Nation of Anti-Islam
Is there more Muslim-bashing in the Netherlands than other countries?
Dutch political leader Geert Wilders goes on trial in Amsterdam next week for allegedly inciting hatred and insulting Muslims. As head of the right-wing Freedom Party, Wilders has called the Quran “fascist,” compared it to Mein Kampf, and released a movie featuring Quran verses alongside images of the 9/11 attacks. In 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered after making anti-Muslim remarks, as was the anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Why is there so much anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Netherlands?
Because it’s a tiny, densely populated country with a high immigration rate. The Netherlands is hardly the only European nation to spawn a strong anti-immigrant political wing. France just passed a law banning burqas. Swiss voters passed a ban on the construction of new minarets in 2009. Austria’s Freedom Party campaigned this year on a platform that included anti-immigrant slogans. But the Netherlands has a higher population density—about 400 people per square kilometer—than any other major European country. It also has a stronger flow of immigrants—2.55 migrants for every thousand people—than most of its neighbors, and Muslims constitute about 6 percent of the country’s population of 16 million. (In Austria, Switzerland and Germany, they make up about 4 percent.) And whereas Muslims are ghettoized in countries like the United Kingdom, they’re more visible in the Netherlands, with largely Muslim neighborhoods abutting Christian ones and more integration between them.