Wilders remains an outsider despite Dutch election ‘victory’
Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigration and anti-Islam ‘Party for Freedom’ (PVV), is being portrayed as the ‘winner’ of this week’s Dutch general election.
And in a sense he is, though many H&D readers will be sceptical of his variety of populist ‘right-wing’ politics.
First of all, we have to understand that he has ‘won’ in a very different sense to ‘winning’ a British election, let alone an American one. While in the UK the leader of the largest party is almost 100% guaranteed to become Prime Minister, and is very likely to have a majority in Parliament without requiring support from other parties, in the Netherlands multi-party politics has been pushed to the extreme.
After these elections there are fifteen parties represented in the Dutch Parliament, even though it has only 150 seats. The smallest of them (a tiny right-wing splinter party) has one seat even though they polled just 0.7%.
Wilders ‘won’ the election with 23.6%, well ahead of his nearest rivals, but has fewer than half the seats required to obtain a parliamentary majority.
It seems almost certain that some form of coalition will be fixed that will exclude Wilders from power.
The good news is that any such coalition is likely to be unstable and short-lived. Dutch voters are shifting in large numbers towards anti-immigration positions, though even those who take this view are divided on other issues.
The mainstream conservative VVD (which has been part of coalition governments and often provided prime ministers for the past forty years) had a disastrous election, falling to third place and losing almost a third of its seats.
The VVD had thought it was a bright idea to elect a new female leader of Turkish origin who parroted some of Wilders’ anti-immigration ideas, though less convincingly. Both she and the leaders of other rival parties were easily outshone by Wilders in televised election debates.
The centrist liberal party D66 also had a disastrous election under an inept new leader. In addition to Wilders, the main winners were a new centre-right party NSC (which will almost certainly refuse to enter any coalition that includes Wilders) and a Green/Left alliance led by a former European Commissioner, Frans Timmermans, which of course is entirely anti-Wilders.
Despite his election ‘victory’ Wilders is now finding that all his years of subservience to the Zionist lobby have bought him no credit at all with the political mainstream, who continue to shun him.
Dutch politics and society remain chronically divided and it’s difficult to see any stable outcome in the near future, whether on immigration, or on environmental policy, or on more traditional issues involving taxation and the size of the welfare state.
One big advantage for Wilders is that his main rival on the anti-immigration wing of politics, Thierry Baudet’s FvD, discredited itself by pursuing crank anti-vaccination policies and extreme Putinism. The FvD lost more than half of their previous vote and now have only three seats in Parliament.
Wilders himself has toned down his Putinism, but remains essentially anti-Ukraine and pro-Israel – positions that will divide opinion sharply among H&D readers.
Labour’s ‘multicultural’ project digs its own grave
Critics of ‘wokeism’ have been entertained in recent weeks by the collapse of Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to build a new Scottish nation that allows men (including convicted rapists) to redefine themselves as women.
Today another aspect of political correctness has fallen foul of inconvenient reality: this time in the Labour Party at Westminster.
Preet Gill is MP for Birmingham Edgbaston and a member of Sir Keir Starmer’s front bench, as “shadow International Development Secretary” (i.e. opposing the minister for overseas aid).
She is also one of two practising Sikhs among Labour MPs. (Another was recently appointed as a Labour peer, joining two other Sikhs in the Lords, and several more Sikhs have recently been selected to stand for Labour in winnable constituencies at the next general election.)
This has had predictable consequences – in that (yet again) there is a conflict of loyalties involving a politician from an ethnic minority.
Liberals and feminists in the Sikh community have for some time been raising concerns about sexual abuse inside Sikh temples (known as ‘gurdwaras’ or ‘guru ghars’). This is related to the broader problem of domestic violence within the Sikh community, which is believed to be related to traditionally high levels of alcoholism among Sikhs.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite her position in the Labour shadow cabinet, Preet Gill has chosen to ally herself with conservative Sikhs against their liberal / feminist critics. Writing on the WhatsApp group ‘Sikhs in Labour’, Ms Gill has repeatedly called such criticisms of Sikh temples “outrageous” and “dangerous”.
Adding to the controversy, Gill is now accused of embarrassing Labour leader Starmer because of her hardline Sikh connections. The Home Office has been handed a dossier including photographs of Gill’s visit with Starmer to her local gurdwara, where they posed in front of a display of photographs of Sikh extremists including Labh Singh, a Sikh paramilitary leader who was once accused of masterminding India’s biggest ever bank robbery in order to raise funds for his group.
While far more attention has focused on Muslim political activism, the much smaller Sikh community has attained political influence disproportionate to its size, not just in the UK but in other Western countries. Nikki Haley (born into a Sikh family and originally named Namrata Randhawa) recently announced her candidature for the Republican nomination for US President. In Canada, the junior party in the governing coalition is led by a Sikh, Jagmeet Singh, and a deputy leader of the opposition Conservative Party is also a Sikh, Tim Uppal.
The most recent census showed that Sikhs represent 0.9% of the population in England and Wales (due to CoViD we do not yet have complete UK statistics): the fourth largest religious group – behind Christians (46.2%), Muslims (6.5%), and Hindus (1.7%).
In Canada, Sikhs are 2.1% of the population, and in the USA 0.2%.
Latest woke insanity sees Shakespeare’s theatre issue ‘anti-semitism’ warning
In the latest pathetic display of woke ‘sensitivity’, Shakespeare’s Globe has issued a warning to theatre-goers that The Merchant of Venice – currently being staged by candlelight at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – “contains antisemitism, colourism, and racism”.
We aren’t quite sure what “colourism” means, but we can be sure it isn’t an apology for the Globe having cast two black men and one Asian women among characters meant to portray 16th century Venetians.
As for “anti-semitism” – can anyone planning to see The Merchant of Venice really be unaware that its central character – the moneylender Shylock – is perhaps the most archetypal Jewish villain in literary history?
If the Globe were really concerned about whether the Shylock image is fair or not, then instead of this pathetic cringe perhaps they would care to sponsor a conference or study day to accompany the production? H&D would be very happy to provide a speaker.
For example we could discuss two statements by one of the greatest figures in British political history, Ernest Bevin, who founded Britain’s largest trade union, took charge of labour relations in Churchill’s government during the Second World War, and was Foreign Secretary for almost six years after the war, when he was the co-architect of NATO.
Bevin told the Trade Union Congress during the 1931 economic crisis: “It is a game of Shylock versus the people, with Shylock getting the pound of flesh every time.”
And at an emergency Cabinet meeting soon after the Second World War, by which time war debt had tightened Shylock’s grip. Bevin said in Cabinet (!) that “we [the British government and by extension the British people] are in Shylock’s hands”. This observation was so incendiary that it was not typed into the official Cabinet minutes, but appears in the handwritten notes of that meeting taken by a senior civil servant.
This was at a time when British soldiers and police were fighting Jewish terrorists in Palestine, and although it took almost three years, ‘American’ pressure eventually forced the British government into acquiescence in the creation of Israel in 1948.
So if the Globe really wants to discuss the question of ‘anti-semitism’ and Shylock in a British context, let’s start with Ernest Bevin and discuss whether his views reflected ‘racism’ or reality.
Or is the Globe interested only in woke posturing rather than scholarship?
Hindus rising to top of British Government
The highest level of Britain’s Government was rocked by an unprecedented resignation this weekend, after the top civil servant at the Home Office resigned, making extraordinary allegations against Home Secretary Priti Patel.
It had already been alleged a few days earlier that the Security Service MI5 “did not trust” Ms Patel with secret information, despite her being the senior minister responsible for MI5, as well as for counter-terrorism, policing, immigration and many other sensitive issues.
This is the second time in just over a year that Ms Patel has faced unwelcome headlines. In November 2017 she was forced to resign from then Prime Minister Theresa May’s Cabinet after admitting a series of secret meetings with Israeli officials and politicians including Benjamin Netanyahu.
Then and now, Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard was and is one of Ms Patel’s principal defenders.
Yet according to her Permanent Secretary at the Home Office Sir Philip Rutnam – one of the elite ‘mandarins’ of the British Civil Service usually legendary for their discretion – Ms Patel simply could not be believed and was impossible to work with.
Sir Philip is now beginning a legal action against the Government for ‘constructive dismissal’, ensuring that this damaging saga will continue for many months, just after Prime Minister Boris Johnson had already lost his most senior minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid. This might have led Ms Patel to believe she is unsackable.
While many H&D readers no doubt share the widespread delusion that Muslims are the ethnic minority that wields political influence in Britain, the Patel saga is part of a wider story in which the ruling Conservative Party is seen to have effectively declared war on Muslims in Britain, while promoting a surprising number of Hindus to top positions and developing disturbing ties to the Hindu extremist government in India.
Ms Patel (the daughter of ethnic Indian immigrants who came to the UK from Uganda in the 1970s) is one of three Hindus in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet, all in very senior positions. Rishi Sunak is now Chancellor of the Exchequer: his grandparents were originally from the Punjab region of India and immigrated to the UK from Kenya in the 1960s. Mr Sunak (a former hedge fund manager who spent three years with Goldman Sachs) is married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire. He took his parliamentary oath on the Hindu holy book Bhagavad Gita, as did his newly promoted colleague Alok Sharma, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Mr Sharma was born in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and immigrated to Britain aged 5. His wife is Swedish, but unlike his two Hindu colleagues in the Johnson Cabinet Mr Sharma represents an ethnically diverse constituency (Reading West) in contrast to the very White constituencies in North Yorkshire and Essex represented by Mr Sunak and Ms Patel.
There are no Muslim ministers serving at any level of Johnson’s government, let alone in the cabinet. Johnson’s only Muslim colleague – Nusrat Ghani, a junior transport minister, was sacked in this month’s reshuffle. She is one of only four Muslim Tory MPs, one of whom – the newly elected MP for Wakefield, Imran Ahmad-Khan, is a very atypical Muslim, having been described as “openly gay” in several press releases which have since been corrected!
This is a remarkable over-representation of Hindus, who amount to 1.3% of the UK population yet hold two of the top three ministerial posts in the Johnson Cabinet, the other being Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, whose father was a Czech Jewish immigrant. Muslims are 4.4% of the UK population, yet have no ministers in either the cabinet or more junior roles.
British diplomats raised concerns during last year’s general election about explicit links between India’s extremist Hindu government and the Conservative Party campaign.
Another ethnic minority Tory who gained promotion is Buddhist Suella Braverman, now Attorney General, who took her oath of allegiance on the Dhammapada. Ms Braverman (whose family origins are on the formerly Portuguese-controlled Indian island of Goa) has also faced recent media controversy after it was revealed that she belongs to a Buddhist sect whose founder was an alleged sexual predator.
EDL Demo in Support of Geert Wilders, Parliament, 5 March 2010
EDL vs. UAF: EDL win on points… scoring a significant victory for Freedom
Various Sources, 5 Mar 2010: The English Defence League take to the streets of London protesting against Muslim extremism and in support of Geert Wilders, who attends the House of Lords to show his controversial film Fitna.
Anti-fascists scrabble around all week putting out emergency emails calling for support, but are heavily outnumbered by the EDL on the day, whose Divisions have travelled from all over the country to be there.
Given the significant nature, size and location of the demonstrations, there is, shockingly, little in the way of media coverage.
Check the following links for MSM reporting of the demonstrations (the Guardian video is recommended, but ignore the obvious pro-UAF, anti-EDL bias), along with EDL Media and other right-media coverage:
“Support Geert Wilders” March a Complete Success, ENGLISH DEFENCE LEAGUE [external site]
Geert Wilders anti-Islam film gets House of Lords screening, GUARDIAN [external site]
When the English Defence League came to London, GUARDIAN Video [external site]
Muslims outraged at UK screening of ‘Fitna’ film, Al Arabia [external site]
How the Nazis stole Christmas
No mention here of how Yule was originally a heathen festival stolen by the Christians…
DAILY TELEGRAPH, 15 Dec 2009: As a new exhibition in the western German city of Cologne shows, the Nazis tried to skew the Christmas story to do away with the Jewish baby Jesus and impose their racist ideology and propaganda on the popular festival.
“Celebrating the birth of a Jewish baby was unthinkable for the Nazis,” said Juergen Mueller, the chief researcher behind the exhibition.
“But Christmas was too popular to be banned. They therefore decided to corrupt it.”
Nazi officials “invented a Germanic origin” for Christmas, renaming it “Julfest” and claiming that yuletide traditions stemmed from ancient rituals surrounding the winter solstice four days earlier, Mueller added.
Read full article [external link]
Buddhism is fastest-growing religion in English jails over past decade
Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion in England’s jails, with the number of followers rising eightfold over the past decade.
DAILY TELEGRAPH, 5 Aug 2009: Although adherents to the Eastern faith believe in peace and the sanctity of life, almost all of the Buddhists behind bars in this country are serving lengthy sentences for serious crimes such as violence and sex offences.
Some jails and secure hospitals including Broadmoor have opened shrines known as Buddha Groves in their grounds, and there is a nationwide network of chaplains to cater for the growing population.
It is claimed that most of the Buddhists in jail converted after their conviction, and chose it over other religions because its emphasis on meditation helps them cope with being locked up.
Supporters of Buddhist criminals say they also believe the spiritual development they gain in prison will help them once they are released, and prevent them from re-offending.
Lord Avebury, a Liberal Democrat peer who is the patron of Angulimala, the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy Organisation, told The Daily Telegraph: “The numbers are quite remarkable. I think one of the reasons is that they convert to Buddhism in prison – it’s a reasonable hypothesis that they become interested when inside.
