Geert Wilders’ Unrequited Love

Geert Wilders loves Israel. He lived there for two years in his youth and sees it as a bastion of the West in a sea of Muslim barbarism: For example:

“If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next. Thus, Jerusalem is the main front protecting the West. It is not a conflict over territory but rather an ideological battle, between the mentality of the liberated West and the ideology of Islamic barbarism. There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946, and it is the kingdom of Jordan.” He called on the Dutch government to refer to Jordan as Palestine and move its embassy to Jerusalem.

Wilders also includes Judaism as part of the European cultural tradition, expressing his desire that “the European Judaeo-Christian tradition to be formally recognised as the dominating culture.”

Wilders also rejects certain elements of the right that are particularly offensive to Jews:

‘My allies are not Le Pen or Haider,’ he emphasises. ‘We’ll never join up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I’m very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.’ Dutch iconoclasm, Scandinavian insistence on free expression, the right to provoke are what drive him, he says.

One would think then that Wilders would be popular among Jews, but he is not. It’s one thing to support Israel, but the problem is that he has the outlandish idea that Europe should be for Europeans and that immigration from Muslim countries should be halted. 

The recent JTA article (“Not wild about Wilders? Populists’ anti-Islam message has European Jewish leaders worried“) makes clear that, as in the US, the organized Jewish community wants a multicultural future for Europeans. Despite contrary opinions by some Jews, the expressed ideal of Jewish leaders is that Europe continue to import Muslims to create a multicultural Europe.

The article quotes the “Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life” statement that “about 5 percent of the EU population is Muslim, with the percentage growing because of higher birthrates among migrants and low birthrates among ‘native Europeans.’” “Native Europeans” must, of course, be put in quotes because the very concept of native Europeans is abhorrent to the multicultural zeitgeist. All Western societies are nations of immigrants, you see — even if the European immigrants arrived thousands of years ago. The report concludes with the obligatory statement that “the successful integration of European Muslims is crucial to the future of Europe.” Where have we heard that before?

From the standpoint of the Jewish leadership, the basic problem is that populists like Wilders “want a Sweden for the Swedes, France for the French and Jews to Israel,” in the words of  Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary general of the European Jewish Congress. This is a slippery slope argument because shipping the Jews off to Israel is certainly not Wilders’ position. Indeed, Lena Posner, president of the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities states, “We are quite upset about having a party [in the Parliament] that says they are only addressing Muslims and immigration. History has taught us about where this can lead, and this is not necessarily good for the Jews”—a comment that combines the slippery slope with the Holocaust obsession.

The slippery slope argument dovetails with traditional Jewish fear and loathing of homogeneous White, Christian cultures. As usual, Jewish leaders want to have their cake and eat it too:  a diaspora strategy that dilutes the power of the native peoples while promoting their own ethnic nationalism in Israel.  In fact, Israel is now insisting that the Palestinians acquiesce in the idea that Israel is a Jewish state with scarcely a peep from the diaspora.

Predictably, Abe Foxman is incensed at Wilders’ failure to agree with both prongs of the Jewish strategy, loving multiculturalism at home and Israel abroad: “It’s akin to the evangelical Christians. …  On one hand they loved and embraced Israel. But on the other hand, we were not comfortable with their social or religious agenda.”

Arch-neocon Daniel Pipes does his “good Muslim-bad Muslim” routine, also designed to maximize Jewish interests in a multicultural West by officially favoring a housebroken Islam allied with diaspora Jews: “Our goal has to be to build and help with the development of a moderate Islam that [Wilders] says doesn’t exist and can’t exist. So we are allies, but there is a significant difference.”

Pipes hopes populist parties will drop their “neo-fascist conspiratorial ideas, strange economic ideas, anti-Semitic and racist ideas” and develop broader platforms. But certainly, none of this applies to the philo-Semitic, libertarian Wilders (who sees Margaret Thatcher and the execrable Winston Churchill as his political role models). So the deeper agenda is to promote multiculturalism in Europe while  managing Muslim discontent about Israel.

The reality is that this is what the entire Jewish political spectrum wants, from the far left to the neoconservative right. Again we see that despite the well-oiled myth that Jews are beset by fundamental disagreements about policy, Jewish power is pushing in one direction throughout the West: Multiculturalism and the end of racially and culturally homogeneous White societies.

And it should be obvious that White advocates who attempt to recruit Jewish support in opposition to multiculturalism are engaging in a futile undertaking. The fact that the organized Jewish community favors Muslim immigration throughout the West even when so many Muslims are hostile to Israel and to Jews (to the point that Jews have been forced to vacate Muslim areas in many places, including Sweden) shows how committed they are to their campaign against the people and the culture of the West.