Worldly Chatter

I was reading the news on NetherlandsNews.net over my morning coffee when I bumped into an article that caught my attention. It was an article written by Bruno Waterfield of the Telegraph, India who writes on a Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

“An anti-immigrant politician is making a meteoric rise with his call on the Dutch — once one of the most tolerant nations in the world — to stop Islam taking over Europe.

Geert Wilders, the 43-year-old leader of the Freedom Party, is convinced that governments are being forced to accommodate a “tsunami of Islamisation” that is fundamentally incompatible with European social value. “Islam itself is the problem. Islam is a violent religion,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “The Prophet Mohammed was a violent man. The Quran is mostly a violent book. We should invest in Muslim people but they have to first get rid of half the Quran and half of their beliefs,” he said.” More

Wilders has been stirring a bit of trouble in the Dutch government on a number of issues, not just this. De Volkskrant (a Dutch newspaper) reports Geert Wilder also has provoked the outrage of a large number of politicians in The Hague with his announcement that he plans to submit a motion of no-confidence against state secretaries Ahmed Aboutaleb and Nebahat Albayrak. Wilders wants to submit the motion on Thursday during the parliamentary debate on the government statement. There isn’t anything that these two individuals have done to deserve this. The government is outraged over his recent conduct as his only basis for this is that they carry dual citizenship, Moroccan and Turkish respectively. He is also unhappy with new Integration Minister Ella Vogelaar as she does not want to ban burqas completely but rather only have them banned in public places and settings where they are dealing with large groups of people face to face…More

I share this because this is an ongoing issue all over Europe, not just the Netherlands. In the UK recently burqas were banned from being worn in public and there has been tension between Muslims and the English on such issues as religion, culture and whether Muslims are trying to dominate the area and force people to conform to them. Here in the Netherlands it isn’t just Wilders who are having issues; he is just the only one making enough noise.

What can be done to quiet the noise that has been going on all across Europe? How do you appease the people who have long called this or that country home while also making Muslims who are fast becoming the fastest spreading religion in the world happy? When you watch the news and see outside your door the unrest that is between the Islamic culture and the western world it makes you uneasy just to talk about it outside your own private rooms. To the average person we see that the Muslims won’t see the western culture for what it is and adapt to it when they come and live in it and the western world sees no reason to bend to accommodate them. Should we accommodate to them? Should they, who have come to us, accept what is and adapt to the environment they moved to? Some even fear that because of the rush of Muslims coming to western countries that those countries will lose their own identity and culture in hopes of not sounding hateful and ignorant and running around trying to find room for them.

A lot of people, while not liking how Wilders is going about it, agree with some of what he has to say and what he is trying to do. It is the same with what goes on in France and in the UK. Measures are being taken to ban burqas and, for a lack of a better word or term, take back their culture they feel is being lost in the constant need to accommodate people who come to their land. It is something constantly being talked about by some and avoided by others but will anything change?

 

Europe, Geert Wilders, UK, Netherlands, Islam, Dual Citizenship, expats