When violent extremism threatens -and politicians join the post-war resistance

Last week I heard for the first time that at the end of last year the growing threat of political violence was discussed in a small circle within a governing party. This included the example of uniformed radicals, regularly sympathizers of FVD, who present themselves as ‘guards’ at corona demonstrations.

The conversation in that ruling party was quite alarming, a person present confirmed – also because ‘very confidential’ information was being exchanged.

And in retrospect it is clear that the collected intelligence services wanted to send a signal to politics during the same period.

Apart from the well-known jihadist threat made For example, terrorism coordinator NCTV reported on October 26 that “an attack is now also conceivable from right-wing extremist angles”.

The latter was about right-wing extremist accelerationism, a movement that wants to stimulate social unrest in order to overthrow the social order.

“It’s mainly the glorification of violence” [van deze jongeren] what we are concerned about” said NCTV leader Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg November 7 against the NOS. They range in age from 12 to 20 years old and are active “in the depths of the Internet.”

And the internal security service AIVD specified the threat in a letter to parliament of 17 December, in which the service explained its plans for 2022.

The ‘increase in violence from right-wing extremists’, it said, is aimed at ‘accelerating (accelerating) the current political system to replace it with a white ethno-state’.

You can say: this fits in times of radicalization, in which the assumption that the truth lies somewhere in the middle is less expressive. And in which political facts have become as fragmented as politics itself: each has its own truth – and radicality.

The influence of The Hague is mainly achieved by putting it on the agenda, so that the discussion is about your point of view, and this explains why the debate in recent weeks has not revolved around the recent warnings from the services, but about a convicted Muslim terrorist from the 2000s, Soumaya Sahla, who has been a volunteer in the VVD since 2017.

It arose after Geert Wilders openly complained about her. Sahla is a former member of the Hofstad group, which was responsible for the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004. In another case from that period, she was convicted of illegal possession of weapons and terrorist conspiracy.

From 2011, she built up a political network with the help of former VVD leader Frits Bolkestein. In the conservative right-wing circles in which she now finds herself, she is seen as an example of a deradicalised former terrorist. It also seemed logical that she led a VVD meeting on ‘terrorism and radicalisation’.

But after Wilders broached the issue, on 5 December a VVD MP, Ulysse Elian – son of Afshin Elian, also threatened in the 2000s by the Hofstad group – who established that Sahla never “publicly” took “responsibility” for her actions. In 2016, the same fact was reason for the Supreme Court not to reduce her prison sentence (three years).

Yet the VVD top ignored this criticism from within its own circle. So when Wilders raised Sahla’s position in the VVD again last week (“Muslim scum of the ledge”), the party pretended Wilders was just bleating – after which the party leadership began a painful retreat.

First, party chairman Sophie Hermans said last weekend at WNL on Sunday that the Sahla issue ‘feels uncomfortable’, then Prime Minister Mark Rutte supported her, and Sahla laid down her VVD position on Wednesday still down.

Post-war resistance, in all its glory.

And just as important: it illustrated how difficult it is apparently to believe in deradicalisation. Considering the growing radicality in society as a whole, this is quite significant.

It seemed to me that the division about this also ran right through the group that surrounded Bolkestein, as the VVD leader the most influential politician of the 1990s, when he started his march in The Hague.

For example, Wilders himself, as a VVD employee, was in Frits’ class at that time. In the late 1980s, Leiden professor Andreas Kinneging, now Sahla’s PhD supervisor, worked under Bolkestein’s supervision at the Teldersstichting (scientific institute VVD) on a conservative correction of liberalism. After Wilders’ attack on Sahla called he called her “a top woman” in December: “Getting old cows out of the ditch for political gain is disgraceful.” And Leiden professor Paul Cliteur, at the time a member of the curatorium of the Teldersstichting, accused the VVD this week that it treated “the interests” of “Wilders”, “Sahla” and “the Dutch people” “carelessly”.

It was striking that Cliteur did not mention that Sahla was a panel member in 2019 at the presentation of his book about ‘Theoterrorism’, in which he claims that the West is sacrificing its own freedoms and the lives of Islam critics (Wilders, Hirsi Ali) for fear of religiously based terrorism. Terrorism expert Edwin Bakker, the third panelist at the time, told me this week that “Soumaya Sahla was full of praise for Paul Cliteur’s views.”

Detail: this was April 11, 2019shortly after the States elections in which FVD became the largest, which already made it clear that Cliteur became an FVD senator later that year.

All these debates revolve around the mindset of the extremist. VVD members told me this week that they interpret Soumaya Sahla as someone who has fallen from one radical faith to another: first a Muslim extremist, now an extreme critic of Muslims.

It is a wonderful phenomenon. You would think that a person who previously fell for an extremist temptation would have learned to distrust their own extremism.

With Wilders you could still understand, as Edwin Bakker also said, that he felt threatened now that someone from a group that wanted to kill him earlier could possibly come near him. At the same time, it was remarkable that in his statements about Sahla he refused to pay attention to the conviction of his old VVD comrades in arms that she is really deradicalised. You can doubt this, who’s to say, but with a fifteen minute Googling you will find numerous occasions where she could have carried out an attack on a prominent politician.

Only: in Wilders you see this attitude in almost all his debates: inability to see the extremism with which he blames others for extremism.

But the really inconvenient thing is that this may turn out to be the wrong debate for this period: based on analyzes of the services, and information in the highest political circles, there is certainly so much reason to fear right-wing extremism at the moment.

This does not mean that jihadism no longer poses a danger – the services emphatically contradict this – but it illustrates that a discussion about (earlier) jihadism alone is one-sided and unwise.

Especially now that the right-wing extremism reinforced by corona is exposing comparable dilemmas: the question will soon arise for those groups as well whether deradicalisation is a possible way out.

But the inconvenient thing is that the largest party announced this week: even if we don’t have proof later that your deradicalisation has failed, you should not think that we are giving you every chance.

And then ask yourself this question: how do politicians think right-wing extremists will react if they already hear that their choices between their twelfth and twentieth year of life have negative consequences for later?