In this piece from Dutch News we find the alleged sources of US funding for Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party For Freedom). Of particular note are David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Jim DeMint, Liz Cheney and, of course Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller.

And just to show that there is no nationalist party with which Pam-bert won’t align themselves, Dutch News reports that the December, 2008 showing of Fitna in Jerusalem was at the “Facing Jihad” conference which was organized by Aryeh Eldad, member of the National Union, an alliance of nationalist political parties in Israel and the head of the ultra-right Hatikva party.

Wilders and the US Israel lobby

The Dutch press has tracked down several of the principal financial sources for the PVV in the US. Two figures stand out: David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. Horowitz runs the online FrontPage Magazine and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which with an annual budget of around 5 million dollars is an important financier of outlets such as Jihad Watch and Islam critic Robert Spencer.

According to the NRC, it was Horowitz who introduced the Dutchman to leading conservative activists Senator Jim DeMint and Dick Cheney´s daughter Liz last year, and brought Wilders into contact with one of his own financiers who is not named.

Pipes is founder of the pro-Israeli Middle East Forum and has long been in favour of a pre-emptive strike against Iran. Pipes also formed the Legal Project in 2007 to raise and distribute funds for researchers, journalists, and authors who face legal battles based on their critical statements about Islam – ‘jihad by court’, as they say.

Wilders is of course an ideal recipient. In 2009 Pipes managed to round up “an amount in six figures” for Wilders in the USA. Interesting detail is that both Horowitz and Pipes belong to the Right of the Republicans but see Wilders mainly as a useful extension of their pro-Israeli agitating.

Horowitz literally said in this article that he couldn’t make the same anti-Islamic comments as Wilders in the US because it would be too dangerous. Then there is the American Freedom Alliance, who honoured Wilders with a reception in the Reagan Library in October 2009. Officially the AFA doesn’t do fund-raising for the PVV. But of course, gatherings such as this are ideal for opening up private channels.

So what of Israel? Vrij Nederland covered that angle in an article last year. Interesting part of the narrative was the trail behind Wilders’ film Fitna, which appeared in many scenes to be a very close (if not identical) copy to the earlier 80-minute documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West, which Horowitz promoted in the US.

Financial supporters for the film (which is meant to have cost $400,000) came from the obscure Clarion Fund and the orthodox Jewish religious/cultural organisation Aish HaTorah, based in Jerusalem opposite the Wailing Wall and closely linked to the West Bank settler movement.

In December 2008 Wilders spoke at the Facing Jihad conference in Jerusalem, where he also showed Fitna in Israel for the first time. There were few Europeans present, but several US neocons like Pipes and his blog-groupie Pamela Geller.

The conference was organised by Arieh Eldad, former Israeli army officer and leader of the extreme right Hatikva party tht places itself on the no-compromise right of Benjamin Netanyahu. For these groups the West Bank should be emptied of Palestinians, who can leave to neighbouring Arab states, to ensure a secure Jewish nation – a crucial part of the global struggle against the Islamic threat.

Financial support for the conference came from the Ariel Center for Policy Research, a base for the anti Peace Process hawks in Israeli politics, who propagate their views via the publication Nativ.