I think the facts are pretty simple. If someone denies the holocaust, they'll be fined or worse. If someone says "all immigrants are criminals" and "homosexuals are no better than paedophiles" as the VB has been doing for years, they should be fined as well.
The VB as a political party still exists and people can still vote for it, should they want to do that. But it is a fact that racist statements are against the law. Whether you agree with that law or not, is a different matter. But it is the law.

I agree, everyone should have the right to speak their minds. And in private, I don't give a toss what the VB members say (I can pretty much imagine). But disinformation of the public, surely that can't be right either?

"I stand by my assertion that the VB's 'racism' is a chimera, and that the real reason it has been banned - ... - is because it advocates secession."

Ehmm, didn't the Volksunie advocate secession? Doesn't the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie advocate secession?

"In haar streven naar een beter bestuur en meer democratie, kiest de Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie logischerwijs voor een onafhankelijk Vlaanderen, lidstaat van een democratisch Europa."

("In its striving for better governance and more democracy, the New Flemish Alliance's logical choice is for an independent Flanders, a member state of a democratic Europe" - rough translation; certainly the word "onafhankelijk" means "independent", which implies secession)

http://www.n-va.be/programma/wiewatwaarom/beginselverklaring.asp

"In the political sphere, the N-VA pleads for a Flemish republic, member state of a democratic European confederation."

"Sur le plan politique, il plaide pour une république flamande, état membre d'une Europe confédérale et démocratique."

http://www.n-va.be/nva_en.asp
http://www.n-va.be/nva_fr.asp

Has anyone proposed taking them to court yet?

" If someone denies the holocaust, they'll be fined or worse. If someone says "all immigrants are criminals" and "homosexuals are no better than paedophiles" as the VB has been doing for years, they should be fined as well"

Uh? Why?

People and parties say things which they believe and may also be factually incorrect all the time. Why should that lead to prosecution?

Just ignore them.

As far as I am concerned, Piglet, your assertion that 'disinformation' requires prosecution is deeply offensive, inimical to good order and a civilised society.

"Because I have written something which supports the VB's right to exist, and Belgians' right to vote against it, to many minds I must therefore be a supporter. Is it really that difficult to understand that that is a non-sequitur?"

Indeed. It would be like arguing that opposing the United States' illegal invasion of Iraq and subsequent, ongoing bloodbath makes one a supporter of Saddam Hussein. Insane....

Oliver: you're correct that saying that the VB has a right to exist does not imply supporting it.

GF: "People and parties say things which they believe and may also be factually incorrect all the time. Why should that lead to prosecution?"

There's a difference between factual incorrectness and saying that all crime in society is the fault of niggers and ragheads.

And as for Pollard: "...accused me of everything short of paedophilia. (I can't imagine why that word came to mind when I thought about the Belgian establishment.)"

Well, you've just lost whatever credit you had with me there. Would you care to say what exactly you meant by that offhand comment?

And while we're at it, would you care to list your sources for the Times article? Those that aren't the Vlaams Blok by way of http://www.flemishrepublic.org (which you quote almost verbatim on a number of occasions), that is.

Quote: "I stand by my assertion that the VB's 'racism' is a chimera, and that the real reason it has been banned - and yes, it has been banned in any meaningful sense of that word, in that its literature may not be distributed by the monopoly postal service or its politicians appear on state TV, and it is soon to be declared a criminal organisation and disbanded - is because it advocates secession."

As Paddy Matthews stated above, and as I stated in a comment posted to Mr. Pollard's original article, other Flemish parties in the mainstream political community (yes, within the Belgian elite !) explicitly claim the independence of Flanders and secession from Belgium. Last time I checked, nobody accused them of anything. You know what ? Because their project is a positive project for their region, not against immigrants, homosexuals, socialists or Walloons. Actually, the Flemish nationalists don't need the Vlaams Blok to achieve their objectives.

A few more facts for you. A fact's a fact, isn't it ?

- Belgium doesn't have a monopoly postal service anymore. And the confidentiality of mail is guaranteed: if the VB sends closed envelopes to its potential voters, no one will have the right to open the letters before they reach their correspondents. And the postal services will have to distribute it, whatever lies in the envelope.

- VB has not been banned, not even remotely. France has similar laws against racism and discrimination. Do you think it has ever hindered the Front National to grow bigger ? This court decision won't harm the Blok. It may even reinforce it.

Mr. Pollard, you did not check your sources. You just seem to repeat what some Blokker spokesperson told you. You may not be aware of it but, indeed, you seem to have been abused. Anyway, your opinion piece proves your ignorance of the complexities of the Belgian political life. You just chose to simplify it by hearing only one side of the story.

One last thing. Quote: "I've had to excise some of the more libellous and outrageous comments, which accused me of everything short of paedophilia. (I can't imagine why that word came to mind when I thought about the Belgian establishment.)"

You are only making your case worse. As far as I'm concerned, you have lost all credibility as a journalist.

You know, this is actually a good thing. We, as well-informed Belgians, can now see first-hand how lack of information about the realities of a complex situation can make a normally scrupulous journalist write an article that sounds plausible but is in actual fact completely wrong on all possible levels.

And this is Belgium, a country that's just on the other side of the Channel, well within the same European judeo-christian frame of reference as the UK. And these are facts that can be verified objectively.

Ah well :)

I agree with you, Michel. :-)

I'd been revering British journalism until I came accross Mr. Pollard's piece. What's the most disturbing, in my view, is that our "hate speech" laws can indeed be criticized - there's no question about it. There were literally hundreds of ways to defend a certain idea of absolute free speech against the court's decision. But Mr. Pollard's chose to take the VB's arguments for granted. That's rather embarrassing.

For anyone not knowing belgian politics by heart and interested some information to some of the statements made above:

'there are other parties that want flemish independence'

a. the volksunie: doesn't exist anymore. It is the predecessor to your second party. Since they don't both coexist at this time, and never have coexisted at any point in time, referring to them as if voters ever had the right to vote for either one of them NOW, is a nasty little lie.

b. the N-VA does indeed support flemish independence. It does however not pose a threat to the elite as it is too small and it's leaders are showing much more willingness to compromise about independence. The elite has managed to keep us at bay with getting a few crumbs, paying a whooole lot of money for it and be 'thankfull' afterwards.

Myself and a lot of other flemish nationalists do not wish this step by step approach, we have seen to what monstrosity it has lead so far.

(For outsiders, there are 4 different ministers of education in Wallonia f.i. as a result of this and the abuse of what was supposed to be the perfect 'federal' solution. Not even these 4 themselves know who is responsible for exactly what. This is almost typical for the montrous construction that belgium has become by the 'step by step' approach. We have a flemish parliament were laws are passed unanimously by [b]all parties[/b], and then these laws go to the federal parliament and there they get rejected as the flemish parties, the very same ones that applauded the proposal at the flemish level, vote against it at the belgian level. How absurd a system is this????? This is beyond repair imo.

To give you the other reasons why the N-VA does not get sued:
1. It got 4.9% of the votes in the last election. This is less than the 5% minimum (made mandatory this year) to get any seats or financing in belgium.
2. They escaped the death trap above by forming an unholy alliance with the Federalist Christian Democrats and giving up flemish independence as a short-time goal.
3. The partner in their alliance is about 6 times their size and does not support flemish independence. It does support more of the monstrosities shown above from the previous 'step by step' approach though.
4. The 'Cordon Sanitaire': what was invented 'to save democracy' is now leading to the end of it. The Cordon Sanitaire was formed in the late eighties when the flemish blok for the first time started to gain a lot of votes. I think they had about 5% of the flemish vote when it was made. It is an agreement by all political parties in belgium (N-VA excepted in theory at least, not in practice) to never form a ruling coalition with The Flemish Blok. It goes as far as never agreeing with anything they propose. Ignore it or oppose it, but never ever say they have a point.

At the time it was made the Flemish Blok was imo indeed a party that bordered on being unacceptable in a democracy. I stress bordered. So it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Unfortunately some of the problems the Flemish Blok complained about, like the ugly side effects of too large a migration of too many poor people with a completely different culture to a too small area at once, only got worse as they were being ignored by the other politicians due to the 'Cordon Sanitaire'. More people started to vote for them regardless. The party itself realized that in order to be able to continue to grow they had to get rid of the more controversial points of their program. They did this and grew even bigger. The other parties however due to being unable to openly support the Flemish Blok on any issue due to the 'Cordon Sanitaire' could only stay in the centre or move to the left while the Flemish Blok moved towards the right and away from the extreme-right.

So now we have a party that is if it ever was not, now definitely is in the process of becoming acceptable, not because more and more flemish people became "NAZI'S" but because the agenda of the party changed and got more realistic.

This is the fact. 80% of the things the Flemish Blok was sentenced for in this show trial is based on information from or preceeding 1996.

Now one of the reasons the flemish parties might be doing this as well, because they have foreseen that in the longer term the Cordon Sanitaire would inevitably fall. There is no conservative party other than the Flemish Blok anymore so a lot and growing number of people whose ideology leans away even somewhat to the right will feel attracted to the Flemish Blok as none of the other parties dares to be the first to break the 'Cordon Sanitaire'.

In a desperate attempt to save Belgium, keep any intruders out of the closed circle of belgian top politics, and reclaim the conservative flemish voter they have taken the risk of outlawing it. Hoping to outlive the storm ahead and go back to business as usal afterwards.

Btw: Jurists are anonymous. The N-VA does not stand a chance against this 'anti-racism' law when someone would file charges against them. Today a 80 year old Cardinal of the Catholic Church and a muslim book 'ways to being muslim' have been charged of being 'homophobic' by a militant pro gay rights organisation. Although the elite will undoubtedly try to stall any such processes inspite of giving it the speedy trial the Flemish Blok got, most jurists claim that with this law these people have to be sent to jail. Some go as far as saying entire religions are unlawfull and should be kept to the private sphere completely according to this law. Pandora's box is only opening...

How can you claim to be fighting for tolerance when you can't even tolerate 1 out of every 5 people around you speaking their minds in public???? People supporting this advocate a dictatorship!

As a very very concerned Belgian I hope more sane minds will prevail and I will - with the complete moral assurance that at least this time I am doing the right thing - vote for the 'Racist' Flemish Blok. All my alternatives are worse by far.

I hope foreigners will remind Belgian politicians of what a democracy is about, and if nothing changes... then never ever make the mistake of thinking of Belgium as a democracy again. Think of it as a 'politically correct' dictature and DDR state.

Made some grievious typo's I see:

jurists are unanimous instead of anonymous ofcourse. :p

Have to go with Jeroen on this one. If this monster won't stop rolling, it'll turn ugly real fast. Let's hope somehow reason can step in, otherwise we might just start reading "Brave New World" in anticipation...

the sad thing here is that even though this seems absurd to you (being called a VB-supporter just because you defend it's right to excist) this is a daily occurance for us ... if you dare say the VB is anything more then the "NSDAP" of their time you'll be shoved into the quarantine-zone they built around us. Saying you support the VB on this (or anything else) undoubtably labels you a right-extremist with these people now and whatever you say will be regarded as racist-propaganda ... in fact if you were to say this in belgium there'd be a very very real chance you'd be bullied into writing an appology or would be fired on the spot.

I agree with most of the facts that Jeroen brings up. He's right to say that--with hindsight--the "cordon sanitaire" played right in the Vlaams Blok's hands, and that the mere fact of the Vlaams Blok has made all discussion about anything that's perceived as "their" themes (immigration, integration, crime, ...).

I do not agree with Jeroen' when he starts talking about a "desperate attempt to save Belgium", but that is hardly the point here.

The point is that this is a complex issue, that Stephen Pollard was fed the Vlaams Blok party line, that he apparently--and until proof of the contrary--never bothered to check the facts or talkt to anyone else, and that the Times published the story without any fact checking either.

I wonder if Stephen Pollard realises that Vlaams Blok president Vanhecke (the man who wrote the article at http://www.flemishrepublic.org) made an appearance on the most watched Sunday morning debate programme, triumphantically brandishing the Pollard article and claiming it confirmed everything the Vlaams Blok had been saying?

No, this was a completely irresponsible thing to do, unworthy of a journalist and unworthy of the Times.

Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure: never, ever, *ever* in my entire life would I *ever* condider voting for the Vlaams Blok.

I do know people that support VB, I even know high-ranking people in the party itself and would consider them fine acquaintances.

I defended their right (actually, their student arm's) to distributing pamphlets when I was at university (after all, the Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites and two green student associations were allowed to), so you could say I'm with Voltaire when he said Je combattrais toujours vos idées, monsieur, mais je me ferais tuer pour que vous ayez le droit de les exprimer.

Michel,

how can you on the one hand be proud of the time when you defended Freedom of Speech, consider a number of Vlaams Blok politicians 'fine acquaintances' yet at the very same time utterly miss what the most important issue in the entire article was?

Ie how can you utterly miss that this is about severe limits on freedom of speech being implemented on those 'fine acquaintances' in Belgium??? 20% of the Flemish population will be unable to use their right to freedom of speech soon. I find your position very very difficult to understand :p

And on a note: according to the verdict by which the Flemish Blok was convicted, statements don't have to be 'blanket'. Just judged systematic and stigmatizing to a minority. As an example (and this is exactly as it is in the lingo speak from the verdict) 'the use of statistics to systematically stigmatize people is racism'. So if there is a problem with a minority of the population being more present in crime statistics, you are (almost) certain about one thing. As long as you say it only once, you will win a trial against you for using them for sure. If you ever use it again you run the risk of it being judged a racist action even if the statistics represent the truth, because anything over once could be judged systematically!