A Dutch far-right politician announces he has become a Muslim

Joram van Klaveren was an MP from the far-right Party for Freedom from (2010- 2017). He was the right-hand man of its Islamophobe leader Geert Wilders, who called Islam ‘the biggest disease to have hit our country’.

He said he had changed his mind halfway through writing a book criticising Islam, when he found out he had more in common with the religion than he initially thought. He said by becoming a Muslim I felt like coming home in a religious way.’ He said that the manuscript of the Islam-critical book he initially planned to write has since been thrown into a rubbish bin and will be replaced by a book in which he will counter the arguments of critics of Islam. He also professed that the analysis which he made that most problems in the country and the world can be blamed on Islam was false.

According to the Dutch Central Statistics Bureau (CBS, Muslims are around round 850,000 (5% of the Dutch population). Van Klaveren is not the first high-profile PVV member to convert to Islam, Arnoud van Doorn, a former Hague-based PVV city councillor switched in 2013.