The video lasts 25 seconds. We see a Belgian flag held by two above a fire. While he is consuming, he reveals another flag behind him, that of the Vrienden Van Breydel association. All about a song demanding the death of Belgium.
Published on July 11th, the day of the Flemish community festival, this video was discovered yesterday by Ludovic and Mathieu who contacted us via our orange alert button. “Is it normal for fachos to burn the Belgian flag in Belgium?” Asked the first. “Burning the national flag is not a crime in Belgium?” Asked the second.
No law prohibits it
Except that in Belgium, there is no law prohibiting or repressing the fact of burning the flag of a country, including its own. From the point of view of the law in the strict sense, “I do not see from which law the authors could be prosecuted so I can hardly see how one could condemn someone who burns the Belgian flag”, confirms Benjamin Biard, political scientist at CRISP, the Center for Research and Socio -political Information.
What is prosecuted is if this act can be qualified as disturbance to public order or incentive to hatred. But the first would need to do so in the street with the result of triggering a violent reaction, which is not the case here. And the second would ask to prove an intention to harm a specific group and therefore directly addressing a community. And, we will see, the message here is not a threat to all Belgian citizens, but a symbol of a political wish: see the end of Belgium as a country. A kind of visual representation of the famous Belgïe Barst slogan.
An far -right association
The Vrienden Van Breydel association is described on its Facebook page as “an association of free Flemings, focused on activism, camaraderie and personality development”. These “Breydel friends” refer to the historic figure of Jan Breydel, associated with resistance to central authority in the Middle Ages.
But behind this Flemish patriotism hides in particular a well -known figure of the Flemish radical extreme right. If the first posts of the association on Facebook date from 2023, they intensified in early April of this year. At that time, they embark on the social network X, formerly Twitter, with this message: “We deserve a place on this other major platform where our freedom of expression is defended against the regime”.
The “regime” is the name they give to Belgian governments and Belgian justice. The establishment therefore. They start republishing extremist tweets. Like those of Tommy Robinson, an Islamophobic British activist from the Hooligan movement sentenced several times. But also Islamophobic, masculinists, homophobic and transphobic tweets. Tweets questioning global warming or green energies. Or, in bulk, against the late Pope Francis, against Remco Evenepoel or against the left in general.
Joined by Tomas Bouns, neonazi condemned for terrorism
April, it is also a month after the dissolution of Project Thule, a far -right group founded by Tomas Bouns, former soldier convicted of neonazi and terrorist activities. The group, directly inspired by a white and white supremacist secret society, is accused of having formed a private militia and of having illegally owned weapons. During a rally prohibited in 2020, the police had seized crossbows, neonazi symbols and propaganda equipment. The man was sentenced by the Ghent Court of Appeal for participation in a private militia, port and detention of weapons.
And this is not the first time. “It has been historically known since 2006 for organizing with other members of Bbet (Bloed, Bodem, Eer in Trouw) an attack project against Abu Jajah and Filip Dewinter,” notes Benjamin Biard. The first is a Belgian-Lebanese political activist founding of the European Arab League close to Hezbollah. The second was at the time an emblematic political figure of Vlaams Blok, ancestor of the Flemish far right political party Vlaams Belang. The aim of this double assassination would have been to lead Belgium into a civil war “which would lead to the advent of a Flemish state”, details the political specialist of the extreme right.
Condemned to 5 years in prison for terrorism, training of criminal band and possession of prohibited weapons, “he has been released since then and we see him reappear” regularly. As in 2021 when he supported the soldier Jürgen Conings who had threatened the virologist Marc Van Ranst with death in 2021 and had stolen heavy weapons on May 17 in the Bourg-Léopold barracks. He had ended his days in a wood in Limburg after a manhunt that had lasted more than a month. This May 17, Vrienden Van Breydel went to the scene where he was found dead to commemorate his memory.
Belgium but also immigrants in line
Tomas Bouns, T-shirt by Vrienden Van Breydel on his back, had invited the relatives of the association to participate in their annual celebration this July 5. He spoke there as constant Kusters, a Dutch politician leader of the Nederlandse Volks-United (NVU), a party recognized for his neonazi ideas. The man has been condemned several times for incitement to racial hatred and for acts linked to the dissemination of neonazia propaganda. Vrienden Van Breydel regularly rests publications from the YouTube channel and his party.
No wonder because one of the battle horses of the far -right association, in addition to the end of Belgium, is the fight against immigration. On April 7, Vrienden Van Breydel walked in Ghent alongside the nationalistische Studentenvereniging (NSV, a Flemish Flemish Fraternity Nationalist regularly associated with racist slogans) during a demonstration under the slogan “Remigration generation”. It had given rise to clashes with anti-fascist counter-demonstrators and arrests.
