Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna would still like you to believe that black is white: Gates of Vienna: That Fascist Black Rat.

They continue to cling to the absurd stance that all of the white nationalist symbols in Vlaams Belang youth magazines, web sites, videos, etc. are … meaningless. This time they try to explain away the cartoon image of a black rat wearing an Odin’s Cross armband, that appears in several issues of a VB publication for young members.

Amid a lot of diversionary, off topic chatter about one of the columns for which the rat character was used as an illustration, Baron Bodissey posts this image of the rat:

This image is symbolic of the entire argument of the pro-Vlaams Belang side in this controversy—because it’s incomplete and deceptive. What Gates of Vienna didn’t show you: the part of the image that was cropped out, which includes … again … the white supremacist symbol known as the Odin’s Cross:

There’s much more information on the rat symbol and its use by European fascist groups at Eurofascism.info, in a specific response to the Gates of Vienna post: When a black rat is washed white.

About the group who published the poster above:

GUD (Groupe Union Défense), a student group, founded in 1969, is active in Paris and Nice, where it harasses anti-fascists, as well as in smaller, university cities. It is headed by Frédéric Chatillon, the son-in-law of a FN regional councilor, Katherine d’Herbais. Chatillon is the owner of the public relations and publishing company Riwal. It should be noted that Syrian money helped Riwal print Holocaust-denying material such as the books of Roger Garaudy (see below) and Jürgen Graf (see Switzerland). The company was instrumental in disseminating Garaudy’s book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics and translating it into Arabic. The translation was done by the Iraqi dissident Jawad Bashara, a notorious anti-Semite. Riwal was also the publisher of FN’s official newsheet Français d’abord (as well as the anti-Semitic newsletter Faits et Documents (see below), until the party split.

Another GUD activist, Thomas Lagane is currently the Front National de la Jeunesse second-in-command. GUD is a violent group with a record of aggression against foreign and Jewish students on university campuses. One of its most notorious members, Yvain Pottiez, is Bruno Mégret’s bodyguard. Another, Axel Loustau, was a FN candidate in the 1997 general election.

UPDATE at 12/8/07 10:50:23 am:

Baron Bodissey is demanding an apology for this post; here’s my reply:

1) I did not accuse Baron Bodissey of cropping the rat image. I wrote that his post contained a cropped image, and that is indisputably true.

2) I did not imply that the image was a Vlaams Belang image. In fact, I posted two paragraphs of information about the group who did create it, the GUD, specifically so that people would not assume it was from the VB.

3) Both of the points above are very clear from reading my post.

4) There will be no apology.

One more note to the Baron: it’s time for you to start treating your European “sources” with a little more skepticism. They burned you with their latest attempted cover-up, and now you have egg all over your face. The person you should be asking for an apology is the one who foisted that cropped image on you.