Wilders plays politics with girl’s murder despite rejecting €10 mil. to fight femicide
PVV leader Geert Wilders used the debate on who is ruling the Netherlands now that the NSC has also pulled out of the Schoof I Cabinet to politicize the murder of 17-year-old Lisa from Abcoude in Duivendrecht last week. He made unsubstantiated claims that people of non-Western descent are suspected of sex crimes twice as often as Dutch people and called on people to vote for the PVV.
“That poor 17-year-old girl who was murdered by someone staying in an asylum center, who was detained and released a week earlier for a sexual offense,” Wilders said. “Unfortunately, this could happen to anyone in the Netherlands. It mustn’t happen again. If you’re fed up with it, if you think something needs to be done, vote for the PVV. If you’re okay with all this, go to D66 for all I care.”
D66 leader Rob Jetten clashed with Wilders on the topic. Jetten called Lisa’s murder “truly horrific” and said that it leaves no one in the Netherlands unaffected. “A girl murdered in the street while cycling home. But Mr. Wilders was silent. Absolutely silent. Until he could pin the murder on an asylum seeker. And that’s Mr. Wilders’ typical pattern. He only speaks out about women’s rights and gay rights if he can also use them to address asylum seekers and migrants.”
The D66 leader pointed to a proposal to allocate 10 million euros to combat femicide and misogyny that Wilders voted against. “Last year, parliament wanted a study on a better approach to psychological violence. Mr. Wilders opposed it. We wanted a national helpline for victims of violence. Mr. Wilders opposed it. We wanted a separate helpline for women with violent partners. Mr. Wilders opposed it. When there was an international treaty against femicide, Mr. Wilders opposed it.”
“While every day, or every eight days, a woman is murdered in the Netherlands. Every day, girls and women in the Netherlands feel unsafe,” Jetten said. “There isn’t a single woman, not a single girl, in this country who believes her life will be safer and freer with the hatred that Mr. Wilders spews here every day.”
Wilders responded that the PVV did support a proposal for harsher punishments.
A man killed 17-year-old Lisa from Abcoude as she was cycling home from a night out with friends in Amsterdam during the early hours of Wednesday, August 20. She had left the Leidseplein area at around 3:30 a.m. on her bicycle, and the police found her lifeless body in a ditch in Duivendrecht around 40 minutes later, after she had called the police to report that a man had accosted her.
The police arrested a 22-year-old man for her murder on Friday. The man was already in custody for the rape of a woman on Weesperzijde in Amsterdam the week before. The man was arrested in an asylum center, but unlike what Wilders said, he was arrested for that crime on Thursday, the day after Lisa’s murder, not a week before.
