Here’s an interview with Geert Wilders on Australian TV.

Near the end, the broadcaster asks if Wilders would ask every immigrant whether he’s a Muslim or not.  The Dutch politician responds that he only says that there should be no immigration from Muslim countries.  The Australian asks specifically if that means a Jew from Egypt or Christian from Lebanon can’t come to the Netherlands.  Wilders says they would be banned.  This doesn’t make sense and indicates the PVV leader isn’t just worried about Muslim immigration, but non-Westerners in general.  He just can’t say that and uses Muslims as his boogeymen, which practically makes a lot of sense.

There are 47 majority-Muslim countries in the world, which means that a Wilders program would effectively ban half of the third world, including just about all poor non-Westerners in closest proximity to Europe (the entire Middle East, the top half of Africa, and the Stans). Those worried about third world immigration but somewhat turned off by his constant harping on Islam and over-the-top support of Israel should thus support Wilders, as ending Muslim immigration basically means doing away with the vast majority of total immigration.

It’s interesting that Wilders is himself partly of Indonesian descent, since his program would not allow anybody from that country into the Netherlands.  From Wikipedia,

In a biography, Wilders himself seems to play down his Indo heritage. Anthropologist Lizzy van Leeuwen analyses Wilders' Eastern heritage with the concept of displacedness, and classifies his standpoints as "post-colonial revanchism". This analysis is met with agreement in Indo communities. However, in an interview, Wilders denied van Leeuwens' speculations.

Ignoring the post-colonial gibberish, could trying to cover up his Indo heritage be the motivation for Wilders’s absurd dye job? Wilders's hair has always made me suspicious of him, as there's just something not right about an originally dark-haired (I think) but now graying 50 year-old man wanting to be a blond.  Now I think I understand.

I have two new podcasts up at AltRight Radio that are of interest to "Euro-centrists." The first is an interview with Jan Lievens, a politician and former youth coordinator with the Flemish independence party, the Vlaams Belang. The second is with AltRight contributor Derek Turner, with whom I discuss political happenings across the continent as well as the difficulty of forming an alliance between Europe's various traditionalist and anti-Eurabia parties, which have identical enemies and yet which can't ever seem to ever get along. 

As Srdja Trifkovic has already recorded on this site, Geert Wilders has continued his remarkable political progress with better-than-expected results in the Dutch general election of 9th June. His Partij Voor Vrijheid (PVV) increased its number of seats in the Dutch parliament from 9 to 24. An election fought ostensibly on the economy and Afghanistan clearly had an important if sotto voce immigration angle.

Dutch politics are complex, and getting more complex as the comfortable postwar consensus breaks down irretrievably. As the Guardian’s Ian Traynor noted on 10 June, “The election… revealed a political spectrum fragmented as seldom before and thoroughly polarized.”

In an echo of the bitter 16th century struggles against the Duke of Alva’s tercios (see Motley’s 1856 classic The Rise of the Dutch Republic or Edward Grierson’s excellent 1969 The Fatal Inheritance), Holland has always had important divisions between the largely Protestant north and the largely Catholic south, with a more secular, mercantile urban middle class acting as counterbalance. In recent decades, this urban and now post-Christian majority has dominated, with couldn’t-care-less views on everything from sexual morality and drugs to immigration, first from former imperial possessions and then from anywhere, into one of the world’s most densely-populated countries. This set the scene for the rise and sanguinary fall of Pim Fortuyn and now the rise of Wilders (who lives under permanent police protection to avoid sharing the fate of his political predecessor).

The impressive electoral breakthrough of the anti-Jihadist Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands is sending predictable shock waves through Europe. Its leader, Geert Wilders, wants a stake in government after his party came third with 24 seats, more than doubling its share in the 150 member national assembly. “Nobody in The Hague can bypass the PVV anymore,” he said. “The impossible has happened,” he went on, “the Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration and less Islam.”

“Less Islam” is the key. Forget the currency crisis, social policy, welfare payments, and other nitty-gritty elements of most European elections. The biggest loser is Holland’s soon-to-be former Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, and his demise is long overdue. Six years ago, in a display of idiocy be expected from a supine Euro-Socialist, he rushed to declare -- in the immediate aftermath of the Jihadist murder of Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street -- that  “nothing is known about the motive” of the killer, and called on the nation “not to jump to far-reaching conclusions.” Balkenende also referred to van Gogh’s “outspoken opinions” -- hinting that he had it coming -- and added that it was “unacceptable if a difference of opinion led to this brutal murder.” Mijnheer Balkenende seemed to be implying that “this brutal murder” would have been deemed less “unacceptable” had it been caused not by “a difference of opinion” but by some more profound reason -- by the sense of pain and grievance in the Muslim community, perhaps, caused by the late filmmaker’s insensitive and inappropriate actions.

Balkenende’s defeat was also due to a host of other issues, but his undissenting dhimmitude is the key. His Islamophile inanities are no longer acceptable to a growing segment of Holland's electorate. The Old Continent is waking up, slowly, to the possibility that by 2050, Muslims will account for over a quarter of its young residents west of the Trieste-Stettin line. Millions of them already live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country, toward which they have a disdainful and hostile attitude.

Today’s “United Europe,” epitomized by Balkenende and his fellow-bien-pensants in Brussels and most national chancelleries, does not create social and civilizational commonalities except on the basis of wholesale denial of old mores and disdain for inherited values. It creates the dreary sameness of multicultural “tolerance.” Their decrepitude breeds contempt and haughty arrogance on the other side: Tariq Ramadan thus calmly insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of the host-society. Muslims in Europe should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says, while, “under the terms of Western liberal tolerance,” society as a whole should be “obliged to respect that choice.”

If such “respect” continues to be enforced by the elite class, by the end of this century there will be no “Europeans” as members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors, and inhabit lands associated with their names. The shrinking native populations will be indoctrinated into believing -- or else simply forced into accepting -- that the demographic shift in favor of unassimilable and hostile aliens is a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. The “liberal tolerance” and the accompanying “societal obligation” that Tariq Ramadan invokes are the tools of Western suicide. “No other race subscribes to these moral principles,” Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, “because they are weapons of self-annihilation.”

The Dutch voters -- traditionally among the most liberal in Europe -- are waking up to the fact that those weapons need to be discarded, and the upholders of those deadly “principles” removed from all positions of power and influence, if their nation is to survive.

In 1938 Hilaire Belloc wondered, “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans -- still nominally Christian -- and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?” Seven decades later, the same traits of decrepitude are present in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States, including both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones. Topping the list is elite hostility to all forms of solidarity of the majority population based on shared historical memories, ancestors, and common culture. The end result is the Westerners’ loss of the sense of propriety over their lands.

Widers is shaking an elite consensus that de facto open immigration, multiculturalism, and the existence of a large Muslim diaspora within the Western world are to be treated as a fixed and immutable fact. That consensus is flawed in logic, dogmatic in application, and disastrous in its results. The grand Gleichschaltung of nations, races, and cultures, which will mark the end of history, is not preordained. In Holland the fruits are all too visible. Gibbon could have had today’s Rotterdam in mind, when he wrote of Rome in decline, its masses morphing “into a vile and wretched populace.”

Wilders has shown that this crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament, was fined an equivalent of $4,000 on Tuesday for "insulting" the new European Union President Herman van Rompuy (r.) and refusing to apologize. In a memorable performance in Strasbourg ten days eaerlier, the Euroskeptic MEP told the former Beligian prime minister that he had "all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk":

"We were told that when we had a president, we'd see a giant global political figure, a man who would be the political leader for 500 million people, the man that would represent all of us all of us on the world stage, the man whose job was so important that of course you're paid more than President Obama. Well, I'm afraid what we got was you... The question I want to ask is: 'Who are you?' I'd never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you."

In what is being seen as a dry run for the national elections of 9 June, in the 3 March local elections Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) won control of its first municipality and came second in The Hague.

The town of Almere at the southern end of the Ijesselmeer is one of the newest towns in Holland, founded in 1975 on land reclaimed from the Zuider Zee only seven years previously. The town’s youthfulness and its mostly homogenous population may seem to be at odds with Wilders’ anti-Islamic and conservative message, but most of its residents commute to work in Amsterdam. The significance of coming second in The Hague is that it is the seat of the Dutch government and royal family, and the home to many institutions, such as the International Court of Justice. This was the party’s first outing in local elections, and it only contested these constituencies because of a lack of resources.