Jaron van Klaveren, former spokesman for the far-right Geert Wilders’s anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV), who once pushed to ban Islam from the Netherlands is now working to dismantle the lies he peddled about the religion.
Van Klaveren dramatically converted to Islam in 2018 and is presently serving as a board member of the Islam Experience Center in Rotterdam.
In an extraordinary personal and political transformation, the former senior member of PVV, said it was the party’s anti-Muslim rhetoric which led him to look more deeply into his new religion.
“The things that I helped them develop are still there, they’re still using the tools I gave them,” he said about the anti-Muslim rhetoric of PVV. “I literally hear them say things that I made up.”
“I was in anti-Islam politics for altogether 12 years, so I have to counter this narrative for at least 12 years to make it even, so to speak,” Van Klaveren said.
Asked whether he felt guilt or regret over his actions during his time with the PVV, Van Klaveren said, “Of course I feel ashamed because of what I said. I had plans, but Allah is the best of planners and my life took another direction.”
Van Klaveren, the right-hand man of the PVV leader Wilders, had pleaded for a burka ban, a ban on minarets and for the de-Islamization of the Netherlands.
Van Klaveren was working on an anti-Islamic book before his conversion to Islam. While researching for the book that was supposed to highlight the dangers posed by Muslims, he ended up writing Apostate: From Christianity to Islam in Times of Secular Terror – a book about his conversion to Islam.
Van Klaveren is not the first former member of the party to convert to Islam. In 2013, Arnoud van Doorn chose to leave the party after converting to Islam. Van Klaveren has taken back his statements on Islam, saying his views were “simply wrong.”
Van Klaveren estimates that only about 12 of the 37 seats won by the PVV in the last elections could be attributed to those who are staunchly opposed to Islam. The rest, according to him, were probably a result of voters who had become disillusioned with mainstream parties over their failure to tackle the soaring cost of living.
