Far-right Dutch politician calls for ‘transfer’ of Palestinians to Jordan

Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders has called for the forcible transfer of Palestinians from their homeland to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as an alternative to the US “deal of the century”. Transfer is a well-known Zionist euphemism for forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing.

Wilders made his comments yesterday in response to this week’s “Peace to Prosperity” workshop in Bahrain. The workshop was planned to discuss the economic aspects of the “deal of the century”, the long-heralded plan spearheaded by two senior advisers to US President Donald Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and former lawyer Jason Greenblatt.

“In The Hague there is hardly any interest in this Trump project,” Wilders told a local journalist. “My plan, the Wilders plan, is a better plan; all Palestinians back to Jordan.” He went on to claim that “Jordan is Palestine” and that changing the Kingdom’s name to Palestine “will end the conflict in the Middle East and provide the Palestinians with an alternative homeland.”

The far-right extremist also claimed that there is little support across in Europe for the US deal, which he called “a ‘Marshall plan’ that should put an end to the bottomless Palestinian well into which the UN has been depositing money in vain for sixty years.” The Marshall Plan was a multi-billion-dollar initiative by the US to rebuild Europe in the wake of the Second World War.

Although Wilders also claimed that most of the money for the “deal of the century” is being “coughed up mainly by rich Arab states,” no Arab state has yet pledged to finance it.

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The Dutch politician has a long history of such extreme views. In 2006 he founded the Party for Freedom (PVV) in his home country, the Netherlands, which he still leads. In the 2017 general election, the PVV became the second-largest party in the Dutch parliament, raising concerns about the rise of right-wing populism across Europe. However, it suffered an embarrassing defeat in this year’s European elections, failing to win any seats in the European parliament despite attempts to align his strategy with other far-right politicians such as France’s Marine le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.

Wilders is perhaps best known for his Islamophobic and anti-immigration comments. In 2016, for example, he was found guilty of discrimination for asking his party’s supporters whether they wanted “fewer or more Moroccans in [their] city and the Netherlands.” When his supporters chanted “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” Wilders replied, “We’re going to take care of that.” He is currently appealing against the judgement, and told the Hague Appeals Court earlier this month that he “only asked a question that half of the Netherlands would answer with ‘Yes’.”

In 2015 Wilders appeared at an event for the German far-right, anti-Islam movement Pegida, telling the crowd to ” Look at Israel, learn from Israel… Israel is a beacon of freedom and prosperity in a region of Islamic darkness…”

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