An anti-Islam politician in The Netherlands is forming an international alliance to spread his message in a bid to ban Islamic immigration.
Geert Wilders said yesterday he would launch the movement this year in the US, Canada, Britain, France and Germany. ” ‘Stop Islam, defend freedom’ is a message that’s not only important for The Netherlands but for the whole free Western world,” he said at the Dutch parliament.
Among the group’s aims will be outlawing immigration from Islamic countries to the West and a ban on Islamic sharia law.
He hopes it will grow from a grassroots movement to eventually produce its own politicians or influence other legislators.
Ayhan Tonca, a prominent spokesman for Dutch Muslims, said he feared Mr Wilders’s message would fall on fertile ground in much of Europe.
“So long as things are going badly with the economy, a lot of people always need a scapegoat,” Mr Tonca said. “At the moment, that is the Muslims in Western Europe.”
Mr Wilders, who regularly stands up for gay and women’s rights, rose to prominence with his firebrand anti-Islam rhetoric, which has led to him being charged under Dutch laws banning hate speech.
He said he hoped to position the alliance between traditional conservative parties and far-right groups, saying in Britain there was “an enormous gap” between the ruling Conservative Party and the far-right British National Party.
“The BNP is a party that, whatever you think of it, it’s not my party – I think it’s a racist party,” Mr Wilders said.
His Freedom Party won the biggest gains in a national election last month, coming third with 24 seats in the 150-seat parliament, up from nine.
Mr Wilders is due to stand trial in October on hate-speech charges arising from his short internet film Fitna, which denounced the Koran as a fascist book that inspired terrorism.
“The fight for freedom and (against) Islamisation as I see it is a worldwide phenomenon and problem to be solved,” he said.
Mr Wilders declined to name any of the other founders of the organisation he is calling the Geert Wilders International Freedom Alliance.
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