MPs want to scrap far-right TV show over “Hitler was right” item

TV broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland (ON!) is facing fresh calls to have its licence revoked in the wake of an online panel show that presented Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as an anti-globalist crusader.

The segment, Let’s Twist Again, featured a clip of Hitler delivering a tirade against a “rootless international clique”, prompting one person in the crowd to shout out: “Jews!”

Presenter Arlette Adriani then asked the two panellists, Joost Niemöller and Raisa Blommestijn, to comment on the statement: “The cosmopolitan elite is compelled to take an essentially hostile position towards the ordinary indigenous people”. Both said they agreed.

MPs from the coalition parties CDA and D66, as well as the left-wing opposition party Pro, tabled questions in parliament asking culture minister Rianne Letschert if ON! should be taken off the air.

The public broadcasting ombudsman Margo Smit said she had received around 20 complaints about the item since it was put online on July 31, most of them in the last week.

“This fragment is proof that this broadcaster is deliberately flouting basic standards,” Pro MP Mohammed Mohandis told RTL.

“Nazi propaganda”

Oufa Oualhadj, for D66, said: “This thinking is bound up with Nazi propaganda and the depiction of people such as Jews as the enemy by presenting them as a rootless international force that supposedly undermines national communities.”

ON!’s director-general Peter Vlemmix said Niemöller and Blommestijn had made it clear during the broadcast that they felt “nothing but disgust for Hitler’s regime and the barbaric consequences of it”.

But he admitted that the channel had “not paid enough attention to the sensitivities around this subject”. “We should have approached them more carefully in this video.”

ON! has faced repeated calls to have its licence withdrawn since it started broadcasting in 2022. It has been fined for broadcasting misleading information and was found to have used discriminatory language when it advertised the post of editor-in-chief with the words: “man or woman, no X”.

Blommestijn received a criminal conviction for discrimination for a social media post in which she used the term “negroid primates” to describe a group of black men who were filmed assaulting a white man.

“Complex” position

Last month a majority of MPs from all three coalition parties and Pro called on Letschert not to renew the broadcaster’s licence next year.

Erik van der Maas, of right-wing liberal party VVD, said: “There is no place in the public network for a broadcaster that is funded by taxpayers’ money but systematically breaks the rules and is not prepared to keep to them.”

But the minister said the legal position was “complex” because the public broadcasting service NPO had not asked her to withdraw ON!’s licence. “That does not take away the concerns about Omroep Nederland,” she said.

The channel’s future is due to form part of a debate in parliament on September 24.