A Dutch Antagonist of Islam Waits for His Premiere

THE HAGUE

GEERT WILDERS’S bleached-blond hair goes to the root of his character.

For more than two decades, Mr. Wilders, the controversial anti-Islam member of the Dutch Parliament, has dyed his hair a provocative — some say extreme — platinum blond.

The color makes him stand out in a crowd, not terribly practical for someone facing periodic death threats from Muslim extremists.

But Mr. Wilders has built a career — and a new political party — on a risky and defiant outlandishness that encompasses everything from his hairstyle to his anti-Islamic rhetoric.

Days away from releasing a much-anticipated film critical of the Koran, Mr. Wilders recalled in an interview the advice he received years ago from political leaders about how to get ahead.

“First, you have to moderate your voice about Islam,” he remembered their telling him. “Second, change your stupid hair.”

He has refused to do either.

“If people push me, I do exactly the opposite,” he said.

Mr. Wilders, 44, is in the news here these days for a 10-to-15-minute film he says he has made depicting the Koran as the inspiration for terrorist attacks and other violence. Having failed to persuade a single Dutch television network to broadcast the film in its entirety, he said he planned to release it on the Internet by the end of this month.

He routinely equates the Koran with Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” saying it should be banned in the Netherlands, and he declared in an interview that the Prophet Muhammad could be compared to the German dictator.

“In his Medina time, if he would be alive today, Muhammad would be treated as a war criminal, being sent out of the country, being sent to jail,” he said.

Moderate Dutch Muslim leaders like Mohamed Rabbae, chairman of the Dutch Moroccan Council, are exasperated by Mr. Wilders’s standpoint on Islam and its prophet.

“Wilders is a little bit crazy, if I may say it in this way, because he is fighting against somebody who has been living in the sixth century, not in our time,” Mr. Rabbae said.

Virtually no one knows exactly what is in Mr. Wilders’s film; even the Netherlands’ worried prime minister has not been granted a screening. But the simple fact that Mr. Wilders is its muse makes people here and in parts of the Islamic world nervous.

Mr. Wilders said he made the film to show that “Islam and the Koran are part of a fascist ideology that wants to kill everything we stand for in a modern Western democracy.”

SOME here see Mr. Wilders’s film — titled “Fitna,” Arabic for civil strife — as a potential hate crime and have already filed police complaints in various Dutch cities, concerned that his past statements and the film will polarize religious groups and foster discrimination.

His supporters say he protects traditional Dutch values. His critics, and there are many, say he is an out-of-control, right-wing extremist risking his country’s good name for his own political gain. Others are even harsher; one former trade union leader called Mr. Wilders “evil.”

“Of course I am not evil,” Mr. Wilders responded, looking a little annoyed. “Do I look evil to you? Maybe I do, but I’m not.”

Mr. Wilders, who lives under constant police protection in an undisclosed location, is undeterred by threats from the Taliban to escalate attacks against Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan if the film is released.

Nor is he moved by Dutch expatriates abroad who, remembering the fallout from the Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, worry that the film may make their lives harder, or even dangerous.

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Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister, told a public television reporter that he found it “irresponsible to broadcast this film.”

“That’s because Dutch companies, Dutch soldiers and Dutch residents could and will be in danger,” Mr. Verhagen said.

Such statements spur Mr. Wilders on, and in his opinion unintentionally prove that Islam is a rigid, intolerant religion whose followers try to muffle criticism, often violently. Framing himself as a defender of free speech, Mr. Wilders said there would not be such a fuss about his film if it were about the Bible.

“We can never allow people who use nondemocratic means, people who use violence instead of arguments, people who use knives instead of debates, we can never allow them to set the agenda,” he said.

After the 2004 release of a short film here that graphically portrayed the abuse of women in the Islamic world, the director, Theo van Gogh, was killed by a Muslim extremist.

Mr. Wilders, already in the Dutch Parliament for six years at that point, was not associated with that film, but he went briefly into hiding when government security forces feared he might become the next target.

Two years later, memories of the van Gogh murder — coupled with concerns about Muslim immigration — helped Mr. Wilders and his newly formed Party for Freedom capture 6 percent of the seats in Parliament.

Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.

Occasionally, conflicts arise between mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has successfully mined the unease between them.

“Ten to 15 percent of the Dutch voters more or less see him as a new leader, one who dares to say what he thinks,” said Hugo van der Parre, deputy editor of the Dutch television news program “Nova.” But “many people see him, as well, as a nut case.”

MR. WILDERS says he detests Islam but not Muslims. “I believe the Islamic ideology is a retarded, dangerous one, but I make a distinction,” he said. “I don’t hate people. I don’t hate Muslims.

He added: “I am not saying all Muslims are wrong or are terrorists or criminals. You will never hear me say that.”

Mr. Wilders, who is married and has no children, was raised Roman Catholic, but is no longer religious. The youngest of four children, he traveled and worked his way through the Middle East for two years after his high school graduation. Since then, he said, he has visited Israel at least 40 times and maintains close contacts there. But he has no real connections from his time in the rest of the region, admitting he does not have any Muslim friends.

His claims to the contrary, some Muslims believe that Mr. Wilders’s animosity toward Islam extends to them.

“If you say the prophet is a war criminal, you say, I hate Muslims,” a Dutch newspaper columnist, Youssef Azghari, said in an interview. “Because the prophet is a symbol. He was the one who invented the Islam.”

Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist.

Mr. Wilders insists the film is every bit as real as his long-held belief that Islam is a danger to Dutch and other Western societies.

“I get in so much trouble, both privately and politically, that if I would do it for publicity reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.