Hate speech is a pastime that is tolerated for whites and is seen as a mortal sin for those of non-Flemish descent.

Stavros Kleiboris is a journalist.

Not long ago, gays, lesbians, and other people who weren’t of the “correct” sexual orientation were viewed by the far right as nefarious scum. A man who constantly cheated on his wife with other women was infinitely better than a man who had a happy relationship with another man.

Then the light went out. Who else has something against gays? followers of Islam. And who was the source of all evil in this country: the new Muslim arrivals. So all traces were erased, pamphlets were burned, and one’s respect for gender was raised to the level of the nobility of our “norms and values”.

That wouldn’t have changed much in the hit sold-to-the-normal counter, but that was still nice on paper, those standards and values. If it would only pass on Muslims by backward scum, wouldn’t it? Since then, homophobia has been Ahmed and Saeed’s fault.

Something similar has been observed in recent years on another political battlefield: the battle for open space. The loss of open space in Flanders is due to the steady population growth, the people who wanted their own place in the fading sun, but above all also to the lack of political decisions that allowed, for example, the development of the damned strip to continue. usual.

N-VA member Thomas Ruggemann saw a better explanation: immigrants. Since the 1970s, millions of newcomers have arrived and vast swaths of open space have disappeared. Again a strange mistake. “How much nature do we still have to destroy to swallow population growth?” asked Rugeman on Twitter. Because everyone knows that the strip development is inhabited by refugees from Syria, right?

The peasant protests threaten to end up in the same xenophobic manner. This is already the case in the Netherlands. The farmers get a great deal of support from American personalities far right, It was recorded by former politician Eva Flardingerbrück for Farmers on Fox.

Vlaardingerbroek, affiliated with the Forum for Radicalization for Democracy, was told that farmers should not give way at all because of nitrogen’s consequences for nature. No, the real reason is that farmers’ land is necessary to absorb immigrants. In other words, the great replacement. (We haven’t quite gotten that far in Flanders yet, although you can already notice that there are some people within Vlaams-Belang who claim there is no nitrogen problem at all.)

The common denominator is not that the people mentioned have good intentions with homosexuals or in the open space or farmers; The catch is that they paint the newcomers in advance as suspicious, like people who make the good life impossible here. It’s hate speech – a pastime that is allowed for those of white color, and seen as a mortal sin for those of non-Flemish descent.