Pim Fortuyn's party suffered a dismal defeat in the Dutch elections last Wednesday, but that does not mean the issues have dissappeared. The Fortuyn electorate, which is comparable with that of the BNP in Britain, seems to have found a new voice in Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali immigrant. Look at the website, link below, for more details on her, but two items are of interest in the UK.

First, the niqaab and chador are suddenly an issue in Dutch politics. The police in Amsterddam removed three Muslim students from a school on Thursday, after an overnight ban on the chador / niqaab. Amsterdam is now considering a ban on chador and niqaab in all schools, although the number affected is tiny, it is an emotional issue.

Not that this was also recently an issue in Australia, see

Outrage over Fred Nile's chador ban call
 http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/21/1037697802561.html

Second, although she kept quiet during the election campaign, the black conservative Ayaan Hirsi Ali made an all-out attack on Islam in an interview published yesterday. See the link below for a longer quote, but this is the central excerpt...

"Mohammed is, by our western standards, a perverse man. A tyrant. He is against free speech. If you do not do what he says, then you will suffer. It reminds me of all those megalomaniac rulers in the Middle East: Bin Laden, Khomeini, Saddam. You wonder why there is a Saddam? He takes his example from Mohammed. Mohammed is the shining example for all Muslim men. You wonder why so many Muslim men are violent? You are shocked when I say this, but you make the mistake of most Dutch people. You forget where I come from. I was a Muslim, I know what I am talking about. It's terrible that even though I live in a democratic country, where free speech is the greatest good, I still face the posthumous blackmail of the prophet Mohammed. Here in the Netherlands Aboutaleb [Moroccan minority spokesman] can read the Koran and think Mohammed is fantastic. And I can say: Mohammed is a despicable individual."

As you might expect, this has enraged the Muslim community, but it has also delighted the anti-immigrant right. She is not only a critic of Islam, but her party opposes immigration and asylum, and supports legally enforced cultural assimiliation of immigrants already here. What's more she is an articulate intellectual, more so than Fortuyn. Although there are black conservatives in the United States who take similar attitudes, so far as I know she is unique in Europe. It is no wonder that Fortuyn's supporters are prepared to overlook the fact that she is herself a black immigrant.