Campus Watch, but better – Freedom Party and politics of obstruction
On 20 & 21 June the Maurits Berger, professor of Islam in the contemporary West, was the convenor of a conference ‘Applying Sharia in the West, where participants discussed the (im)possibilities of implementing Islamic rules (‘Sharia’) in Western societies, with a focus on rules pertaining to family relations. Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party seized the opportunity to ask questions in parliament. Some of these questions based upon faulty assumptions and others were unclear as to what they were actually about, unless read as an accusation that the central questions of the conference were a ‘sign of progressive Islamization in education. In this blog article Maurits Berger reflects on the controversy arguing that the PVV uses a method that is as effective as it is perverse in using lies and distortions that eventually leads to an all pervasive self-censorship among academics.