With his vow to protect Antwerp Jews from Muslim immigrants, Filip Dewinter is catching on among some in the community despite his far-right party

Stewart Ain:

Polls are suggesting that Filip Dewinter, chairman of the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) Party in Antwerp, could become the Belgian city’s next mayor and the most successful far-right politician in Europe, bypassing the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jorg Haider in Austria.

Perhaps surprising is that Dewinter, who has been called a “Haider without the anti-Semitic background,” is reaching out to the city’s 20,000 Jews and receiving support from a small but growing number.

They are seeing Dewinter, 43, in a more favorable light because of his pledge to protect the Jews from attacks by Muslim immigrants who come mostly from Morocco and Turkey, according to Hans Knoop, a retired Dutch journalist who now runs his own media consulting agency and has lived in Belgium since 1990.

“Orthodox rabbis openly support him, and he has started a charm campaign to the Orthodox community and to Israelis,” Knoop said. “He gave an interview to [the Israeli newspaper Haaretz] in which he said there is a danger from the left and from Muslims. He is successful because some Jews fall for his charms. They say that if he hates the Arabs, he is our friend.”

Attacks against Jews and Jewish property — including an assault on the chief rabbi of Brussels and the firebombing of a Jewish bookstore in Brussels — prompted The Simon Wiesenthal Center in April 2002 to issue a travel advisory urging Jews to use “extreme caution” when traveling to Belgium.

The ban remains in effect, according to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center’s associate dean, because Belgian authorities have made no concerted effort to arrest and punish the perpetrators.

“The Jewish community does not feel physically safe, especially in Antwerp where there are all sorts of daily intimidation and where the community tradition is not to be aggressive through the democratic process,” Rabbi Cooper said. “They have an old European view of things.”

In Antwerp, a city of 450,000 about 30 miles north of the capital Brussels, the vast majority of Jews are fervently Orthodox. They are concentrated in the center of the city in what has been described as the last shtetl in Europe.

Most of those Jews are involved in the diamond industry and have made Antwerp the world’s largest diamond trading center. It is estimated that 80 percent of all rough diamonds in the world are traded in Antwerp, and that as much as half of the trading in cut and polished diamonds also occurs there.

Dewinter is capitalizing on the fear in the Jewish community and on its support for Israel, which he openly champions while many other Belgian political leaders view Israel as an occupying power.

“A lot of individuals ... cannot follow anymore those in the Jewish establishment who say they should vote for the Liberal Party,” said Henri Rosenberg, a chasid and law professor at Catholic University in Holland.

“In the last few years, the Liberal Party has taken into its midst some extremist elements who support Hezbollah and Hamas, while Dewinter is very charming and has been interviewed in Jewish newspapers and he meets with rabbis,” he said. “A lot of Jews are not following the establishment and will vote for him.”

Rosenberg cited instances in which members of parliament from the Liberal Party flew to Syria and “shook hands with [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah and then traveled to Palestine. And when Mr. Arafat came to Belgium, he received the red carpet treatment in parliament, while a few weeks later [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon came and they did not want him in parliament. So as a face-saving gesture, the president of the parliament invited him to his office. And the only party to object [to Sharon’s treatment] was Dewinter’s.'

Rosenberg added that Dewinter is “a friend of the Jews, and he says Israel is the only democracy in the region and should be supported by the European Union.”

Complaint against extreme-right leader for “islamophobia”

Filip Dewinter speaking in Ghent, Belgium. "You should know, the real enemies of Israel today are not on the right, but rather on the left: the socialists and the Greens."