(National-UAE) With Europeans approaching the next parliamentary vote split down the middle on the benefits of immigration, few can claim to have the perspective possessed by Joram van Klaveren.
As a spokesman for right-wing Geert Wilders’s anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV) a decade ago, the Dutch politician fought tooth and nail to ban burqas and minarets in the Netherlands, making the headlines for his anti-Islam statements.
Now a Muslim convert and author of the book Apostate: From Christianity to Islam in Times of Secular Terror, he calls out populist parties fuelling Islamophobia in an attempt to win votes in the next European elections.
“The PVV policy was: everything that did not work had to be linked to Islam in one way or another,” Mr van Klaveren told the National.
