The cost of Western fundamentalism

As the virulently anti-Islam, anti-immigration Dutch politician Geert Wilders sought re-election in last week's polling in the Netherlands, light has been thrown on the links of his less than transparent parliamentary party.

As a Reuters article pointed out, "Wilder's party is self-funded," thus absolving the need to disclose donors, as is mandatory for the mainstream, government-funded parties.

Wilders - who joined the Dutch parliament in 2006 having campaigned from an anti-Islam platform - had a 24-member party in the 150-seat lower house, but lost 11 in the recent poll.

His MPs stand against mosque construction, headscarves and non-Western immigration.

Tolerance and outreach are on a distant planet, with Wilders having declared he would not enter a mosque "in a hundred thousand years."

Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in July last year and was last month sentenced to an initial 21 years in jail, quoted Wilders in an online manifesto that sought to justify his crimes.

It transpires that in a legal case brought against Wilders in 2010 regarding his film Fitna - broadly translated as "upheaval, chaos, creating discord" - "which interlays images of terrorist attacks with quotation from the Koran," legal fees were paid by the Middle East Forum (MEF), a US-based pro-Israeli think tank.

The MEF was founded in 1990 by Daniel Pipes to "promote American interests in the Middle East."

The forum views the region as an area of "radical ideologies, violence and weapons of mass destruction as a major source of problems for the US."

Ironically only Israel is proven to have of weapons of mass destruction, and in seemingly copious quantities.

The MEF aims to protect the "freedom of speech of anti-Muslim authors promoting US interests in the Middle East," and of course to protect it "from Middle East threats."

"Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe. If we do not stop Islamification, 'Eurabia' and 'Netherabia' will just be a matter of time," Wilders told the Dutch parliament.

Another supporter of Wilders is Los Angeles-based David Horowitz, whose organisation is the David Horowitz Freedom Centre "dedicated to the defence of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by leftist and Islamic enemies at home and abroad."

Horowitz has also founded an Israeli Security Project.

"Horowitz agreed with the Dutchman's repeated and public comparison of the Koran with Hitler's Mein Kampf," regarding comparing the two works as a "fair analogy."

Pamela Geller who runs Stop Islamisation of America is also cited as a supporter, though denies she gives Wilders any funding.

Wilders is described as deprived of a personal life as a result of his hatred of Islam, with no privacy and 24-hour guards - paid for by the Dutch taxpayer.

He states that nowhere has he had "that special feeling of solidarity that I always get when I arrive at Ben Gurion International Airport," which he records he has arrived at 40 times in the last 25 years.

This solidarity has led him to call for Jordan to be renamed Palestine and for Palestinians to return there and for the Dutch government move their embassy in Amman to Jerusalem.

Further, he has stated: "If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next. Thus, Jerusalem is the main front protecting the West.

"It is not a conflict over territory but rather an ideological battle between the mentality of the liberated West and the ideology of Islamic barbarism."

Jerusalem's millennia of guardianship by regionally rooted Muslims, Christians and Jews, predominantly, seems to have escaped him.

Between them all, what a meeting of minds.

Pipes and friends, it seems, cast a long shadow.

As Max Blumenthal has written, the promotor of the filth-ridden anti-Muslim film The Innocence of Muslims, which has triggered anti-US protests across the Middle East, is Steve Klein, "a known anti-Muslim activist with ties to the extreme Christian right and the militia movement.

He is "a Hemet, California-based insurance salesman who claims to have led a 'hunter-killer team' in Vietnam.

"Klein is a right-wing extremist who emerged from the mindset that produced Anders Behring Breivik and which takes inspiration from the writings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes," wrote Blumenthal.

Pipes has also virulently denied having had any influence in the publishing of the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

However he confirms on his website that an editor responsible for their commission, Flemming Rose, interviewed him in Philadelphia in October 2004. The result was an article entitled The Threat of Islam which appeared in the paper that month.

The 12 cartoons appeared late in 2005 and resulted in the burning of the Danish embassies in Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon and Iran, an estimated minimum of 100 deaths, stormings of European buildings and burnings of European flags.

Denmark's PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared it Denmark's worst international crisis since the second world war.

US President Barack Obama said after the death of ambassador Christopher Stevens and his colleagues - the 10 Libyan staff killed in the attack on the embassy in Benghazi apparently passed him by - that he rejects denigration of religious belief.

Perhaps a place to start denigration's halt would be the homegrown variety in the Western, crusading, fundamentalist Christian-Zionist alliance from Wilders to Pipes.