Dutch populist firebrand Geert Wilders, fresh after winning the Dutch national elections last week, is facing backlash from the terrorist group Hamas, along with several Arab states, for suggesting that Palestinians should be relocated to Jordan as a means to solve the ongoing conflict between the Palestinians and Israel.
Hamas has called on the international community as well as the United Nations to condemn Wilders for breaking international law, seven weeks after the group murdered around 1,200 Israelis in a surprise terror attack.
According to a report from the Israeli news website Ynet last week, Wilders has made comments in the past claiming that Jordan should change its name to Palestine and allow the Palestinian people to settle there, putting an end to their conflict with the Israelis and allowing the Palestinians to have their own state.
Over the weekend, on Saturday, November 25th, Wilders reiterated his position on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, saying “Jordan is Palestine!”
Both the Arab League and the Palestinian Authority slammed Wilders for his remarks, with the Palestinian Authority claiming Wilders was issuing ”a call to escalate the aggression against our people and a blatant interference in their affairs and future.”
Hamas, the Palestinian Gaza-based terrorist group who murdered over a thousand Israeli civilians on October 7th, also released their own statement regarding Wilders:
We strongly condemn the statement of the Dutch extremist Wilders, who calls for the displacement of our people to Jordan, which calls for widespread international condemnation
We in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) condemn in the strongest terms the racist statement of Dutch extremist Geert Wilders, in which he called for the displacement of our people to Jordan, and we consider it a fascist position aligned with the plans of the Nazi-Zionist occupation, in a delusional attempt to displace our people from their land and Islamic and Christian sanctities.
We call on the international community and the United Nations to condemn this racist, fascist statement that violates international law and the right of our people to their land, and we affirm that our Palestinian people will continue their legitimate struggle against the occupation until its demise, and achieve their national aspirations in a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, despite the noses of the neo-Nazis.
Wilders mocked the Hamas statement saying, “Hamas complaining about international law,” adding a clown face emoji.
Wilders has been a longtime supporter of Israel and has previously called the country “the West’s first line of defence against Islam.”
The firebrand Party for Freedom (PVV) leader has also been a longstanding critic of the religion of Islam as a whole, equating radical Islamist mosques to Nazism, labelling them “Nazi temples” and proposing that the Netherlands ban the Quran and close all mosques in the country in 2016 as part of a “de-Islamification” platform.
As a result of his views, Wilders has been under heavy police protection since 2004 due to threats from Islamist radicals following the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh that same year, who was killed by a Muslim originally from Morocco.
