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Conservative Brussels Journal Threatened by Socialist Belgian Government

Journal editor says immigrant violence no coincidence in “society that has lost respect for human life itself”

by Hilary White

BRUSSELS, May 17, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A small, independent online Belgian news service, Brussels Journal, that focuses on European cultural issues and politics is being accused of “inciting race hatred” against immigrants and threatened with prosecution and shut-down by the government determined to silence opposition.

Brussels Journal, whose tagline is “all the news that never gets printed,” is popular with conservative-voiced news sources in the US and Canada because it reports on the general scene in European politics without the pervasive secularist and leftist slant most international news services offer.

The calls to squash the feisty electronic Journal started after a Belgian teenager shot three people, two of whom were Muslim immigrants in Antwerp.

On Thursday, May 11, Hans Van Themsche, an 18 year old high-school student who had recently been expelled from school, went on a rampage and shot a veiled Turkish woman, a two year old Flemish toddler on a tricycle and her black nanny, killing the latter two and seriously wounding the first.

Paul Belien, editor of Brussels Journal writes, “Belgian journalists, lawyers and politicians (including Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt), say that I am responsible for creating the atmosphere of hatred that led to the massacre. Some people even demand that I be prosecuted.”

A press release issued immediately following the shooting, by the far-left organisation, the Progress Lawyers Network (PLN), calls for Belien to be prosecuted for “inciting racial hatred,” in “his recent publications.”

The government condemned the shooting as an “extreme form of racism” and hundreds participated in a march in Antwerp on Friday protesting racism. But evidence is now being uncovered that shows Van Themsche was unstable, an avid fan of violent video games and showed signs of suicidal tendencies.
 
Belien writes, “Hans Van Themsche’s killing spree is indicative of a society where young people have lost all respect for human life. Is it a coincidence that this should happen in a society that has lost respect for human life itself?”

Citing Belgium’s “very liberal abortion law” and the plans to extend euthanasia legislation to “minors and to the senile elderly,” Belien asks, “Is it a coincidence that at the same time so many young people have also lost their faith in the future? … Having lost faith in heaven, they then decide to turn the world into hell.”

The accusation of “inciting hatred” follows a story Brussels Journal carried on the murder of 17 year-old Joe Van Holsbeeck. Van Holsbeeck was killed in April at Brussels Central Station at evening rush hour by a pair of immigrant youths when he refused to hand over his MP3 player. Brussels Journal wrote that the reaction of Belgian media and Church authorities who said “indifference” was to blame, were deliberately avoiding the real issue.

“Belgian citizens realize, however, that the murder has nothing to do with ‘indifference in Belgian society,’ but everything with a group of North African youths terrorizing Brussels and the ‘indifference’ of the authorities to eradicate this scourge.”

Responding to accusations of racism, Belien writes, “I have repeatedly defended the view that Muslim immigrants are not to blame for Europe's predicament.” Rather it is the statist and extreme left political culture that Belien blames.

 “Europeans have foolishly replaced God by the State as the one on whom they rely to take care of all their needs from cradle to grave,” he writes. “The religious vacuum has led to a demographic vacuum, because those who lose faith in God lose faith in the future as well. A civilization that has created a religious and a demographic vacuum is bound to perish.”

“The lights are turning out for Europe. If America follows Europe’s example, Christendom is lost.”

US journalist Rod Dreher, called the attempt to silence Brussels Journal, “an outrage, and beyond chilling.”

“The material Belien and his writers publish,” Dreher writes at BeliefNet.com, “would be quite mainstream in America. And now the weight of the Belgian state may be brought down to crush him and silence this independent outlet for criticism and commentary.”

Brussels Journal coverage of the Antwerp Massacre:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1065

Brussels Journal coverage of Van Holsbeeck murder:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/995

Read the Weekly Standard’s review of Paul Belien’s “A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianization of Europe”:
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=9240

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