The Fulford File, By James Fulford | Brussels Journal Too Belgian (Or Flemish) For Little Green Footballs
11/08/2007
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

Little Green Footballs is a website focusing on the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Muslims around the world. It's owned by Charles Johnson, who was instrumental in exposing Dan Rather. It posts stories of Muslim atrocities, and allows comments, which means it has a large number of people writing random things on the site.

Lately, LGF has decided to attack Paul Belien of the website Brussels Journal, who has written a number of articles for us at VDARE.COM. In fact they're attacking him partly because he's written a number of articles for VDARE.COM.

In The Mask Comes Off at Brussels Journal, they write

"So let's look at Belien's writing. Here's an article by Paul Belien himself, published at the hard-core (some say extremist) anti-immigrant web site Vdare.com: VDARE.com: Anti-Immigration Party Banned In Belgium, by Paul Belien.

"And Belien's article was linked with approval at the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, on a page full of other bizarre and anti-Semitic articles.

"Nice company Paul Belien runs with." [Links in original]

That's an incoming link they're talking about from the Institute for Historical Review. (Let me pause to condemn them—they actually are Holocaust deniers, which I condemn here as crazy lie, of a kind that I as journalist find highly annoying—and if I forget to condemn them, I'll be held responsible by the Little Green Footballers.)

But Little Green Footballs is blaming Belien, and us, for the fact that an outside organization linked to a news story we published—something over which we have no control.

Another case of guilt by association here:

"Vlaams Belang leaders Filip DeWinter and Frank Vanhecke appeared on a radio show called "The Political Cesspool" (a very apt title), promoted at the web site of notorious white supremacist David Duke."

"Promoted at the web site" means that Duke put up a link to the show when he was on it, and listed the names of others appearing on the show.

VDARE.COM editor Peter Brimelow has also appeared on that show—he's on Little Green Footballs' list—and he did so for the same reason that I assume Dewinter  and Vanhecke did—which is that he'll generally appear on any show that asks.

This is like the flap about John Ashcroft being interviewed by Southern Partisan magazine. The interview was in 1998, but the flap was in 2000, when Ashcroft was nominated for Attorney General. The complaint wasn't just that leftists didn't like what he'd said in the interview, they didn't like the fact that he let the Southern Partisan interview him at all. Joshua Micah Marshall did a piece in Slate [John Ashcroft's Rebel Yell,  Dec. 26, 2000] mentioning the interview, asking if Ashcroft believed something the magazine had published in 1984.

I remember thinking that, if you went by that, you would never, in a million years, give an interview to the New York Times.

Another critic of the Vlaams Belang and Brussels Journal is Bruce Bawer.  Bruce Bawer left the US in 1998, apparently out of fear of Christian homophobia. He's now noticed that that Muslims, who are taking over Europe, are much more homophobic than Christians, and has written a book called While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.

But he's still afraid of the Christian Right. He has condemned Belien and the Brussels Journal as a "bunch of little Euro-fascists" because Belien came out in favor of "traditional Judeo-Christian morality"—which is, of course, anathema to Bawer, as it is to professional gay publicist Andrew Sullivan.

Then the LGFers are trying to make something of the fact that murdered Dutch political leader Pim Fortuyn, (a liberal) called Filip Dewinter (a conservative) a fascist. [Sources for Pim Fortuyn 'Fascist' Quote, November 5, 2007]

Of course, that doesn't actually mean anything. The word "fascist" has little or no meaning in modern discourse—it simply means that someone disapproves of someone else.

This, of course, was before Fortuyn was murdered by an immigration enthusiast for being an immigration skeptic. But I'll talk more about Fortuyn later.

The Nazi charge is especially peculiar when you consider that Belgium was actually occupied by the Nazis in World War II.  And in fact, Paul Belien has had to issue this crushing rebuttal of an accusation (by the Council on American-Islamic Relations) that the Vlaams Belang's founders were "collaborators":

"It is simply not true that "Vlaams Belang's founders were Nazi collaborators in WW II."

"Vlaams Belang founder Filip Dewinter was born in 1962 in a family that cannot be accused of Nazi sympathies. His father and uncle were members of the anti-German Resistance. Vlaams Belang was founded in 2004, sixty years after the end of WW II." [CAIR hits a new low of defamation]

Of course, that's the point. The Nazis all died years ago. Now Belgium is occupied by

a) A lot of immigrant Muslims.

b) A European bureaucratic government that doesn't believe in freedom of speech.

And I'm serious about the degree to which they're occupied. Paul Belien belonged to a political party which was banned by his government. Apparently, at Little Green Footballs, that means that the Party is wrong. But obviously it's any government that decides to ban any political party that's wrong—by any democratic standard.

By the same token, recently the Vlaams Belang were attacked by police during a peaceful demonstration. See here for details. Or read Pat Buchanan's description of it:

"Heightening the tensions, on Sept. 11, a demonstration was held in Brussels to protest 'the Islamization of Europe,' featuring a moment of silence for the victims of 9-11. There, as Washington Times columnist Diana West describes the videotape, 'we see black-clad Belgian policemen brutalizing a man in a light-colored suit and tie. His hands are cuffed behind his back, his right elbow is clasped in what is known as an arm-bar hold, and he is being subjected to a genital hold—a vicious grip that, a retired cop friend of mine tells me, would get any American policeman thrown off the force. [Brussels and 9/11, September 14, 2007]

"The victim of this police brutality was Frank Vanhecke, president of the Flemish secessionist party Vlaams Belang and a member of the European Parliament. Also arrested and beaten was Filip Dewinter, the leading politician of Vlaams Belang, which is Belgium's largest opposition party. This is like having Mitch McConnell beaten up and arrested at a rally on the Washington Mall to protest illegal immigration. "

Perhaps that means that they're criminals in the Little Green Football world—but the videos say different.

Here are some points for consideration by Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs:

  • You can't avoid the accusation of racism. A racist can be  "anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal. Or, too often, a libertarian. And, on the immigration issue, even some confused conservatives."" It is literally not possible to avoid this accusation. When you consider that George Bush gets called a racist, you know that no amount of bending over backwards will deflect this charge.
  • You don't get any credit from your enemies on the pro-Muslim, "anti-racist" left for engaging in shunning. No credit at all. The people who called you "rabid racists" before will continue to do so.
  • Paul Belien, and the Vlaams Belang, are not just on the Internet, like Little Green Footballs. They're an actual political party, physically located in Belgium, which means that they're on the frontline as far as Islamic Extremism is concerned. They're in danger from actual physical Muslims, not screenshots of Muslim websites, or snarky commentators, and from their own government as well.

And that brings me to the final point:

  • Demonization has consequences.

That was the title of Steve Sailer's piece on the Pim Fortuyn murder in 2002. Fortuyn was quoted as saying "....when I am killed or wounded then you [Prime Minister Wim Kok] are responsible because you give me no protection and you make the atmosphere in this country so poisonous that people want to hurt me....

This actually happened. Fortuyn was shot to death by leftist Volkert van der Graaf. Steve Sailer asked:

"Do the left, center, and the 'respectable' right have Pim Fortuyn's blood on their hands?

"The 1984-style 'Two-Week Hate' directed against immigration reformers following Jean-Marie Le Pen's April 21st election upset created a climate of rage that must have helped inspire a leftist lawyer to murder Le Pen's supposed "extreme rightist" Dutch equivalent, Pim Fortuyn."

A year later, Steve wrote:

The assassin, Volkert van der Graaf, finally made his confession in court this last week. And—what do you know!—he says he killed Fortuyn largely for opposing Muslim immigration.

If you keep calling people racists, Nazis, et cetera week after week, some people will start to believe it. And maybe do something about it.

Is that really the kind of behavior Little Green Footballs wants to encourage?

And given their robust stand on the flaws of Islamic culture, can they afford to?

Print Friendly and PDF