https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-new-chapter-for-geert-wilders/
On the morning of June 3, Geert Wilders, member of the Dutch House of Representatives and head of the Party for Freedom (PVV), tweeted that the PVV would be leaving the Dutch ruling coalition. This move at once brought down the Dutch government and began a new chapter in an extraordinary personal – and national – saga. It was a generation ago, in 2002, on the verge of an election that would likely have made him prime minister, that Pim Fortuyn, an outspoken gay sociologist, was gunned down in a parking lot in Hilversum as punishment for his outspoken recognition of the existential nature of the Islamic threat. Two years later, Theo van Gogh, an iconoclastic columnist and raconteur, was murdered on an Amsterdam street in retribution for his own forthright criticism of Islam. For a brief period, the Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was the country’s leading critic of the religion under which she’d grown up, but she was soon forced to leave for America. That left Wilders to take to the pulpit – or, if you will, to put on the boxing gloves.
And what a remarkable job he’s done – and in the face of impossible pressure. Not only have death threats from the adherents of the Religion of Peace obliged him to live under police protection since 2004; as punishment for telling the truth about that execrable ideology, he’s been denounced by corporate leaders, by academics, by clergy, by his fellow politicians, and, not least, by his country’s (and, often, the world’s) legacy media. He’s been called in on the carpet more than once by security and justice officials, and in 2007 no less august a personage than Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, who is now king, rebuked Wilders (although without mentioning his name) with the remark, “Not for nothing do we have the saying, ‘Speech is silver, silence is golden.’” (Obey your own advice, dude.) In 2008, a who’s-who of the Dutch cultural elite signed a statement, published on the front page of the newspaper Trouw, that condemned Wilders’s “intolerance” and urged “a new balance between the values of then and those of now” – in short, rank and cowering appeasement of Islam. In 2009 he was denied entry into the U.K. on the grounds that he might introduce unseemly ideas into a country awash in jihad-happy imams; in 2010, he was put on trial for insulting Islam. As Wilders explained to me that year in an interview in The Hague, “The political elite today is not very successful in beating my party in a political way, so they are looking for a different way…..The more popular I get with the people, the more people want to shut me up.” Sound familiar?