Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam populist who won the Dutch election in November, is best known for attacking the Muslims who comprise just over 5% of the Netherlands’ population as human “scum” whose “backward religion” amounts to a “retarded culture” based on the teachings of a “pedophile” prophet. Voters rewarded his pledges to outlaw mosques and end immigration to Europe’s sixth-largest economy by electing his party to the largest bloc in Parliament.
In its 46-page election manifesto, his far-right Freedom Party promised to stop “wasting billions on useless climate hobbies” and send “all” the “climate measures” to curb planet-heating emissions in the flood-prone nation “straight into the shredder.”
But as Wilders scrambles to moderate his stances in hopes of forming a coalition with enough center-right parties to net the votes needed to actually govern, the likely next prime minister of the Netherlands will need to quit denying the reality of climate change. If he can pull it off, he would become the first far-right leader to take power there since the end of World War II.
Tom Middendorp, the Netherlands’ former defense chief, thinks he’s the right man to persuade Wilders to begin taking planet-heating emissions seriously. And he may just start with what he saw last week on a trip to Iraq.
The retired Royal Netherlands Army general traveled across the Middle Eastern nation, where the Dutch military recently deployed more troops to help the NATO mission fighting terrorist groups like the so-called Islamic State, and saw a powder keg forming. Drought and war had driven thousands of farmers from their land and into cities like Mosul, where water was growing scarce and unrest was worsening.
“Desperate people who don’t know how to sustain their families don’t have many choices,” Middendorp told HuffPost in a wide-ranging interview by phone Tuesday morning, just days after he returned home and a month after he published…
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