Commentary magazine hosted a morning program yesterday with a controversial member of the Dutch Parliament, Geert Wilders, who broke with his party in September 2004 when it moved to the middle and he to the right.

The magazine’s managing editor, Gary Rosen, and the director of the Edmund Burke Foundation, Bart Spruyt, sat on either side of Mr. Wilders. American law books lined the conference room walls. Offprint copies of Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary article “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win” lay on the table – appropriate accessories to the ensuing discussion of the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and Western Enlightenment values.

A tall, soft-spoken Dutchman with wavy blond hair and uncompromising views, Mr. Wilders said that he is polling from 6% to 20% of the Dutch electorate.

His rise to prominence can be better understood in the context of recent tragic events. The Netherlands has long been known for its tolerance; Ian Buruma in The New Yorker recently described it as a kind of “Berkeley writ large.”

This liberal welfare state has been shaken by the arrest of a 26-year-old, second-generation Moroccan for the murder of Theo Van Gogh. Mr. Wilders talked about a note found pinned to the filmmaker’s body that he said reflected, “pure anti-Semitism combined with Islamic radicalism.” The climate is such that the 2002 murder of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn by a Dutch animal rights activist has made Fortuyn soar to the top of opinion polls.

With heavy-lidded eyes, Mr. Wilders laid out his views. He said over the last 30 years, the population of non-Western immigrants in the Netherlands grew 40 times faster than the Dutch population. “The Dutch are a minority already,” he said.

Mr. Wilders said he wanted to stop the immigration of non-Western immigrants to the Netherlands for at least five years “not because of some strange xenophobia,” but to ease integration.

“We are a country of tolerance, but we took that too far,” he said. He stressed that his homeland should “fight for our Dutch values” and “use the stick more than the carrot.” In short, in Mr. Wilders’s opinion, the Dutch have been too tolerant of intolerance.

“It’s not by accident it happened in Holland,” Mr. Wilders said. He said the Dutch political elite are more involved in their own party politics and are not reacting to the voice of the people.

He spoke of Spain’s appeasement after its pro-American government lost its mandate; the German elections, which featured anti-American arguments; and France, which, he said, had “turned, more or less, support for Islamic radicalism into some kind of art form.”

He said he supported the American invasion of Iraq and hopes for closer relations between the Netherlands and America.

He said that prisons in his country contain disproportionate numbers of Moroccan and Turkish people. One of Mr. Wilder’s recommendations would land more immigrants in jail: He argued for the preventative arrest of 150 to 200 radicals rather than waiting for them to commit a crime. The proposal got no support in Parliament. Mr. Wilders also said the government should get toughed with Moroccan youths who he said terrorize whole neighborhoods. Sending them to see social workers is too weak a remedy, he said.

Mr. Wilders also would close down radical mosques (about 25 of the roughly 500 in the country) immediately since they are “no longer houses of prayer, they are houses of jihad.” The Dutch have allowed entry of radical clerics who, he said, were sometimes not even allowed to speak in their own countries.

He spoke of moderate politicians who want to literally hold hands at solidarity rallies – he called this “hollow rhetoric” that was “totally useless.”

The talk was not purely opposed to Dutch Muslims; Mr. Wilders said the majority are moderate. “They will be perhaps the first to benefit” from these changes, he said.

An audience member asked Mr. Wilders where he saw himself on the political spectrum – was he a Burkean or a classical liberal, for example? Mr. Wilders shrugged, “I don’t want to be put in some kind of corner.” His political enemies would immediately misuse whatever label he chooses, he said. But he did finally come up with a French political thinker to describe his views: “Alexis de Tocqueville.”

The director of research at Freedom House, Arch Puddington, asked whether political elites in the Netherlands blamed Israel and America for the rise of terrorism in Europe. Mr. Wilders replied yes, some do.

Herbert London of New York University asked about the effect that limiting immigration had upon unfunded pensions and their looming liability in Holland. Mr. Wilders spoke about getting some of the nonworking Dutch presently on disability to work. Mr. Puddington, in the audience, later said he was unconvinced by this response. He told the Knickerbocker that Dutch citizens cannot replenish the economic base that sustains all of their pensions and are ambivalent about immigration.

Mr. Puddington later said he also remained unconvinced by Mr. Wilder’s opposition to incorporating Turkey into the European Union, which Mr. Puddington thinks would be a positive development. Mr. Wilders said Turkey is a good neighbor, but “being a good neighbor is not the same as being a part of the family,” adding that he would rather have Canada or Australia join the European Union

Brian Anderson of City Journal asked how he feels about the press coverage he receives. Mr. Wilders replied that members of the press generally earn a lot more than his average constituent. Cooper Union professor Fred Siegel followed up by asking who those voters are: Mr. Wilders said the average age appears to be 35 to 55, with a wife working part-time, and taking one or two vacations a year. They are common Dutch people who are fed up, he said.

Mr. Siegel asked if the Dutch were to engage in preventative detention, wasn’t that contravened by EU law? Mr. Wilders acknowledged he would be sued under EU law. “If his party took power, it would produce a clash with the EU,” Mr. Siegel later said.

Asked about his security measures he takes to protect his life in the face of death threats, Mr. Wilders said it was like “being caught in a bad B-movie.”

City Journal Contributing Editor Kay Hymowitz asked about the role of schools in assimilating Muslim children; Mr. Wilders said that the Dutch government traditionally gives money to religious schools of all kinds, and are now in trouble as a result. One example he gave was of a radical Imam in Rotterdam who was on the board of a school there.

“Ian Buruma’s account of the situation in the Netherlands portrays Wilders as a kind of wild man,” Mr. Siegel said. “But to listen to him speak, he was calm, relaxed and reasoned.”