How Brussels Deals With Non-Violent Dissent: 2

With arms bound, conservative leader Frank Vanhecke discovers the contempt that socialist police and politicians hold for free-marketers.


Can you even imagine such a thing happening to the head of a political party in the United States? What if Howard Dean was treated thusly or Mel Martinez was roughed up in such a way? (No one would worry so much if this happened to Dennis Kucenich whose testicles fell off years ago.)

We have many people in our country that are dissatisfied. They yearn for the government to supply more and do more. They covet a cradle to the grave government benevolence that is openly promised by socialists. They are also blinded to the dangers of ceding personal responsibility to an all-powerful government.

Socialism cannot survive and tolerate dissent.

The Brussels Journal covers yesterday's activity in Belgium.

At a press conference in the European Parliament yesterday evening foreign journalists openly doubted the statement by Philip Claeys and Koen Dillen, two members of the European Parliament for the Vlaams Belang party (VB), that the Brussels police had told the VB that they would tolerate yesterday’s anti-Islamization demonstration if it was a peaceful “static” protest at Schuman Plaza. Despite this agreement, the police beat up the peaceful demonstrators in front of the European Commission building. “You can tell us whatever you want, but we need proof,” one of the foreign journalists told Claeys and Dillen.

The proof was given yesterday on Flemish television when reporter Goedele Devroy told a colleague [video here, in Dutch] that she was amazed by the brutality of the police against the peaceful demonstrators “who just stood there.” She added: “This is strange because, when I rang the police this morning, they said that they would tolerate the demonstration if the demonstrators would not use violence and if they just remained put and would not try to march.”

It looks like a deliberate trap was set up for the demonstrators, who were gathered at Schuman Plaza. Riot police units from Liege in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, maltreated the demonstrators, many of them from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, in an excessively violent way, picking out the VB leaders for the worst treatment.