Political Views
Rhys-Davies holds politically conservative views. As a university student in the 1960s, he had been a radical leftist, but changed his views when he went to heckle a young local member of parliament, Margaret Thatcher. Rhys-Davies says that "she shot down the first two hecklers in such brilliant fashion that I decided I ought for once to shut up and listen".
In 2004, Rhys-Davies stated the following in a very controversial interview with a Welsh news website about the Muslim population, stating:
There is a demographic catastrophe happening in Europe that nobody wants to talk about, that we daren’t bring up because we are so cagey about not offending people racially. And rightly we should be. But there is a cultural thing as well… By 2020, fifty percent of the children in the Netherlands under the age of 18 will be of Muslim descent… And don’t forget, coupled with this there is this collapse of numbers. Western Europeans are not having any babies. The population of Germany at the end of the century is going to be 56% of what it is now. The populations of France, 52% of what it is now. The population of Italy is going to be down 7 million people.
His comments were endorsed by the British National Party. Rhys-Davies commented that it was "distressing to find yourself on a BNP leaflet". He was also endorsed in a National Vanguard editorial. Yet, in an interview with the conservative journal National Review, he clarified that he is opposed to Islamic extremism precisely because he feels that it violates Western beliefs in equality, democracy, tolerance, and the abolition of slavery.
Read more about this topic: John Rhys-Davies
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