AP article on MP Geert Wilders contains errors

I really don't like to lecture my peers, but since this article about MP Geert Wilders is currently being quoted all over the world, I have to make mention of some of the errors inside it. AP journalist Anthony Deutsch writes the following:

But a recent poll suggested his anti-immigrant message was reverberating through the electorate, and he would win 24 seats if elections were held today -- up from 19 seats before Van Gogh's murder.

There are quite a few things wrong with this statement.

• First, there isn't just one important political poll in the Netherlands, there are several. One of them is the TNS Nipo poll, which indeed gave Mr. Wilders 24 seats at the time the journalist wrote the article. (Today, a new poll by Maurice de Hond, the Dutch 'Mr. Zogby' was released, which puts the number at 26). Another important poll however, is the one done by Inter/View. It only gives Mr. Wilders 10 seats. The discrepancy between these polls has been present for several weeks now (all three of them are repeated on a weekly basis). Under those circumstances, using one of them whilst not mentioning the others is at the very least misleading.

• Second, even according to the optimistic De Hond and TNS NIPO polls, Mr. Geert Wilders didn't get 19 seats before Van Gogh's murder. Instead, he got 12 seats in the De Hond poll at October 30 (sometimes dated November 1), and 9 seats in the TNS NIPO poll which the AP were using.

• Third, only after the Van Gogh murder, on November 6, does De Hond put Wilders at 18 seats. At November 8, six days after the murder of Van Gogh, TNS NIPO finally comes up with the figure of 19 seats. The field work for this survey was done from November 4 until November 7, as can also be read here.

There are more inaccuracies in the article. The 'latest video' that the journalist is referring to, was already discovered in early October. Furthermore, the video is not 'in Dutch with Arabic music in the background'; the death threat is actually sung in Arabic. The few Dutch words that get transposed over the footage are hardly representative of the entire movie, which can be viewed here.

18:48

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The neocolonialism of Hans van Mierlo

Mr. Hans van Mierlo, the founder of Dutch centrist party D66, feels that immigration secretary Mrs. Rita Verdonk shouldn't have corrected an imam who refused to shake her hand. Mr. Van Mierlo got about a quarter of an hour on Buitenhof, one of the best news shows on Dutch PBS, to explain his point of view.
Never mind the 15 minutes he needed, his argument can be summarized in one line. According to Mr. Van Mierlo, if you think you're a member of a superior culture, you shouldn't take offense at ideas from other cultures which you consider to be old-fashioned.
Mr. Van Mierlo, the point is not if we, as members of a so-called superior culture, can handle it. The point is that we are insulting other cultures by allowing them to carry on believing in antiquated ideas about gender roles.
I'm even willing to go so far as to consider the so-called 'civilized' and 'sensible' attitudes of Mr. Van Mierlo neocolonial.
Why is that?
Bear with me for a moment. Let's say that someone from another country tells you the Sun revolves around the Earth. Would you correct him, or just snigger behind his back? Which course of action would show the most respect for the person you're having a conversation with?
This culture has, for various economic and social reasons, decided that our civilization is best served when both men and women are no longer distinguished by different kinds of treatment. There's not much debate about that; you could argue that the concept that women and men should be treated equal as this benefits us all, is about as normal amongst well-educated Westerners as the idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun, rather than the other way around.
Yet according to Mr. Van Mierlo, we should simply ignore it when somebody with a different view of the world treats a woman according to his antiquated ideas.
To me, that amounts to extremely condescending behavior.
Mrs. Verdonk is not the kind of woman to take offense when somebody treats her in a way even her greatgrandmother wouldn't have had to endure. She's much too mature for that. The reason she corrected the imam was, quite rightly, because he should be corrected, and because she respected him enough to still think he would benefit from that. If your friends don't have the guts to tell you the truth every now and then, they're not really your friends, they're invertebrates.
Not educating our new countrymen on basic tenets of Western civilization has long been considered perfectly acceptable and even 'tolerant'. By acting the way we did (or rather: not acting), we have been depriving them of the opportunity to become full members of our society. When Mr. Van Mierlo corrects Mrs. Verdonk, he isn't making the case for respecting the cultures of immigrants. Whether he intends to or not, he's arguing to hold them back as much as possible. There was a time when such behavior by Western cultures was rife, and most of us generally don't feel proud about that era.
It's a good thing not even his own party takes Mr. Van Mierlo too seriously anymore.

13:35

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