Excerpt:
Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb caused a social media uproar with an interview on NPO Radio 1 in which he said that "every Muslim is a bit of a Salafist". PVV leader Geert Wilders called for Aboutaleb's resignation.
The Rotterdam mayor discussed several topics with Thijs van den Brink, but it was his statements regarding Islam that caused a commotion, AD reports. For example, he said he sometimes considersĀ himself a jihadist. "I get up every day at 7 o'clock to do good for a city in the Netherlands. That is the jihad in its purest form." Van den Brink pointed out that this is not the form "we know in the Netherlands". To which Aboutaleb responded that there are many definitions of jihad, "of which the armed struggle is only one form". "And that also falls apart in the defense and the attack deployment", he said.