BBC: Wilders firing at EU, Islam, migrants
PVV leader Geert Wilders has told the BBC that he wants to bring down the European Union. Speaking to the station’s Europe Editor Gavin Hewitt in a TV interview that aired, he dubbed Islam an "inferior culture" and said that future Eastern European migrants should stay home.
"Indeed, I believe that Islam is an inferior culture," Wilders said. "I know that a lot of Muslims are law-abiding people whose concern is to have a good life, a good education for their children and a good job and I have nothing against them."
PVV founder Geert Wilders, as seen in 2006 (ANS-Online/Flickr)When his motives were questioned, Wilders said, "A responsible politician I believe never stirs up any problems in any society."
“Mr Wilders recounts how a magazine has placed him in fourth position on an al-Qaeda hit list. It is to underline that he has been more outspoken about Islam that almost any other European politician,” Hewitt reports.
In the video broadcast today on BBC World, Wilders Recalling his meeting with Wilders at the Dutch parliament, Hewitt details how security issues mandated the curtains be closed in the "elegant meeting room."Hewitt writes that when he asked Wilders whether he wanted to "bring down the European Union," the politician said "Yes, as a matter of fact I do," he replied, "in a way that I would like the Netherlands to leave the European Union."
"I believe that we have very few things to benefit from the European Union. I believe that a growing amount of voters feel that we pay a lot of money to Europe, but that at the end of the day we are not in charge of our own laws, of our own borders, of our own money, of our own budget, and people want to change that." When Hewitt called Wilders out, saying Europe will never return to a time when countries controlled their own borders in that way, the PVV parliamentarian said, "I'm more positive than that."Hewitt says Wilders' view of democracy is one that remains at a nation-state level, and that it cannot exist internationally across a continent. For this, Wilders told the reporter he campaigns for a role in a parliament the he ultimately wants to subvert.
"He takes issue with my word 'undermine' as being too negative but concedes he wants nothing to do with institutions like the European Commission. He does not want to reform the EU but to replace it with nation states set free from the shackles of Brussels,” Hewitt writes.
Beginning in January, people from Bulgaria and Romania will be allowed to travel and work freely across the European Union, including the Netherlands, something Wilders has spoken against for several years. GroenLinks MEP Judith Sargentini has broadly referred to opposition of these two countries as "populist grandstanding." Nevertheless, Wilders wants the Tweede Kamer to pass a bill banning Bulgarian and Romanian workers from entering the Netherlands, no matter how many treaties it violates.
"My message to those two countries is 'Stay home.'"
