14 muslim groups file hate speech complaint against Wilders over election post
Updated at 18:02 to add the updated number of complaints filed with discriminatie.nl
Fourteen Islamic organizations in the Netherlands have filed a criminal complaint against far-right politician Geert Wilders, accusing him of inciting hatred, discrimination or violence, and of group insult and sedition over a social media post comparing images of women labeled as PVV and PvdA voters, RTL reports.
The complaint, confirmed by an attorney for the groups after reporting by Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, centers on a tweet posted last week by the leader of the Party for Freedom, or PVV. The image in the tweet showed a face split into two halves: one half featured a blonde woman with blue eyes and a friendly expression labeled “PVV”; the other half showed a woman wearing a headscarf with a stern, angry expression labeled “PvdA.” Wilders captioned the image: “The choice is yours on Oct. 29” — referring to the upcoming Tweede Kamer elections.
The national anti-discrimination hotline discriminatie.nl said Monday it had received 12,500 reports from the public about the tweet. The organization had already reported last week that more than 2,500 discrimination complaints were filed within days of the post appearing online. The only previous incident to trigger more reports was the 2020 satirical song “Prevention Is Better than Chinese,” released during the COVID-19 pandemic, which generated about 4,000 complaints.
“This number of reports is a clear signal from society,” a spokesperson for discriminatie.nl said last week, calling the post “polarizing, stigmatizing, and discriminatory.” The spokesperson told RTL that many complainants believed the post deliberately portrayed Muslims in a negative light, and that words like “tasteless,” “hateful,” and “racist” appeared frequently in the reports. Several people compared the imagery to Nazi propaganda targeting Jews during World War II. Discriminatie.nl is still accepting reports and has reportedly not ruled out filing its own formal complaint.
Attorneys Adem Çatbaş and Haroon Raza filed the current complaint on behalf of K9, a coalition of nine regional mosque federations, along with Collectief Jonge Moslims, Muslim Rights Watch, S.P.E.A.K, Meldpunt Islamofobie and the Federatie Islamitische Organisaties. The groups said in their filing that they represent the majority of Muslims in the Netherlands.
The organizations argued the image “cannot be seen separately from the broader societal climate in which Muslims in the Netherlands structurally face discrimination and stigmatization.” They cited a recent study presented to the Tweede Kamer that described anti-Muslim discrimination in the country as “urgent.”
The complaint said the tweet should be viewed “with historical awareness” and likened it to Nazi-era propaganda. “It is reminiscent of antisemitic portrayals spread by the Nazi paper Der Stürmer, in which Jewish people were depicted as a caricatured threat to society,” the filing stated. The tweet has also been widely compared to Nazi rhetoric online.
The groups pointed to other statements Wilders made on social media in the days after the tweet, including one declaring that Islam does not belong in the Netherlands, another calling for the protection of “our own people,” and a statement saying “our daughters must be able to walk safely in the street.” “The association between the criminal foreigner and the aggressive Muslim woman arises with this tweet,” the complaint said.
Wilders has faced legal action over group insult before. In March 2014, during a campaign event in The Hague, he asked supporters whether they wanted “more or fewer Moroccans in this city and the Netherlands.” The crowd chanted “fewer, fewer, fewer,” to which Wilders replied, “Well, then we will arrange that.”
After a seven-year legal process, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands upheld his conviction for inciting hatred and group insult on July 6, 2021, closing the case. The court stated that “group insult is prohibited under the Criminal Code” and that “even a politician must adhere to the basic principles of the rule of law and must not incite intolerance.”
