Filip Dewinter
Posted on 05/16/2003 5:24:05 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
French-speaking enemies call him a "designer fascist", with his air of having just stepped off a plane from San Francisco.
Filip Dewinter, the strongman of the Vlaams Blok, the Right-wing anti-immigration party that is poised to do well in tomorrow's Belgian election, is a man who provokes that sort of angry reaction.
His Flemish front poses a mortal threat to the Belgian state and the welfare apparatus that keeps the French-speaking regions afloat.
Filip Dewinter
Each year, the Dutch-speaking majority in the north pay a bigger share of GDP to subsidise their former masters in Wallonia than the west Germans transfer to their cousins in the eastern Lander.
Mr Dewinter intends to put a stop to this by abolishing Belgium, which was created by Lord Palmerston in the early 1830s, against the wishes of both tribes. He wants to carve out an independent Flemish state which he says should be aligned with the "Anglo-Saxon world".
The Blok has risen so far, so fast, from its murky origins in Waffen SS nostalgia that it could become the biggest Flemish party in tomorrow's election, shattering the cosy coalitions that have run Belgium for half a century and slavishly followed Paris in European Union politics. The Blok already has 33 per cent of the vote in the Flemish bastion of Antwerp.
At a Blok "family day" in rural Limburg, 2,000 beer-drinkers - Antwerp dockers and Phillips workers from the factory in nearby Hasselt - gathered in the rain waving the party banner, "Eigen Volk Eerst"(Our People First). A speaker wound up the crowd with a stream of insults about Elio Di Rupo, the bow-tied, openly homosexual Walloon leader.
Mr Dewinter praised President George W Bush for dealing with Saddam Hussein and told me in good English: "The chief threat to the world now is radical Islam. They were taught a lesson by the Iraq war that they must take the West seriously. They thought we were very soft and tolerant but they now see we can hit back when necessary."
Like neighbouring Rotterdam, power base of the murdered Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn, Mr Dewinter's home town, Antwerp, has become a multicultural powder keg, a recruiting centre for al-Qa'eda.
Last year, a former Hizbollah fighter from Lebanon, Abou Jahjah, led race riots that charged through the shopping district, allegedly smashing the windows of those who failed to pay protection money.
Children of ultra-orthodox Jews are preyed upon by North African gangs on their way to school and now have to walk in groups.
"We are seeing the first pogroms in Belgium since World War Two," Mr Dewinter said.
"How can this be happening in a democratic country? We've got the most Left-wing citizenship laws in Europe that lets people have nationality after three years, even if they come illegally.
"What the Labour Party has been doing in England is to the point. We've got to stop non-European immigrants coming in from the Third World. Those who are already here should have to assimilate or go back."
For the Blok, mass immigration means more Algerians or Moroccans who speak French and gravitate into the "enemy" camp.
It is hard to separate the language war from the questions of race.
So where does the Blok fit on the Right-wing spectrum that runs from Germany's skinheads, to Jean-Marie Le Pen's anti-semitic Front National, to sleek "post-fascists" such as Italy's Alleanza Nazionale, to Fortuyn's gay, feminist, free-market, anti-Muslim mish-mash?
Most Flemish nationalists welcomed the Nazis as liberators in 1940, believing Hitler would create a Flemish state. Thousands volunteered for SS divisions to fight Bolshevism on the Eastern Front. The state later sentenced 2,940 to death for treachery, imprisoned 70,000 and charged 405,000 with collaboration, punishing five per cent of all Belgians. The Vlaams Blok, founded in 1978, is led by their children.
Perhaps a ruling elite that has still not put Marc Dutroux on trial - for fear of what he might reveal - seven years after he starved young girls to death in chains in his dungeons, should ask itself why the Vlaams Blok is running away with the votes.
That's a platform we can all endorse!
French-speaking enemies call him a "designer fascist", with his air of having just stepped off a plane from San Francisco.
That would be "gayly tripped off a plane from San Francisco".
Each year, the Dutch-speaking majority in the north pay a bigger share of GDP to subsidise their former masters in Wallonia than the west Germans transfer to their cousins in the eastern Lander.
So the Walloons pay more money than West Germans did to repatriot East Germans?
The Blok has risen so far, so fast, from its murky origins in Waffen SS nostalgia that it could become the biggest Flemish party in tomorrow's election, shattering the cosy coalitions that have run Belgium for half a century and slavishly followed Paris in European Union politics.
Okay, so Blok is bad, it had it's origins in the Waffen SS nostalgia, even though it is against anti-semitism and further Muslim immigration. Maybe that is the real crime.
Perhaps a ruling elite that has still not put Marc Dutroux on trial - for fear of what he might reveal - seven years after he starved young girls to death in chains in his dungeons, should ask itself why the Vlaams Blok is running away with the votes.
Is it just possible that there are decent Belgians that are waking up?
This is a surprise! I remember the shock that went through Belgium at the time -- that this could happen here! But that he's not only not (French) toast, but not even put on trial... what might he reveal?????
Not likely to happen, if a recent visit with a Jewish classmate of the wife's, still living in Antwerp, is any indication.
Make it so.
The NYT oughtta hire this guy; he sounds like one of theirs. Talk about prejudice, slanted reported and naked, raw bias...
He answered his own question, LOL, Europe is sure a wierd place, no wonder so many leave the continent.
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