Geert Wilders is a loser. The right-wing Dutch politician’s anti-immigrant, anti-Islam platform flopped in national elections last week in the Netherlands.
But if Wilders is unpopular at home, he’s popular here in the U.S. with our own far-right whackaloons. Reuters’ Anthony Deutsch and Mark Hosenball report:
Groups in America seeking to counter Islamic influence in the West say they funded police protection and paid legal costs for Wilders. …
Wilders’ ideas — calling for a halt to non-Western immigration and bans on Muslim headscarfs and the construction of mosques — have struck a chord in mainstream politics beyond the Netherlands. …
The Middle East Forum, a pro-Israeli think tank based in Philadelphia, funded Wilders’ legal defense in 2010 and 2011 against Dutch charges of inciting racial hatred, its director Daniel Pipes said.
… David Horowitz, who runs a network of Los Angeles-based conservative groups and a website called FrontPage magazine, said he paid Wilders fees for making two speeches, security costs during student protests and overnight accommodation for his Dutch bodyguards during a 2009 U.S. trip.
Horowitz said he paid Wilders for one speech in Los Angeles and one at Temple University in Philadelphia. He declined to specify the amounts, but said that Wilders had received “a good fee.”
Horowitz and Pipes have a lot in common. They’re both dishonest, inflammatory anti-Muslim bigots willing to say or to pretend to believe anything for their cause. And they both get lots of funding from the Bradley Foundation, where National Organization for Marriage-founder Robert George and fellow alleged intellectual George Will serve on the board of directors.
Oh, speaking of Horowitz — a big thank you to the passive-aggressive benefactor who sent me an Amazon gift credit for his latest book. I used it to purchase Peter Enns’ The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins.
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Peter LaBarbera of the anti-gay group Americans for Truth About Homosexuality is, unsurprisingly, not pleased with the new NBC sitcom, The New Normal, which features a gay couple. He asks, “When is Hollywood ever going to have a healthy, contented ex-gay in a movie or a TV show?”
Apparently, LaBarbera has never watched Good News Today, where Burton Quim, founder of ex-gay ministry Overcome, is a regular guest.
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On Thursday, Terry Mattingly of Get Religion defiantly insists that there is no evidence for the claim that white evangelical social conservatives exhibit racism.
On Friday, white evangelical social conservatives spoke for themselves:
Conservative pundit Gary Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council, which puts on the Values Voter Summit each year, told the crowd at the 2012 conference Friday that it needs to turn out in great numbers to defeat President Obama’s army of welfare recipients and fraudulent votes.
After his speech, Bauer told TPM “voter fraud is rampant in urban areas” and he expected that to help Obama.
Bauer also told TPM that “there are a lot of people who will vote this November because they depend on government largesse,” meaning checks from Washington. He expects those voters to go Obama as well.
Gary Bauer just wants to protect white America from criminal urban welfare recipients. And besides, some of his best friends are Alan Keyes.
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