So says Diana West:
As many readers know, I have written extensively about Filip and his party’s courageous political battle to halt and reverse the Islamization of Belgium since I first met him almost exactly three years ago. . . .
Diana West is certainly no fascist sympathizer. Unlike Charles Johnson, she’s actually been to Belgium and seen what Vlaams Belang is fighting against:
As Filip put it, “so-called anti-fascists used fascist methods to try to silence us. This cannot be allowed in a democracy.”
Read the whole thing. A tectonic shift is re-arranging our political landscape, an insight brought into startling clarity a few years ago when I noticed that feminist Phyllis Chesler had invoked The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail.
Fifteen years ago, Raspail’s 1973 dystopian novel had a sort of samizdat existence, known only to a relative handful of paleoconservatives and certainly not a book that respectable American intellectuals would admit having read. Raspail himself noted that his book — a nightmare vision of an ennervated Europe overrun by hostile invaders — would now be illegal to publish under France’s modern “human rights” laws. Times change, circumstances change, and the political correctness that suppressed The Camp of the Saints has long since passed its sell-by date.
Courage to speak painful truth has never been more important. Diana West knows that. So does Mark Steyn. Those who counsel cowardice in these times are not true friends of liberty.
UPDATE: Baron Bodissey also takes issue with the New York Times’ treatment of DeWinter and Vlaams Belang:
Filip Dewinter was the only national Belgian political leader to speak out publicly in Parliament on behalf of Belgian Jews this time last year, when the Left marched with Hamas supporters on the streets of Antwerp chanting “Jews to the gas”.
Vlaams Belang is the only political party in Belgium that takes a libertarian stance and supports a free market economy.
To refer to them as “fascist” or “neo-Nazi” is not just inaccurate, it is a travesty of the truth.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE II: Speaking of “casual defamation,” the anonymous blogger at a site called Drops In the River (DITR) labels me a “Neo-Nazi supporter . . . outspoken racist” and a “pussy” — I love it when anonymous people accuse me of cowardice — en route to asserting that DeWinter must be a fascist because Charles Johnson says so. (Argumentum ad ponytailem.)
DITR is such an expert on all things Belgian, don’t you know. But what’s interesting to me is that DITR lists his “favorite writers” as Matt Taibbi, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Andrew Sullivan, David Weigel, Max Cannon and Radley Balko. An interesting selection — Weigel and I are good buddies, which would be a too-familiar description of my acquaintance with Balko, although he and I are not strangers. And I’ve plied Hitchens with Johnny Walker while he told bawdy jokes at a DuPont Circle beer joint. Not to tar my friends with guilt-by-association, but one way DITR “proves” DeWinter is a “fascist” is because DeWinter was photographed talking to (gasp!) Pat Buchanan. By similar proofs, Michael Kinsley must be part of this crypto-fascist cabal.
DITR’s citation of both Hitchens and Dawkins tells me that we’re dealing with an atheist, probably a youngster who digs atheism because it’s so hip, rebellious and intellectual. Also, we presume, because atheist chicks are notoriously easy.
We note in closing that DITR is irony-impaired: Not 48 hours before he called me a crypto-fascist stooge for quoting Diana West’s defense of Filip DeWinter, he was highlighting the punishment of a 13-year-old girl under Sharia law in Saudi Arabia.
Yet DeWinter is smeared as a “fascist,” you see, for opposing the importation of Sharia to Belgium. We need a truth-in-labeling law in politics.
