Geert Wilders Breaks Through, but How Far?

In 2005, I interviewed Dutch politician Geert Wilders when the threat to his life from Islamic extremists was deemed to be so severe that he was forced to spend a lot of time living in a prison:

Wilders doesn’t like to grumble. “I have to make the best of it,” he told me. . . . “I have a kind of living room, which is quite okay. On either side, there are the cells where the two Libyans were held. In one cell I have my clothing. . . . In the other cell there is my bed.” The prison is, “of course, a terrible place,” but his hosts have done what they can. “They put some lamps in and a TV,” small consolation, I suspect, for a life under siege.

We were chatting, not in the prison, but over coffee in a small, cramped office tucked away at the end of a long corridor somewhere in the depths of the building that houses the Dutch parliament in The Hague. A number of bodyguards sat nearby.