A white staffer of Flemish Finance Minister Ben Weyts (N-VA) presented himself in an opinion piece sent to multiple media outlets as a Mohammed El Idrissi, a gay Muslim hailing from Antwerp.
The opinion piece, titled 'Gay and Muslim: I am far-right's worst nightmare', was sent shortly after Flemish influencer Jonatan Medart shared a video of him and his partner being targeted by homophobic slurs in Ghent.
Magazine Knack initially revealed the opinion piece as a fake, originating from within the ranks of the N-VA, with Nieuwsblad reporting on Monday that the author is a white staffer from the Ministry of Finance. The staffer told Nieuwsblad that he wanted to prove the left-wing bias of Flemish media by sending the piece in the hopes it would be picked up.
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The fictional Mohammed writes that he lives in the Antwerp neighbourhood of Borgerhout with his male partner, and can go to the mosque wearing skinny jeans and a crop top. “When I go to the garage in Olen [a small village in the Antwerp province, ed] wearing those same clothes, a seventy-year-old white man might suddenly call out ‘f-----’ to me, as if we were back in 1974.”
Mohammed says he feels more comfortable around Muslims in Borgerhout than the "rich brats in New-South," an upscale neighbourhood in the city.
Plain dumb
He further targets Defence Minister Theo Francken (N-VA) and Vlaams Belang party leader Tom Van Grieken. “For politicians such as Theo Francken and Tom Van Grieken, a narrative about Muslims and homophobia is, of course, extremely useful. It fits perfectly into a broader narrative in which Muslims are repeatedly portrayed as a threat to ‘our’ Western values.”
The staffer told Knack that he acted of his own accord and wanted to prove that conservative voices are not given a platform in opinion pieces of Flemish media. He sent it to five newsrooms, with at least one of them publishing it before realising it was a fake.
Finance Minister Weyts told Het Laatste Nieuws that he believes the plan was "plain dumb," and that he will "have a one-on-one conversation" with the staffer. “It was a personal initiative, completely separate from the ministry, but that doesn’t make it right. The question now is whether we should immediately punish and expel young people who do dumb things.”
De Wereld Morgen, the outlet that published the opinion piece, says that it will improve its verification process for authors of opinion pieces. “As soon as we realised it was fake, we took it offline straight away. I think it was online for a good twelve hours in total,” Helenka Spanjer of De Wereld Morgen told Nieuwsblad. “Of course, we’re annoyed about this. In the future, we’ll have to check more carefully whether someone who sends us something is actually who they claim to be.”
