Paul Beliën

On 26 June 2008, in light of the lasting Belgian political crisis, Paul Beliën wrote on his blog that he expects the unitary Belgian state is about come to an end.

In May 2006, Beliën received a letter from the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism asking him to remove the post Geef ons Wapens! ("Give us Weapons!") from his blog, The Brussels Journal. That title referred to a 1963 –then obviously figurative– outcry refutedly ascribed to the later Prime Minister Martens that was related to disputes between Belgian speakers of Dutch and of French. The agency falls under the responsibility of Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and is directed by Jozef de Witte [nl]. The agency claimed Beliën's blog post was a "call for violence against a group because of its ethnic or national origin" and that it violated the Belgian law of 1981 on racism and xenophobia.

On 25 April 2006 Beliën wrote a new article, which title differs from the post Geef ons Wapens! ("Give us Weapons!") from his blog, The Brussels Journal with a new title "En Geef Ons Dus Wapens" ("And Thus Give Us Weapons"). Beliën made a lot of effort to remove any sign of the article Geef ons Wapens! ("Give us Weapons!").

In June 2006 a judicial enquiry was conducted regarding the homeschooling of Beliën's children. The Flemish Ministry of Education had asked the judiciary to press charges on child neglect by failing to educate his children adequately. In 2003, the Flemish government adapted the executive order on compulsory education, requiring homeschooling parents to sign an agreement about the education they give their children. The declaration contains the following statement, inspired by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child:

Paul Beliën, Alexandra Colen and others have speculated about a possible political agenda of dissident persecution behind what they call the state's "crackdown on homeschoolers". They argue that Beliën was summoned to a police station to give a statement on 13 June 2006, shortly after the above-mentioned incident with the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism. Kersey claims outright that "Dr Beliën has incurred the wrath of the authorities as a result of expressing opinions that they find inconvenient, and as a result, any cause is being found to make his life difficult."

As of December 2006, Beliën was appointed director of Islamist Watch. Islamist Watch is a new project of the think tank Middle East Forum which combats the ideas and institutions of Islamic extremism in the United States and other Western countries. According to the Middle East Forum's website, Beliën received this appointment because of his emergence as "one of Europe's leading experts on lawful Islamism, particularly in his role as founder and editor of The Brussels Journal."

In 2005 Beliën published A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianization of Europe. The book explains Belgian history through the life and acts of the country's six kings. Contrary to mainstream historians, Beliën depicts an artificial state, called into existence by the Belgian revolution of 1830, and led by rather ruthless kings and a corrupt political elite ever since. The book touches controversial subjects such as Leopold II's brutal colonisation of the Congo, the relation to Nazi Germany in World War II and the numerous Belgian political scandals in recent decades, including the pedophile Marc Dutroux affair. He suggests that the real father of Queen Victoria's husband Albert, Prince Consort, was King Leopold I of Belgium, Albert's maternal uncle, rather than Ernst I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, as is otherwise believed.

In an article (23 June 2004) for the business newspaper De Tijd Beliën reflected on the policies of Guy Verhofstadt who was then serving as prime-minister of Belgium. According to Beliën, Verhofstadt brought Flemish Liberalism to the brink of the abyss. Beliën stated that he saw in Verhofstadt a transformation from adoring the economic liberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the laureling of Ludwig Erhard of Verhofstadt in Beliën's magazine Nucleus in 1990, to a Third Way position taken by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, with Verhofstadt ultimately taking an Old Europe stance with Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in 2003. According to Beliën, this last 'change of winds' by Verhofstadt prevented him to become the next President of the EU Commission. Furthermore, Beliën thinks that the vacuum left by Verhofstadt's failure to turn the VLD into a broad people's party has been filled by the Vlaams Belang.

Beliën was editor at the foreign desk of the Gazet van Antwerpen, until he was fired in April 1990.

An op-ed of Beliën for the NRC Handelsblad (published 6 April 1990) mentioned that Beliën was working "for a newspaper in Antwerp, whose name he could not mention". A couple of days later Beliën was fired. Jos Huypens, deputy editor of the Gazet, said that the cause of Beliën's firing was a "conflict that was dragging on for years". Shortly later, the Wall Street Journal published another Beliën piece, detailing the connections between political parties and the media in Belgium.

Beliën had received information in October 1989, that the Belgian King, Baudouin, would not sign the new abortion law. Although the editor in chief of the Gazet van Antwerpen, Lou de Clerck, found this information to be too sensitive to be published, Beliën published it anyway in the Wall Street Journal on 1 November 1989 and also later in NRC Handelsblad. In reaction to this, De Clerck refused to let Beliën write in foreign newspapers, mentioning his relationship to the Gazet van Antwerpen.

Paul Beliën (born 1959), is a Flemish Belgian journalist, author and founder of the conservative blog The Brussels Journal.