A Paris-based Jewish group has called for a “complete investigation” into the activities of a Flemish extreme-right party’s in Belgium and its links to racist killings in Antwerp last week.

Last Thursday, an armed 18-year old skinhead, Hans Van Themsche, walked through Antwerp, started stalking identifiable foreigners in Belgium’s second city and killed a Black woman babysitter from Mali and a two-year old native Belgian toddler.

He also seriously injured a woman of Turkish descent and his hunt for further victims was stopped only when a police officer shot him and wounded him.

The killing has sparked concern that the attacks could be part of a wider trend of racist violence in Belgium.

In a letter to Belgian interior minister Patrick Dewael, Shimon Samuels, director for international relations of the Paris-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre expressed "shock and disgust at the racist murders in Antwerp."

Deeply racist

A note recovered from Van Themsche's home by police suggests that his racist politics was more deeply rooted. His father had been a founding member of the Vlaams Blok, the anti-immigration, extreme-rightist Flemish party renamed Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, in 2004 in a bid to broaden its appeal.

His aunt, Frieda Van Themsche, is a Vlaams Belang member of the Belgian parliament, and his grandfather was a member of the Nazi Waffen SS at the East front during WWII.

Antwerp has long been a hotbed of the extreme right party which gained 24 percent of the Flemish vote in 2004 regional elections, making it the largest party in Flanders, Belgium's largest and most prosperous region.

The party immediately condemned the murders. “Our party is shocked by the events, for which there can be no excuse," its chairman Frank Vanhecke said. "We demand the heaviest possible penalty for the murderer."

But other Belgian politicians and commentators were quick to connect the murders to VB's xenophobic policies. "These horrible and cowardly crimes are a form of extreme racism," said Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. "No one can ignore what the far right can lead to." Whether such charges will erode the VB's appeal, or give it a new underdog allure, is still not clear.

The Wiesenthal Centre was also less than impressed. "Despite the condemnation of these killings by the extreme right Flemish Interest Party, it is clear that the impunity granted to their skinhead retinue and the tenor of their website links have encouraged a rising wave of racist violence in Belgium,” Samuels wrote.

Samuels urged the Belgian authorities "to apply the full measure of the law in punishing the perpetrators and exposing their networks. A complete investigation must be launched into the activities of the Flemish Interest and its associates."

He transmitted the sympathies of the Centre to the families of the victims, "whether white, black, Turkish or Jewish - all hate is indivisible."

The Brussels-based left-leaning Jewish Lay Community Centre (“Centre Communautaire Laic Juif”) also expressed ts concern at the rise and trivialization of racism and intolerance in the Belgian society.” “Our country must show its determination against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” the CCLJ said.

Dangerous times

Pinhas Korenfeld, a leading member of the Antwerp Forum of Jewish organisations, however told EJP that "violence is not a monopoly of the extreme-right."

 “It’s clear in this case that the young guy has been living in an extreme-rightist environment but all fanaticisms and extremisms are dangerous, “ he added.

He explained that he was himself recently attacked in daylight in the centre of Brussels by people “who weren’t skinheads or extreme-rightists” and spoke of increasing acts of anti-Semitism in Antwerp where some 15,000 Jews are living.

“I think that what has failed in this country is youth education,” he added.

The Vlaams Belang has in the past tried to attract Jewish votes in Antwerp by underlining the danger of growing Islamism in the country.
"It's intellectually unfair to blame the act of a lunatic on a political party, whatever his family ties to the Vlaams Belang," says Carl Devos, a political scientist at the University of Ghent.

"But the Vlaams Belang is responsible for creating an atmosphere and popularizing the theme of racial tension."

He worries that such racially-charged crimes are eroding tolerance in a country that can't exist without it. "It's not like we're living in Beirut," he says. "But we are losing control."

The Belgian union of Jewish students has called for a demonstration protest against racism Monday in Brussels.