Concerning Filip Dewinter’s Letter to “Joods Actueel”

Last week Little Green Footballs published yet another “gotcha!” item purporting to be a smoking gun against the Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang. Like so many of its predecessors, this exposé turned out to be full of sound and fury, but signifying diddly-squat.

For his indictment of Vlaams Belang, Charles relied on a machine-translated letter from Filip Dewinter, a leader of Vlaams Belang, to a magazine called Joods Actueel. Although a commenter noted that the translation he used was inaccurate, he persisted.

As Atlas Shrugs pointed out, Joods Actueel is hardly an impartial source in these matters, and does not represent the Jewish community in Antwerp:

[Editor-in-chief Michael] Freilich does not speak for the Jewish community in Antwerp. “Freilich in no way represents the Jewish community in Antwerp”. “The Jewish community does not read his magazine (“and the Orthodox for sure not”). “He has no status in the Jewish community” “He is an extreme fanatic leftist guy”. He speaks for himself. “It’s a one man newspaper”.

I asked our Flemish correspondent VH to read up on the issues and send us a report. He had this to say:

I agree with Pamela. Amongst the socialist dhimmi wimps, coincidentally there are also those from a Christian and Jewish background. The problem is their fatal confusion of racism with anti-Islamism (and vice versa), as many leftards in all their blindness (blood=ketchup) are used to.

One of those willing airheads is this Michael Freilich who messed up (hippified) his father’s well-respected Jewish magazine, Joods Actueel, and now messes up kids’ interviews and gives the Middle-of-the-Road-Socialist CJ another set of sheets to bring to the dry cleaners.

The Netherlands also has mental cases like Marinower and Freilich, who want Geert Wilders to be silenced on behalf of all those pitiful peaceful “future Jews”: Muslims…

The fact that Muslims — since their devil’s “religion” stormed out of the desert — are World Champion Jew Killers (out of religious belief) does not come up even a micron over their little lefty racism-horizon…

Anyway, the best reply is the excellent letter of Dewinter that is in the column to the right-hand side of the article at Joods Actueel [the link does not always work; see the Google translation page to extract the Dutch text].

We are busy struggling with Arabization in real life, leaving CJ wetting his keyboard with fascist blackhood blokbuster fantasies. CJ and his mau mau gang remind me of Monty Python’s Lumberjack song about now.  :-)

And now for VH’s (non-machine) translation of Filip Dewinter’s letter to Joods Actueel:

Dear Mr. Freilich,

With amazement I have read the article “Jewish youth interview Filip Dewinter”. Of course, your “article” is accompanied by commentary and interpretations. The 16-year-old high school students who have not “tackled” me “hard enough” are corrected by your “opinion” writer Guido Joris. They are accused of “youthful hubris”; they were supposedly unable to “sufficiently disprove my arguments”; they offered “little response”… The interview itself is said to be a “charm offensive by Dewinter “… Why? I am interviewed weekly by students and school pupils for exam papers and a variety of school assignments.

It is impossible to frame and indicate all the “quotes” that you distill from the conversation, therefore you should publish the hour-and-a-half interview unabridged. Yet a few comments: I never attended memorial ceremonies in honor of the SS in Lommel, organized by Blood and Honor. Twenty years ago I demonstrated in November 1988 against the fact that the cemetery — which has graves of both Allied and German soldiers — was closed for the families of the deceased. It was a wake — more than 40 years after World War II — that called for reconciliation and during which flowers were laid on the graves of soldiers from both sides.

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Three young people with a “big, black Keppel” are suddenly presented as “the best example of the multicultural society”, while I believe the Jewish culture and religion should not be placed outside the European civilization — as you do when you put forward Jewish youth with a Keppel as an example of multi-culturalism — but as part of the roots of our European civilization.

Apparently your editors do not, or will not, or are not allowed to understand that the undersigned has nothing to do and does not want anything to do with neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism. My grandfather was part of the resistance in Blankenberge [Flanders] during World War II, and my father was forced to do slave-labour in Germany.

I struggle in a genuine fight against the Islamization of Antwerp and the advancing religious conquest by Islam. Your suspicions and mistrust are completely inappropriate and isolate your magazine from an important segment of Antwerp’s citizens who are sympathetic towards the Vlaams Belang, but absolutely distance themselves from neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism.

Maybe I’d better end this letter with a quote from one of the young people who participated in the interview: “Dewinter seemed sincere and did not evade any questions”.

Always willing to do an objective interview, I sign,

Yours faithfully,
Filip Dewinter

Flemish readers are invited to weigh in on the nuances of these translations and the issues they represent. I look forward to the ensuing discussions.