ginovandewalle.com

Last Friday, a terrible thing happened in my home country: a 20 year old idiot entered a children’s day care centre and killed two babies, one adult and wounded twelve other babies with a knife. After the racist killings in Antwerp in May 2006, where another young 18 year old idiot killed a pregnant woman and a two year old child, and the Dutroux affair in the nineties, both the national and international press were focussing again on the terror in Belgium. The Dendermonde Killings. Obviously, everybody who thought to be interesting enough had to put in his or her little word in order to try to explain the whole terrible thing.

The same day, one of the regional Flemish Ministers, Youth Minister Bert Anciaux wrote on his blog: “I had to think about the hundreds of babies in Gaza that were also consciously killed by an agressor that has not been brought to justice”. Because of these twenty six words,  of which I took the liberty of translating them into English, Mr. Anciaux is getting all the critics in the world thrown over his head.

The President of his “new-home” political party SP.A is distancing herself from these words but will still support him. As did the Federal Belgian Government. The Liberals said he should think twice before making such a remark. The Christian Democrats said they would no longer support Anciaux. I ask myself if they ever supported him in the last couple of years, but that’s another story. Even the International Herald Tribune mentioned it.

In this matter, Bert Anciaux, as usually, let his heart speak out. But as President Richard Nixon once said during the famous interviews with David Frost in 1977: “It is good if a politician has a heart, but he also should have a head. And a great politician should always have his head speak above his heart.”

When I read all this, while being at home with a sort of flue, I can only ask myself one question: don’t these politicians have anything better to do? In my humble opinion, these politicians are just using Anciaux’s words as an excuse to silence him as a pretty popular collegue (who is not my favourite) a couple of months before the elections of June 2009.

And while doing this, they simply pass by the fact that two little innocent babies have been denied the right of living a happy life. As is the fact in Gaza, where hundreds of innocent babies have been denied the same right. As is the fact in Israel where also babies have been killed over the last couple of years.

A child is a child, wherever this child lives in this world…

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