a belgian minister's aide invented a gay muslim to prove a point about the media. he left his real name in the file. i'm on the floor.
via VRT NWS and The Brussels Times
Somewhere in Belgium, a young man sat down in September and wrote as a gay Muslim, inventing a garage in a small town where an old man shouted a slur at him, and composing a takedown of two of the country's best-known right-wing politicians. Then he emailed it out as an attachment with his own name in the file's metadata.
The op-ed was titled, per VRT NWS, "Gay en moslim: ja, ik ben extreemrechts' ergste nachtmerrie," which translates as "Gay and Muslim: yes, I am the far right's worst nightmare." Its author was Mohammed El Idrissi, a 29-year-old gay Muslim from the Antwerp district of Borgerhout. It argued that whenever a gay person is harassed in Flanders, everyone looks at Muslims first, that "Mohammed" felt completely accepted in Borgerhout and far less so in his in-laws' village in the Kempen, and, in a line The Brussels Times quotes, that "for politicians such as Theo Francken and Tom Van Grieken, a narrative about Muslims and homophobia is, of course, extremely useful."
Mohammed El Idrissi does not exist.
who actually wrote it
The piece went to several Flemish newsrooms at the end of September; The Brussels Times counts five. Only one, the news site DeWereldMorgen.be, ran it. The weekly magazine Knack then discovered that the sender was not real: the author's actual name was in the document properties of the attached column, VRT reports. He turned out to work in the cabinet of Ben Weyts, the Flemish vice-minister-president and budget minister, who belongs to N-VA, the same nationalist party as Theo Francken, one of the two politicians the fake column attacked. Nieuwsblad named the cabinet on Monday, according to The Brussels Times.
His stated motive, as he told Knack and VRT relays it, was to show that conservative voices struggle to get space on Flemish opinion pages while a queer Muslim gets published. Which is one way to prove a point. The other way would have been to write under his own name and see what happened, but then nobody would have had to invent a garage.
DeWereldMorgen pulled it once Knack warned them. Editor Helenka Spanjer told The Brussels Times it was online for "a good twelve hours in total" and that in future "we'll have to check more carefully whether someone who sends us something is actually who they claim to be."
what the minister did
Weyts called the stunt "gewoonweg dom," simply stupid, and said in a written statement that it "was a personal initiative, completely separate from the cabinet, but that doesn't excuse it," according to VRT. By Monday evening his spokesperson told the Belga news agency, per VRT, that the aide had been given a formal reprimand that goes in his personnel file. Firing him is off the table. "He is 26 and realizes he has committed an enormous blunder," Weyts said, "but I'm not throwing him under the bus over one stupid mistake, even though he damaged me and my cabinet with it." (Those quotes are our translation of the Dutch VRT printed.)
Not everyone thinks a note in a file is enough. Mieke Schauvliege, who leads the opposition Green group, called it "letterlijk fake news," literally fake news, spread by someone paid with public money, and said the minister should take political responsibility. VRT's own political journalist Ivan De Vadder went further: as far as he was concerned, the aide could no longer work in a cabinet.
The far right did not take it as a favor, either. Chris Janssens of Vlaams Belang, the party whose leader the fake column went after, posted on X that in the middle of budget season a Weyts staffer had sent newsrooms a fake op-ed to clear Muslims of anti-gay hatred and pin it on right-wing Flanders, and that N-VA's staff had gone as far off the rails as its leadership. (Again, our translation.) Imagine inventing a gay Muslim and somehow annoying everyone except the gay Muslims, who were not consulted.
We have no position on Flemish civil service discipline. We would simply note that a man who wanted to prove a gay Muslim gets an easier ride than he does ended up with the gay Muslim's byline, the gay Muslim's argument, and none of the gay Muslim's attention to detail.
