A slow snooze day at the New York Times, which recently featured a piece I can hardly wake myself up to mention except that it casually defames -- as only the uninformed can casually defame -- one of the true heroes of our times, Filip Dewinter (above) of the Vlaams Belang party in Belgium.

As many readers know, I have written extensively about Filip and his party's  courageous political battle to halt and reverse the Islamization of Belgium since I first met him almost exactly three years ago.

Did I say courageous? Here's a look at what it takes to make the case against Islamization in Europe today.

Here is Filip Dewinter (with megaphone) in October 2008, after having been attacked as he arrived to participate in a debate at the University of Ghent. As Filip put it, "so-called anti-fascists used fascist methods to try to silence us. This cannot be allowed in a democracy."   

Here he is being arrested in 2007 by Belgian police at a political rally in Brussels to comemmorate 9/11 and protest the Islamization of Europe, a process unconscionably enabled by what you could call the "indigenous" acolytes of the one orthodoxy on earth more messianic than Islam -- multiculturalism.

The Times article contemplates the endlessly thrilling (if you are the NYT) chimera of right-wing "fascism" in Europe, utterly missing the grinding Western reality of encroaching Islamic-cum-socialist totalitarianism. It drops moody shadows of "Nazism" with its anti-Semitic shadings over Vlaams Belang. You may find a lenghty queue of my writings on this subject, along with other postings on Filip Dewinter here, but for now, let me offer a quick picture(s) of where to find anti-Semitism in Belgium today, dating back to last year's Muslim protests in Antwerp over Gaza that escalated into rioting in the Jewish district of the city.

Back to fantasy land at the New York Times, where the threat to the Western world comes not from equal parts Islamic and multicultural orthodoxies, but from Vlaams Belang.

Vlaams Belang, which has a history that reaches back to the wrong side of World War II has an unabashed record of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness of all sorts; a few years ago, for example, the party announced an advertising campaign in Moroccan newspapers and magazines to “discourage foreigners from coming to our country.”

That's the example, folks. An advertising campaign to discourage the culturally overwhelming, one-way immigration wave transforming European cities in particular into Dar al-Islam (I know; I've seen some). Well, what can one say but Sieg Heil? After all, who at the New York Times doesn't want to encourage more Moroccan and other Islamic immigration into Manhattan and Westchester County given these immigrants' alarming rate of involvement in violence, crime, terrorism, dependecy on welfare and intense Islamizing influence?

Back to Timesworld:

And as recently as 2004, it was condemned by the Belgian Supreme Court for incitement to discrimination and racial segregation.

Exactly what is happening right now in the Netherlands to Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom.

(The party responded by changing its name.) Even to most right-wing sensibilities, Vlaams Belang is certainly beyond the pale. ...

Oh, yeah? Of course, most right-wing sensibilities, intellects or imaginations have yet to be penetrated by the facts or implications of Islamizing Europe.

It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives, should become the issue over which a kind of civil war among American conservatives broke out, but that is what happened.

Again, most "American conservatives" remain clueless. The squabble the NYT saw fit to eplore, lamely, included players I could count on one hand.

Opposing “Islamofascism,” Johnson had come to believe, shouldn’t require identification with fascism of the older sort. Johnson began taking shots at not only Vlaams Belang, an organization it seems safe to say the vast majority of his readers had never heard of, but also at formerly favored colleagues like Spencer and Geller, to whom, by attending the same conference, the European neofascist movement was now . . . linked. ...

I can't tell which is more noxious: the slander or the ignorance.

Johnson first hinted, and eventually demanded, that they publicly distance themselves from both Vlaams Belang and the conference itself, and when they demurred, he publicly distanced himself from them.

“Filip Dewinter has said some things I deplore,” [Robert] Spencer says. “But I don’t consider myself responsible for him just because I was at this conference and he was, too. That’s an outrageous kind of guilt by association. Let me ask you this: a few years ago I spoke at a Yom Kippur service, and one of the other speakers was Hillary Clinton. Does that make me a supporter or her work, or her of mine?”

Me, personally? I'll take all the "guilt by association" with Filip Dewinter I can get.