islamist murdered film director Theo van Gogh in 2004.

Centrist politicians heap scorn on Mr. Wilders’s proposed solution, which is to ban the Quran, new mosques and Islamic schools. This is extreme, and Mr. Wilders had to walk back those proposals to achieve the vote totals he did Wednesday. But if any other Dutch politician has better ideas for achieving assimilation, voters would be all ears.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/wilders-wins-big/

It’s about time. On November 22, seventeen years after its founding by Geert Wilders, the Party for Freedom (PVV) won a huge victory in the Dutch elections. With 23% of the vote, the PVV went from 17 to 37 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives. The conservative British commentator Paul Joseph Watson called it “the biggest political earthquake in Europe since Brexit.” The lefties who’d shown up to follow the returns at the headquarters of other parties exhibited the same shock and grief that we saw in the faces of Hillary Clinton voters at the Javits Center on Election Night 2016.

Even as the final results were being tabulated, a group of “experts” on the Netherlands met at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute for a 90-minute discussion of the exit polls. There were five people on stage, but very little range in views. All five were unsettled by Wilders’s success. Erik Voeten, who teaches Geopolitics and Justice in World Affairs at Georgetown University, accused Wilders of “Islamophobia” and “xenophobia” and claimed that he “wants to do things that are contrary to current Dutch law, European law, and international law.” Stan Veuger of AEI called the PVV “extremely radical.”

How radical? Wilders, charged Veuger, “wants to ban the Koran, ban mosques, ban Islamic schools.” Echoing word-for-word Voeten’s observation that such moves would violate “Dutch law, European law, and international law,” Veuger pronounced that the very idea of Wilders as head of government was an “inconceivable option.” He even suggested that the “stringent security measures” that Wilders has to live with 24 hours a day might make it “difficult for him to function as prime minister.” And why exactly does Wilders live with “stringent security measures”? Because Muslims have repeatedly threatened him with assassination. Of course Veuger was far too discreet to mention that delicate detail.

Matthias Mattijs, a Belgian who teaches International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins, maintained that the likes of Wilders could not possibly become prime minister. And Arthur van Benthem, who teaches Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School, worried that the election results would stall important action on “climate change” and “energy transition.” The Dutch government, you see, has set itself the goal of eliminating all non-electric cars by 2030 and of cutting “cattle farming in half” to satisfy EU rules on nitrogen emissions. How, asked van Benthem, could the Netherlands attain these manifestly worthy objectives now that Wilders, that deplorable figure, has pulled such numbers?

https://victorhanson.com/can-europe-become-western-again/

For the first time in a millennium, Europe no longer plays a critical role in promoting Western civilization nor in world history at large.

Ostensibly it should. Some 750 million people live on the European subcontinent.

Europe still remains the most popular tourist spot on earth. Its hallowed architecture, art, infrastructure, and natural beauty still remind millions of visitors of the world’s once most dynamic and grandiose civilization.

Even now, European nations, in and out of the Europe Union, still produce a combined gross domestic product of $24 trillion, second only to the United States.

Europe’s exports are among the world’s most coveted cars, sophisticated technology, and valued industrial goods.

Yet since World War II, Europe has played an increasingly reduced role in world affairs, despite its membership in the NATO alliance and the growth of the European Union.

Why?

The twentieth-century traumas of World War I and II—in which some 70 million Europeans were killed—saw Europe commit near collective suicide. The ensuing Cold War hinged on protecting a relatively unarmed Europe from an aggressive nuclear Soviet empire on Europe’s borders.

But as World War II and the Cold War faded into memory, Europe did not snap back and assume its centuries-old role as a world leader and beacon of Western Civilization.

Instead, a weary Europe outsourced its security to the United States. It redefined itself as a postmodern, pacifist, socialist utopian project—most recently predicated on redistributionist entitlements, open borders, and radical green policies that have all inevitably ensured European decline.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20174/persecution-of-christians-october

“These rapes are unfortunately customary and serve a specific purpose. It is believed that once no longer a virgin, a girl would become unsuitable for marriage, even if she belongs to a religious minority, and her only choice would be to marry one of her captors. Mishal was then forcibly converted to Islam and married to one of the kidnappers.” – bitterwinter.org, October 24, 2023, Pakistan.

“Some cases do land in courts. But it is not easy for the victims to win them. Sometimes, the victims are treated as if they were the perpetrators….” — bitterwinter.org, October 24, 2023, Pakistan.

“As we returned back to our grass-thatched roof house, we found some of the debris around the house. On entering the house, we found there was a threatening message, ‘Today if we find you around, we shall destroy you with the house. You have become an embarrassment to our Muslim family by joining a wrong religion.'” – morningstarnews.org, October 4, 2023, Uganda.

Regrettably, this scenario—a fire claims Christian lives, only for Muslim authorities to say it was “accidental”—has played out many times in the Middle East.

The following are among the abuses and murders inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of October 2023.

The Sexual Abuse and Forced Conversion of Christians

Pakistan: Three Muslim men abducted and violently gang-raped a 16-year-old Christian girl, Persis Masih, on her way to Sunday church service. The girl’s father, a pastor, and most of the family had left early for church, while Persis continued to get ready. She never appeared at church and was not home when they returned. After immediately filing a report with police, “the family spent a sleepless night contacting relatives in the hope of finding Persis,” according to the Oct. 1 report. Eventually,

“[T]he family heard Persis moaning for help outside their gate. The culprits, realizing the severity of her condition, had callously dropped her off. Supported by her elder brother Yessi Masih, Persis was brought inside the house, her physical and emotional state in shambles… [After rushing her to a hospital, the] medical examination revealed the horrifying truth—Persis had been gang-raped. Despite the trauma, she bravely identified one of the perpetrators, Muhammad Atif, thanks to the assistance of the local police and CCTV footage.”

https://www.euronews.com/2023/11/23/political-earthquake-in-the-netherlands-anti-islam-populist-geert-wilders-landslide-victor

The far-right populist has won a huge victory in one of the biggest political earthquakes in the Netherlands since World War II.

He’s been called the Dutch Trump. He’s been threatened with death countless times by Islamic extremists, convicted of insulting Moroccans and Britain once banned him from entering the country.

Now Geert Wilders has won a massive election victory in the Netherlands and is in pole position to form the next ruling coalition and possibly become the country’s next prime minister.

His Party for Freedom (PVV) is projected to win 37 seats, according to the latest estimates, well ahead of their nearest rival: A left-wing alliance. 

However, Wilders will likely have to convince other parties to join him in a coalition – something that could prove tricky. His target is 76 seats in the 150-seat parliament.

An exit poll revealing his landslide appeared to take even a 60-year-old political veteran by surprise.

In his first reaction, posted in a video on X, formerly Twitter, he spread his arms wide, put his face in his hands and said simply “35!” – the number of seats the poll then forecasted his party had won. 

Wilders, with his fiery tongue, has long been one of the Netherlands’ best-known lawmakers at home and abroad. His populist policies and shock of peroxide blond hair have drawn comparisons with the former US President Donald Trump.

But, unlike Trump, he seemed destined to spend his life in political opposition.

The only time Wilders came close to governing was when he supported the first coalition formed by Prime Minister Mark Rutte in 2010. But Wilders did not formally join the minority administration and brought it down after just 18 months in office in a dispute over austerity measures. Since then, mainstream parties have shunned him.

They no longer can.