Author:
Publication: Dhimmiwatch.org
Date:
Filip Dewinter, a boyish man in
a dark blue suit, bounds up two flights of steep stairs in his political
party's 19th-century headquarters building where posters show a Muslim
minaret rising menacingly above the Gothic steeple of the city's
cathedral.
"The radical Muslims are organizing
themselves in Europe," he declared. "Other political parties, they are
very worried about the Muslim votes and say let's be tolerant, while
we are saying - the new political forces in Europe are saying - no, we
should defend our identity."
From the Freedom Party in Austria
to the National Front in France to the Republicans in Germany, Europe's
far right has made a comeback in recent years, largely on the strength
of anti-immigration feelings sharpened to a fear of Islam. That fear
is fed by threats of terrorism, rising crime rates among Muslim youth
and mounting cultural clashes with the Continent's growing Islamic communities.
But nowhere has the right's revival
been as swift or as strong as in Belgium's Dutch-speaking region of Flanders,
where support for Mr. Dewinter's Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, has
surged from 10 percent of the electorate in 1999 to nearly a quarter
today.
Vlaams Belang is now the strongest
party in Flanders, with support from a third of the voters in Antwerp,
the region's largest city. Many people worry that the appeal of antiIslamic
politics will continue to spread as Europe's Muslim population grows.
"What they all have in common is
that they use the issue of immigration and Islam to motivate and
mobilize frustrated people," said Marco Martiniello, a political
scientist at the University of Liège in the French-speaking
part of Belgium. "In Flanders all attempts to counter the march of the
Vlaams Belang have had no results, or limited results, and no one really
knows what to do."...
"Their values are not the right
values," said Henri Rosenberg, a Talmudic scholar and lawyer who
is an Orthodox Jew, speaking of the Muslim community. Though he is
the son of concentration camp survivors and his grandparents died
in camps, he campaigned on behalf of Vlaams Belang, then named Vlaams
Blok, in regional elections last year....
Behind the wooden door of a brick
Brussels town house, Jean-François Bastin, 61, a Belgian convert
to Islam, holds court before a steady stream of Islamic activists. His
fledgling Young Muslims Party is one of the new groups aggressively pursuing
pro-Muslim agendas in Europe.
He calls Osama bin Laden "a modern
Robin Hood," and the World Trade Center attacks "a poetic act," "a
pure abstraction." His 23-year-old son is in jail in Turkey on charges
that he was involved in the bombings there that killed 61 people
in November 2003....
Already about 4,000 to 5,000 Flemish
residents are leaving Antwerp every year, while 5,000 to 6,000 non-European
immigrants arrive annually in the city, Mr. Dewinter said. Within
10 years, he predicts, people of non-European backgrounds will account
for more than a third of Antwerp's population.
"It's growing very, very fast,"
Mr. Dewinter said. "Maybe that will be the end of Europe."
