Prime minister Mark Rutte clashed with his anti-Islam rival Geert Wilders in a live TV debate ahead of Wednesday's Netherlands election.
WILDERS: A country can be in an economic crisis, that’s an important topic, but with good national and international policy you can solve that problem. But this is an existential problem. This is the survival of the Netherlands…
The future of our country and western civilisation is at stake, so I therefore chose to put this statement on the agenda...
Islam and democracy cannot coexist. And you can see that in, literally, every country in which Islam is dominant. We can see a total lack of freedom, you can see widespread violence and oppression, whether you are a Christian or Jew or whether you are an apostate or a critical journalist.
So I think that if we will defend ourselves and deal with Islam that we will not make our constitutional state and our democracy weaker, but stronger. And we need courage to do that, we will have to break the mould.
I don’t mean all people who support Islam, but Islam itself plays by different rules than we do. It doesn’t play by our rules, so if we play by our rules and Islam doesn’t do that then this means that at the end of the day, we will lose everything that we stand for.
