Here is an excerpt from an article by former Financial Times writer and Dutch media Middle East correspondent Ferry Biedermann published on ForeignPolicy.com on October 4, 2010.
The rise of the far right has hardly caused a ripple in the Netherlands. The Dutch coalition deal was done before the end of September, marking the political whitewashing of the previously unacceptable Geert Wilders, the provocative, and peroxide-blond political wunderkind MP, and his right-wing Party for Freedom. He has agreed to lend his support to a minority government [and] in return Wilders has been given freedom to pursue anti-immigrant measures and several openly anti-Muslim initiatives, including a burqa ban and closer monitoring of Islamic schools.
His outspokenness has made him a hated figure for some Muslims, and he lives under constant police protection. Recently, an Australian imam called for his beheading, the last in a long line of threats. Wilders himself argued in July on the website muslimsdebate.com that he does not hate Muslims — he just opposes Islam and wants Muslims to liberate themselves from its shackles. [But] Geert Wilders is slowly but surely making Islamophobia an accepted element of political rhetoric in the Netherlands. To give an idea of the tone of his discourse in the Netherlands, he has called for a “head rag tax” on women wearing headscarves. He favors banning the Quran, wants to close Muslim schools but not equivalent Christian or Jewish ones, wants to force immigrants to sign “assimilation contracts,” and wants to include the “Judeo-Christian character” of the state in the constitution.