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rightwing Dutch politician assassinated
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cancer boy
cancer boy
977 posts

Re: freedom of speech
May 07, 2002, 16:19
As the interview quotes that follow illustrate, the guy certainly wasn't a "nazi" by any stretch of th e imagination. I don't endorse his views at all but I don't think they're deserving of a bullet in the head either. Shooting anyone whose views I didn't like would make me a fascist (although naturally I'd be one of the "good" fascists who was allowed to kill "bad" fascists).

(Source - Daily Telegraph 04/05/2002)

"I'm not anti-Muslim, I'm not anti-immigration; I'm saying we've got big problems in our cities. It's not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate."

He is speaking close to the Turkish consulate, in a run-down quarter of Rotterdam's port where the beat is Afro-Caribbean, teenage girls wear the veil, and the streets are desolate after dark. "In any case, this country is already bursting. I think 16 million are quite enough."

Dressed in his trademark checked shirt and matching silk handkerchief, the television wit and professional provocateur relished the chance to take a swipe at Tony Blair, telling The Telegraph that his moralistic foreign policy was a "danger to world peace".

Snorting with delight, he said the British would not care for it if an Arab leader ordered them to change their ways under threat of aerial bombing.

The epitome of the new politics, neither Left nor Right, Mr Fortuyn sweeps from one television studio to another in his chauffeur-driven Daimler, cradling his lap-dogs, and reduces his tired-looking rivals to open-mouthed silence by sheer cheek.

Laxer rules on euthanasia, legalised marketing of soft drugs, the use of the private sector to cut waiting lists in hospitals, abolition of capital gains tax: he comes at them from every side, usually skating over his loose arithmetic.

One would hardly know that he was once a Marxist professor of sociology. But the core of the Fortuyn message is laid out in his book Against the Islamicisation of our Culture.

It is selling like hot cakes, with the warning that radical Islam, creating fortresses in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, is a mortal threat to Holland's easy-going way of life, its feminist emancipation, and tolerance of gay people.

Contemptuously waving aside suggestions that he is Holland's answer to Jean-Marie Le Pen, or Austria's Jorg Haider, or Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Blok, Mr Fortuyn said it was sloppy thinking to lump all of Europe's anti-establishment movements together as some sort of meaningful far Right.

"Right-wing in Holland is to the Left of the Tories in England," he said. "If I were living in France I'd vote for Jacques Chirac, despite the fact that he can't seem to keep his hands out of the cash till," he added.

"I am appalled by Le Pen's anti-Semitic past and feelings. A man who says the Holocaust is no more than a footnote in history is beyond my comprehension."

Unlike the French National Front, Mr Fortuyn has drawn a line in the sand over deportation - the issue that really sorts the sheep from the goats on Europe's political Right. "If you allow immigrants into your country then you're responsible for them.

"That means they have the same rights and you can't just throw them out of the country. If Turkish or Moroccan boys misbehave here, it's up to us to re-educate them, and when necessary to punish them," he said. Those who are in, stay in. For the rest, the portcullis comes down.
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