Vlaams Belang's Jewish supporters

Vlaams Belang is gaining support due to fears of Islamic violence:

Vlaams Belang is now the strongest party in Flanders, with support from a third of the voters in Antwerp, the region's largest city. Many people worry that the appeal of anti-Islamic politics will continue to spread as Europe's Muslim population grows.

"What they all have in common is that they use the issue of immigration and Islam to motivate and mobilize frustrated people," said Marco Martiniello, a political scientist at the University of Liège in the French-speaking part of Belgium. "In Flanders all attempts to counter the march of the Vlaams Belang have had no results, or limited results, and no one really knows what to do."

Fear of Islam's transforming presence is so strong that even many members of Antwerp's sizable Jewish community now support Mr. Dewinter's party, even though its founders included men who sympathized and collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

Many of those supporters are Jews who feel threatened by a new wave of anti-Semitism emanating from Europe's growing Muslim communities. The friction is acutely felt in central Antwerp, where the Jewish quarter abuts the newer Muslim neighborhood of Borgerhout.

There, Hasidic diamond traders cross paths daily with Muslim youths, for many of whom conservative Islam has become an ideology of rebellion against perceived oppression. Israeli-Palestinian violence produces a dangerous echo here: anti-Israel marches have featured the burning in effigy of Hasidic Jews, and last June a Jewish teenager was critically wounded in a knife attack by a group of Muslim youths.

"Their values are not the right values," said Henri Rosenberg, a Talmudic scholar and lawyer who is an Orthodox Jew, speaking of the Muslim community. Though he is the son of concentration camp survivors and his grandparents died in camps, he campaigned on behalf of Vlaams Belang, then named Vlaams Blok, in regional elections last year.

I imagine that Vlaams Belang will continue to grow in support as long as Islamic immigration is allowed to continue.