Friends of Filip

People in the local fascist party here in Belgium, Vlaams Belang, are slightly angry after reading the last edition of the monthly magazine DENG.

Maybe with good reason, as Belangman Filip Dewinter was chosen by the magazines readers to be the worst Belgian of them all, beating both psychopath child molester and murderer Marc Dutroux and megalomaniac private colonialist king Leopold II. DENG also wrote some pretty nasty stuff about things Dweinters father should rather have did instead of fathering Dewinter and the magazine did offer everything you need to make the face of Filip the fascists something to aim for when you pee. Or poo, if I am not mistaken.

That was a bit over the top.

It also allowed Vlaams Belang to avoid the real issues DENG covered, namely how Filip Dewinters party is friendly with some of the worst nationalist nutcases around Europe. You have Dutch nazi Constant Kunsters, who states:

That Dewinters is catering for the Jews in Antwerp is of course only a strategy, no more. Dewinter is still more extreme and radical than he wants to show.

You have Bruno Gollnisch, Le Pens henchman, who lost his position as a professor at the Jean Moulin University in Lyon, because of holocaust revitionism, and who is “very friendly with the representatives of Vlaams Belang in the European parliament”.

Then there is Mario Borghezio, who believe the Freemasons is an occult power that controls Europe and who seemingly found setting fire to the belongings of immigrants sleeping under a bridge in Turin to be a nice political statement. He has visited Vlaams Belang several times. The list continues…

There is not too much new about the Vlaams Belang. The distance between fascists who use Islam as public enemy number one and fascists who use Jewry in the same way is not as far as the socalled defenders of European civilization like to pretend. These people are defending an ugly tradition of Europe; fear and hatred of those of a different religion, to quote what religious historian Torkel Brekke wrote in Norwegian Dagbladet recently:

The irrational fear of religious minorities have always had good soil to grow in in Norwey, and other places in Europe. The phobia is knit to the history of Europe, where especially the religious and political developments of the 16th century set down the framework for our thinking about the relationship between politics and religion. After the Reformation and the following religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, the early European states agreed that a country should have the same religion as the head of state in the country. You got state churches, amongst other places in Norway. The religiopolitical history of Norway since this time is, amongst other things, a history about irrational fear for everyone who thought or believed something different than what was approved by the king. As is well known the fear targeted Jews, but Christian minorities, like the Quakers, were also victims of the majoritys phobia. [...] Today we experience a continuation of this sad history through a strong stigmatization of Muslims. This worries me. Everyone who is concerned with studies of genocide, know that such stigmatization is the first step towards [human rights] violations.