Inconvenience Leiden University grows over Paul Cliteur’s support for Baudet

The storm surrounding the Forum for Democracy has now also reached Leiden University. Professor Paul Cliteur, confidant of FVD founder Thierry Baudet, is under the magnifying glass because he has not sufficiently distanced himself from racist and anti-Semitic voices within FVD. He is also said to have barely taken action in the past after several internal complaints about anti-Semitic statements made by Baudet, whose doctoral research he supervised.

As a result, the board of the university is now suddenly under pressure. Rector magnificus Carel Stolker arrived on Saturday afternoon

Zeker, Lieke, het verwijt van een patroon van antisemitisme rond FvD is uiterst zorgelijk en raakt daarmee ook Paul Cliteur. Antisemitisme en racisme, en ook het daarvan niet-afstand nemen, zijn totaal maar dan ook totaal onaanvaardbaar. Wordt snel vervolgd. https://t.co/TVDHD8oJGx

— Carel Stolker (@CarelStolker) November 28, 2020

: “The accusation of a pattern of anti-Semitism around FVD is extremely worrisome and thus also affects Paul Cliteur.” At about the same time Cliteur arrived

Verklaring van Paul Cliteur, zojuist geplaatst op zijn LinkedIn-pagina 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/ixf4Iv7LNU

— Raisa Blommestijn (@rblommestijn) November 28, 2020

, in which he distances himself from anti-Semitism, but not from FVD or Baudet. On Sunday, employees of the law faculty in Leiden came with an “open letter against anti-Semitism, racism and discrimination and the downplaying or normalization thereof”.

FVD has been up for over a week now, due to anti-Semitic text messages within the party’s youth organization (JFVD) and statements that Baudet himself allegedly made during a recent meeting with the top ten of FVD. He is said to have defended the statements of JFVD youth at the time (“they are not stupid, they have a very high IQ, that’s why they say these things too”) and said that anti-Semitism is commonplace in his immediate environment. “Almost everyone I know is anti-Semite.”

Unlike dozens of FVD celebrities last week, Cliteur, until recently FVD senator, continues to give Baudet the benefit of the doubt. “He can provoke and confuse people,” said Cliteur later that Saturday, in an interview with the Leiden university magazine Big. “But that’s different from what he’s now being accused of.”

Unconcealed anti-Semitism

The day started with a long article on GeenStijl: ‘The undisguised anti-Semitism of Thierry Baudet’. It turned out that complaints had regularly been made to Cliteur about extreme statements by Baudet, but that the professor has always dismissed this. Baudet is said to have said, among other things, that in World War II “the Jews won” from the Germans, because they would have been in power ever since. “These are ideas that I have, you should just be able to say that?” Baudet is also said to have praised the leaders of the Vichy regime in France, which collaborated with the Nazis during the war.

When Cliteur was also approached by political scientist Machteld Zee in July about the complaints, he is said to have told her that this is “new information”. Cliteur says against Big that Zee “makes no direct statements” in the article on GeenStijl and that he is therefore not sure whether she said this. Opposite Big Zee confirms the information in the GeenStijl article.

Cliteur says in Big that he would tell any complainers that he was “not there” and would refer them to Baudet. “Go and fight it yourself.” He also says that as far as he is concerned there is a difference between what Baudet says in private and what he says publicly, for example in the House of Representatives. “I first want to see that he is indeed making these kinds of statements publicly. And nothing has been shown of that yet. ”