Word: belangers
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...aspect of mosque design provokes more anger than most: the minaret. Across Europe, minarets on city skylines have become a political issue. In the Netherlands, Filip Dewinter, a leader of the right-wing Vlaams Belang party, decried a new Rotterdam mosque because its minarets were higher than the lights of the city's soccer stadium. "These kinds of symbols have to stop," he told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. In 2007, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that minarets shouldn't be "ostentatiously higher than church steeples...
...There's no Belgian nation. There's no Belgian anything.' FILIP DEWINTER, leader of the far-right Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang party, on a plan to redivide Belgium into Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, the two regions that united to form the country in 1830. Polls show as many as 40% of Belgians support the plan...
...national control. A total separation like the so-called "velvet divorce" of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992 is impossible because of Brussels: Belgium's capital is in Flanders, but 85% of its residents speak French. That hasn't stopped radical nationalist groups like the xenophobic Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) from pushing for total separation, which may have contributed to the idea being shunned by other parties...
...Vlaams Belang immediately condemned the murders, demanding "the heaviest possible punishment for the murderer" and declaring that "such disturbed criminals ought to have no place in our community." But other 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...
...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 VB 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...