Who is Crazy in Holland Today?

The former Soviet Union used to send dissidents to psychiatric wards and treat them for the mental disease of not seeing the benefits of communism. In Europe, we have not gone so far (yet) that people who do not see the benefits of the multicultural society are treated as lunatics. They are merely considered to be “fascists” or “racists.” Nevertheless, some intellectuals on the left truly seem unable to understand how anyone who is right in the head can be “right” in the head.

This explains why many leftist Dutch are so puzzled by Geert Wilders. While they can understand that the blue-collar lower classes oppose immigrants – because they are unsophisticated and dumb – they find it hard to understand why a seemingly intelligent man like Geert Wilders is fighting the Islamization of his home country.

Last week, an article by the cultural anthropologist Lizzy van Leeuwen in the leftist weekly De Groene Amsterdammer (“The Green Amsterdammer”) caused a stir. She explains Wilders’s “rabid anti-immigration and anti-Islam ideas” as stemming from his ethnic mix. The article is considered to be “an intellectual attempt to analyze what drives Wilders.” According to Mrs. van Leeuwen his statements – plus the fact that he dies his hair peroxide blond – are connected to his genealogical link to Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world.

Of Barack Obama it is said that his worldview has been influenced by his childhood years in Indonesia, the former Dutch colony that is also said to have shaped Geert Wilders’s worldview. Van Leeuwen reveals that Wilders’s maternal grandmother, Johanna Meijer, was a member of a prominent Jewish-Indonesian family. Her husband, Johan Ording, was a regional financial administrator in the Dutch colony. According to van Leeuwen, the latter was fired while on leave in the Netherlands and reduced to poverty when the government refused to give him a pension. Van Leeuwen says that Wilders is out to avenge the injustice done to his granddad.

The Indonesian colonial background of his grandfather is also said to explain Wilders’s “far-right” opinions. She claims that in the 1930s many colonial administrators sympathized with the Dutch Nazi party NSB. After the independence of Indonesia in 1949, they were forced to leave for the Netherlands. This frustrating experience led to their attachment to patriotism and European values. Moreover, they harbored strong sentiments against Islam, the dominant religion in Indonesia. In Wilders’s case, his anti-Islamic and pro-Israeli feelings were exacerbated by the Jewish origin of his grandmother.

Van Leeuwen’s revelations – if true, because Wilders has not responded to them and keeps his private life absolutely private – do not explain, however, how Wilders’s father can have harbored sympathies for the anti-Semitic NSB while being married to a Jewish wife. That accusation makes her thesis highly unlikely, if not ridiculous.

It is astonishing, however, that leftist intellectuals in Europe no longer see a contradiction between Nazism and pro-Jewish positions. Indeed, Israel is consistently depicted by the European left as a racist Nazi-like state. Meanwhile, the Dutch media criticize Wilders for not disclosing his genealogy. “Wilders hides his family roots,” a major (center-right) Dutch newspaper headlined.

No-one ever demands (would even dream of demanding) that a leftist politician, even one from the far-left, disclose who his ancestors are in order to allow anthropologists to come up with an explanation for his crazy political views. However, a politician on the right, who is pro-Israel and opposes the Islamization of Europe, is treated like a weirdo whose “ethnic mix” has to be researched in order to explain his “incorrect” ideas. When he insists on keeping his family out of the limelight, he is accused of trying to hide something and has the media delving into the lives of his long deceased parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, trying to find the Jew, the Nazi, preferably both, and preferably both combined in one person.

Who, if we may ask, is crazy in Europe today?

Meanwhile, while the Dutch media were discussing the Jewish-Indonesian background of Geert Wilders’s maternal grandparents, the Dutch government announced that it will not respond to a question which Wilders and other members of his Freedom Party (PVV) had tabled in the Dutch parliament. The PVV had asked the government to calculate the cost of non-Western mass immigration into the Netherlands, a country of 16.5 million inhabitants. Last July, the conservative weekly Elsevier calculated, based on a 2003 study of the government’s own Central Plan Bureau, that immigration had cost the Dutch taxpayer 12.7 billion euro in 2008 (5% of government expenditure) and over 400 billion euro in the past four decades.

The government told the PVV that it will not disclose the cost of non-Western immigrants to the prison system, welfare, health care, schools and the maintenance of law and order. The Dutch integration minister Eberhard van der Laan told the PVV parliamentarians: “We are not interested in what an individual, whether he be a Frisian, an Amsterdammer, an elderly person or somebody with blue eyes, costs.”

 

Disgusting!

It is absolutely irrelevant whether his grandfather was a nazi-sympathetic and his grandmother a Jew. How does ANYONE dare judge a person upon the political views or ethnicity of their relatives??? Now let's ignore the more paining part of judging someone upon ethnicity or political views at all and let's have a look at the RELATIVES part of the whole attrocity.

It was a common practise of the communistic Czechoslovakia to punish people for something someone from their broader family once did. Grandchildren of emmigrants were not allowed to study, if your uncle had a friend in the Western Germany, you could forget about going for holiday abroad. Are we observing the descent of the free Holland to the practices of totalitarian regime Czechs and Slovaks fought so hard to overthrow barely 20 years ago??? How revolting!!!

wilders

The author is kind to refer to Wilders as seemingly intelligent.

@Balder Org: All 2 of them...

Actually the NSB began to emulate the anti-Semitism of the NSDAP in 1936 under the influence of van Tonningen.  That the original NSB had Jewish members does not mean that there were "many" or that they were a significant proportion.  Just because a party or movement took its cue from Mussolini rather than Hitler, does not mean that it did not harbor anti-Semitism.  Anti-Semitism was prevalent in Europe amongst all major social and political factions.

Many Jewish members i Dutch Nazi Party

" Van Leeuwen’s revelations – if true, because Wilders has not responded to them and keeps his private life absolutely private – do not explain, however, how Wilders’s father can have harbored sympathies for the anti-Semitic NSB while being married to a Jewish wife. That accusation makes her thesis highly unlikely, if not ridiculous. "

This does not have to be as rediculous as it seems.

The Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB) actually had many Jewish members. According to Wikepedia it was first after Operation Barbarossa (German attack on Russia) that Jews could no longer be members of NSB.

Sharia Law Anyone....

I thought the whole approach was racist - to whip out some old racial stereo-type that Wilders would not even remember - smacks of cheap attempt to control the man.

These leftists - whose main interest is to promote PC over reality - just can't seem to fathom that Wilders doesn't get his support from calling for racial purity.

Don't say immigration - its racist!!

Within reason there should be limits on immigration. While many Muslims have immigrated to Europe - is it fair on everyone else that they be allowed generation after generation - to force their children to marry cousins back in the old country to help them to immigrate to Europe - where they would not otherwise be able to - and while the taxpayer foots the (ever increasing) bill.

And further to say - its racist (and even fascist) to tell them that they can't continue to do this? Even though it is clear they are abusing the immigration laws.

Where the hard-leftist crowd - is really going to get disappointed is when they find that Wilders support continues to grow - as many of his ideas become mainstream.

To make the comparison with the treatment Dutch colonists received when they returned with their mixed families - is a folly - as these Dutch immigrant - were not collectivvely saying - in the next 50 years were are going to take over 'your' country - a ram our religion down your throats.

The problem for the Left in Europe is that it is shrinking - possibly a reality disconnect problem?

Supporting policies which are detrimental to the country - because to challenge them - might be perceived as being racist!!

Is over !!

Is the Left so Idle?

Is the Left so idle that it needs searching for recondite, putative facts about Geert Wilders? Not content not to show up with a political agenda (except endless immigration and gradual, if not creeping or even running, Islamicisation) worth the name, they persist in further foundering by displaying their lack of knack for ideas, and besmirch the reputation of an honest man, probably one of the sanest of all European politicians. Because Mr Wilders do not fantasise about immigration, and do not share in the folly of the Dutch mainstream political parties, he will never have a rest, let alone earn some measure of respect from the media. Not only does he oppose the multi-culti madness, but he also stands for ideals of freedom which used to be a common rule for all dwellers of this continent, and that makes him a privileged target of the establishment. Once again, the leftist media have shown how cheap their gibes actually are.