It’s Come to This

That’s right, it’s come to this,
yes it’s come to this,
and wasn’t it a long way down,
wasn’t it a strange way down?

                    — Leonard Cohen, from “Dress Rehearsal Rag”


Click to see a larger version
Yes, it’s come to this.

This is what free speech, civil society, and the rule of law have come to in Belgium. A well-dressed man, part of a gathering of people assembled to make a peaceful protest, has been roughed up by the police, grabbed by the testicles, and wrestled to the ground. He is about to be arrested, handcuffed, and forced onto a police bus.

Why? What could be the reason for this?

He came to Schuman Square in Brussels to object to the disappearance of his own country, to the submergence of his own people by a tide of Muslims from the Third World. No one asked the people of Flanders if they wanted hundreds of thousands of unassimilable foreigners to come and live in their midst; it was simply done to them. It was — and is — the official policy of the Belgian government and the European Union to import more immigrants from the Islamic world, and to allow them to retain their native cultural practices, no matter how barbaric. All in the name of Multiculturalism!

For this reason Frank Vanhecke, the party leader of Vlaams Belang, was beaten up by the police and spent the night in jail, as if he were pickpocket or a vandal or a street brawler.

Actually, pickpockets and vandals and street brawlers often get less serious attention than this in the countries of the West.

Yes, it’s come to this.

A member of the Vlaams Belang party sent me these photos; there are more of them below the jump.
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Click each thumbnail to see a larger image. The top photo shows Mr. Vanhecke being thrown to the ground. In the second one you can clearly see him being grabbed by the nads as he was perp-walked away to the bus. The third shows another member of Vlaams Belang held face-down on the pavement. The last photo shows Filip Dewinter, Vlaams Belang member of Parliament, as he resists being forced into the bus, just a moment before only his arm remained sticking out between the doors and his wrist was smacked with a baton. The Europeans are big on human rights. They’re very fond of lecturing us ignorant Americans about the human rights of, say, the Palestinians, or the prisoners in Abu Ghraib. But what about the human rights of the people of Flanders? What human rights were being respected or enforced yesterday on the streets of Brussels? Wasn’t it a strange way down?