A Dutch Member of Parliament of Geert Wilder’s ‘Party for Freedom’ (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV), has called for the closure of all mosques in the Netherlands, stating that they wanted to ‘de-Islam the Netherlands.’ MP Machiel de Graaf made the comments during a debate on integration and this is a step change for the anti-Islam party since they had previously called for a freeze on mosque building programmes, rather than the closure of all mosques within the country.
The right-wing political party MP then went onto focus on schools and the supposedly changing nature of schools, wildly claiming that “a majority of school pupils are Islamic……….Dutch unity, identity and culture are being wrecked by immigration and via wombs.”
Once again, Muslim women have been brought into a debate in immigration and with a focus on and the deligitimisation of their bodies. Yet, these very same groups purport to speak about women’s rights whilst demeaning Muslim women as if they are centres of ‘breeding,’ talk that is dangerous and which potentially feeds and fuels attacks on Muslim women. Yet, hypocritically, the PVV Party talks about fighting for women’s rights, except that those rights are selective for specific women and not for others.