Bruce Bawer via LGF, today:
The other day, in the wake of my City Journal piece “Heirs to Fortuyn?”, a couple of anti-jihad writers who had not yet rebuked me for my stance on Vlaams Belang finally got around to doing so. Not only did they send me e-mails taking me to task for criticizing VB in that article; one of them also took it upon himself to chew me out for, in his view, admiring Pim Fortuyn too much and Geert Wilders too little. (Never mind that I’ve defended Wilders frequently and that Wilders has blurbed my new book, Surrender.) Wilders, this individual felt compelled to lecture me, is a far greater figure than Fortuyn ever was. Why? Because, he explained, Wilders stands for “Western values,” while Fortuyn stood only for – get ready for this – “Dutch libertinism.”
Yes, “Dutch libertinism.” The words took my breath away. During the last few days (while, as it happened, I was visiting Amsterdam) I haven’t been able to get them out of my mind. For a self-styled anti-jihadist – who, by the way, I first met three years ago at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference in The Hague – to refer in this way to a man who sacrificed his life for human liberty is, in my view, not only incomprehensible but profoundly despicable. This is, after all, precisely the sort of language that Dutch Muslim leaders hurled at Fortuyn during his lifetime. And in the present case the words were plainly aimed not only at Fortuyn but at me – a writer who, like Fortuyn, that great martyr for freedom, is gay.
What the hell, one is entitled to wonder, is going on here? Why has Vlaams Belang, of all things, become a veritable sacred cow for so many anti-jihadist writers? And why does at least one of them now take such a staggeringly contemptuous view of Pim Fortuyn? I can’t honestly say that I understand any of it. But I do know this: when writers who represent themselves as champions of liberty start cozying up to distinctly illiberal parties like Vlaams Belang – and when one of those supposed champions of liberty starts to sound uncomfortably like the Islamist enemies of freedom whom he purports to despise – then there’s something terribly wrong, and genuinely evil, afoot.
LGF Watch, more than three years ago:
Shorter Paul Belien
"The only possible alternative to Islamo-fascism is Christo-fascism."
This piece of lunatic drivel scores extra-high on the Irony-Meter thanks to this bit in its last paragraph:We have seen the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh
Pim Fortuyn was a proud, promiscuous homosexual.
Theo van Gogh despised all religions, and was an ardent admirer of Fortuyn.
But according to Bible-bashers like Belien and his fascist friends, secularism, abortion and "hedonism" (a code word for sexual tolerance) are destroying Europe and paving the way for an Islamist takeover.
I don't think either van Gogh or Fortuyn would agree.
(note: Paul Belien is the publisher of the Brussels Journal, and has close ties to Vlaams Belang.)
More (from us, of course) on Vlaams Belang
