I have written a lot about European right-wing demagogues across the union of 28 nations. The likes of Filip de Winter (Belgium), Geert Wilders (Holland), Le Pen (France), Nigel Farage UKIP in the UK, Hungarians, Greeks {Golden Dawn], Baltic states and the newly supported Neo-nazis in the Ukraine. The terror of discrimination knows no bounds as was experienced last week in the Municipal Election in the Netherlands (Wilders’ rant against ethnic Moroccans) and yesterday’s elections in France where Marine Le Pen scored her greatest victory in the first round of Municipal Elections [party Le Front National].
I refuse to publish the ugly racist cartoon, social media has picked up on this supposedly piece of ‘satire’ and everyone can find the posts linked on twitter by Chika Unigwe. The newspaper De Morgen has a history of racism and has a close relationship to Flemish right-wing party of Filip de Winter. This weekend Geert Wilders was invited to a conference in Belgium, however he needed to quell unrest in his one-person political party called PVV due to numerous cancelations of political affiliation with his party by members in Dutch parliament, Provincial parliaments and municipal elected members.
Reflection by an editor in De Morgen can be found here:
It was Saturday afternoon around four o’clock when the Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe tweet circulated: “We still have much work to do Shame on @demorgen.” The message was accompanied by a photo of an excerpt from “The Daily Herald, the weekly satirical contribution in this paper. ‘The Herald’ this weekend, as the ‘Reporter’-section that precedes it, totally dedicated to President Obama, following his arrival in Belgium this week. In the part you see how President Putin would have sent a photo depicting the U.S. presidential couple with a monkey face.
That was obviously meant as a joke, but it got completely wrong. “An attempt at anti-Putin joke [??] that was read completely the wrong way,” EU correspondent Michiel Van Hulten writes on Twitter, appropriately summarizes incident together. Many see a trivialization of racism.
I sure hope we do not forget the ugly history of Belgium colonialism in Africa, especially in the Congo. The spread of racism in an ever growing roght-wing parties in Europe is most dangerous and most Europeans close their eyes and say: freedom of speech is a great good, we can’t do anything about it. It’s masked in antagonism against the large number of immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. It has found a fertile base since 9/11 and the unified propaganda of Islamophobes funded across Western Europe, Middle East and the US.