Violence And Vandalism At Brussels Peace Protest

Belgian member of Parliamant Richard Miller can personally attest that Sunday's high-profile pro-Hamas "peace" protest staged in Brussels degenerated into violence: he was hospitalized after being hit in the head by a piece of gravel thrown by one of his anti-Israel allies.

Translated from the Belgian news site 7sur7:

"Everything was going well during the demonstration when suddenly, there were incidents during the dispersal of the procession in front of the railway station", explained M. Miller. "That's when I was hit by the cobblestone. I was groggy and found myself bloodied", he said while waiting to be evacuated by ambulance. He participated in the protest at the request of the president of his party so as to represent the MR [Reformist Movement], he added.

It was not reported whether the parliamentarian's assailant was one of the 143 vandals arrested during the "peace" protest for destruction and mayhem caused along the Albert II boulevard, and elsewhere. Three policemen were also wounded by day's end, one with a broken foot. A dozen cars were vandalized and several store and restaurant windows smashed. Police are now wading through the surveillance footage filmed that day by security cameras, matching suspects to actions.

Organizers announced that between 50,000 and 60,000 people participated in the protest march; police give a much lower figure, of 30,000.

Belgian Off-Duty Police Attacked By Mob Of 30 Youths

If they see you, they attack you; little self-control on display in this story of Belgian police officers who were enjoying a day off, when all of a sudden they are pounced upon by no less than 30 young thugs.

Loosely translated from the Belgian paper La Derniere Heure: 5 police officers from Brussels were assaulted by 30 youths, in the Bruparck parking lot in Heysel, on Sunday morning.

The officers were not on duty and were coming back from an evening together. As they entered the parking lot, they were recognized by a group of youths that were hanging around and who had already had problems with the police.

The youths beat up four of the officers so severely that they will be unable to return to work for some time. One of the police officers suffered a broken elbow. The young thugs also damaged the officers' cars. ...

One of the problems making urban violence worse in Belgium are the juvenile detention centers; they are full, and often young offenders are released shortly after they are caught, due to lack of space.

Yesterday we covered a similar story out of France, where off-duty police officers were attacked by a smaller gang of feral youths. Just how common an occurance has this become?

No New Year's Fireworks For Brussels

The Terror Threat hanging over Belgium since December 21st has cost Belgians their traditional New Year's fireworks celebration in Brussels: it is canceled. No exhilarating light show will now ring in the New Year for Belgium's capital city... a sad symbol of the decline of Western Europe, falling ever deeper into darkness and despair.

A spokesperson for Freddy Thielemans, infamous socialist mayor of Brussels, explained that "The goal is not to create panic or to barricade the entire city, but we do not want to take any unnecessary risks..." Better that the entire nation be deprived of their inspiring New Year's Eve tradition, than 14 suspected islamist terrorists remain behind bars. All this due to "insufficient evidence".

A Belgian news outlet, "La Derniere Heure", did some investigating on the reasons for the arrests and quick release of the suspects, and were able to identify three incredible pieces of the puzzle, offering some important context to the legal rorschach test followed by Belgian authorities on this case... a context that had been missing in most of the coverage of the story to date.
What follows is my loose translation of their report, "The Terrorists' Plan":

It all started, a few months ago, with a plan to free [Nizar] Trabelsi. In the middle of the month of December, however, the deal changed. Investigators learned that the plan had evolved. No longer was it a question of a prison break but of an attack.

"You know, it's always hard to predict if the threats will be carried out or not. If we act too soon, we risk not having enough evidence. If we act too late, we risk having dozens of deaths", confided one investigator.

Therefore Friday December 21st, anti-terror police led a series of searches and arrested 14 people. These were released the following day... because of insufficient evidence and also due no doubt to the suspects' explanations. The telephone conversations and emails.... it was all a joke. And yet...:

One: in one of the conversations, the suspects talked of staking out the subway ["metro"] while making reference to the London bombings (four explosions striking the city's public transportation, leaving 56 dead and 700 wounded). They wanted to test the efficiency of the police by placing small bombs in the trash bins.

Two: Naima, the wife of Nizar Trabelsi, confirmed that her daughter, who is studying chemistry, was ready to make bombs.

Three: Naima's son clearly told his step-father, Trabelsi, that he wished to become a "kamikaze". [Their word; not clear by the report if that is a direct quote or not]

A few days ago, the Belgian news site 7sur7 offered a short biography of Malika el-Aroud, one of the 14 suspects who were arrested and released due to "insufficient evidence".

"Widow of Mahmoud assassin arrested":

Malika el-Aroud is 48 years old, a belgian of afghan origin, widow of Abdessater Dahmane, one of the two assassins who killed anti-taleban Norther Alliance warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud in a suicide bombing on Sept 9 2001.

She was acquitted in 2003 by the Brussels criminal court that was investigating a network channeling jihadi candidates for Afghanistan. She left for Switzerland at the side of her newest husband, she had been judged in June of this year in Geneva for supporting islamic terrorism on internet websites. She had received six months of a suspended sentence "for support of a terrorist organization and complicity in representations of violence."

According to the charges, her husband, Moez Garsallaoui, a 39 year-old Tunisian living in Switzerland, had created and maintained several different websites used by terrorist organizations, al-qaida among them. These sites mostly spread formulas for building explosives, according to the charges. His wife Malika, "thanks to her notoriety within the islamic world, offered a legitimacy to the criminal efforts of her husband", the case maintained.

What the failure to covenant looks like

We first mentioned Hind Fraihi and her recent book in: Those for whom Vlaams Belang is the last stop! Fraihi went undercover in Belgium's Moroccan neighborhoods to learn about the rise of fundamentalist Islam there.

Charles has just sent me an English-language youtube clip from a
Deutsche Welle TV broadcast from Brussels that discusses Fraihi and her book.


It's a video that reveals how the streets of many districts in Europe are no longer under the control of the European states, but are the domain of entrepreneurial Islamist dictators. Those who think the present global crisis caused by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism promises to be a short-lived phenomenon resulting from a rural society's early integration into urban modernity need to listen to Fraihi and think again.

What the video depicts so well is the violent balkanization that befalls a country without a common covenant, a common commitment to a single rule of law that applies equally to all people. Those who forget, or who never know, their responsibility to act as guarantor for the equal freedom and rights of every other citizen, whatever their ethnic, racial, or religious brackground, whether they are aboriginal or newcomer, whatever their sex or social status, may look forward to a Belgian future where, instead of a shared commitment to a common constitutional order, they will be ruled by the push and pull of competing bureaucracies, gangs, and religious authorities, and whatever back room deals these can work out, far away from the tv news cameras and democratic transparency.

For the people to own their politics, to be self-ruling, they must share a common sense of nationhood. This is what Covenant Zone exists to defend for Canada, in face of would-be supra-national forces, like the EU, the anti-national leftist elites of our academies and media, or the Ummah, that threaten to destroy the only basis on which democracy can be sustained.

If you want to discuss how we can better make ourselves into guarantors of each other's freedom in a shared and renewed Canadian covenant, please join us here on the blog, or, if you can, attend one of our regular Thursday night meetings in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, 7-9pm, in front of Blenz Coffee. Look for the guys with the blue scarves.

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Those for whom Vlaams Belang is the last stop!

Islam in Europe: Book Review: Undercover in Little Morocco
Esther, at the excellent Islam in Europe blog, reports on the book by journalist Hind Fraihi on the Moroccans of Belgium. The active support in this community for violent Jihad, killing Jews, and control of the local Muslims, especially women, according to fundamentalist Islamic dictates, may come as no surprise. In any case, it is a reminder of what the Flemings rightly fear in their midst. But what may surprise some readers is the support for the Vlaams Belang among the moderate Muslims:

She meets more people like Jamal, but she feels they're fighting a losing battle against the fundamentalists. She says that the moderate Muslims are walking a tightrope, between the Muslim fundamentalists and the right-wing (ie, nationalist) Flemish extremists. I had trouble understanding what she meant, but she later brings example of Muslims who vote for Vlaams Belang. I doubt most Muslims are in danger of becoming nationalist extremists, though. As Fraihi says, if they vote for Vlaams Belang, they do it out of protest, fear and disillusionment.

As one example she brings Fatima, a Moroccan immigrant in her 60s. She doesn't see herself as integrated and doesn't think she acts any different in Belgium then she did in Morocco. She came in 1968, got a hearty welcome, worked with Belgians and generally enjoyed herself. She followed up on her kids - went to PTA meetings and made sure she knew where they were going at all times. A friend of hers complains that her son lives off benefits, even though he could work. There is discrimination, she says, but the 2nd and 3rd generation don't want to work and just use it as an excuse. These youth are coddled by multicultural and integration organizations, all in the name of tolerance.

According to Fatima the problem-youth are problematic because they have become fully Flemish. She suffers from the extremist Muslims who demand that she wear a headscarf, soemthing that she'd never done in morocco. The moderate Muslims are the first victims of Muslim extremism, but nobody takes care of them. She supports the Vlaams Belang program: stopping immigration, reducing marriage immigration and cutting off the integration sectors. She sees Vlaams Belang as the only party which is upset at Muslim extremism, who wants to treat immigrants strictly but justly. Moderate Muslims are fed up and feel that they've been left on their own. Fatima wants to vote for a more moderate party, but only after the danger from Muslim extremism is dealt with.

She meets a worker at a youth center who tells her he blames the parents, imams and Belgian authorities for the Islamization of the youth. The parents blindly follow the Moroccan imams, who preach that almost everything is a crime, though many of them are former criminals themselves who have become 'born again' Muslims. Some have traveled to Afghanistan and are therefore barred from going back to Morocco, and yet the Belgian authorities don't seem to care. The parents were also not that religious when they were kids, but they expect much more from their children. Not only that, the parents had realized their dreams, but their children don't reach as far, don't get anywhere and are therefore easy prey for terrorist recruiters.

As she repeats in her interview, she feels the 'integration' sector has no reason to actually solve the problem, since that would take away their reason for being.

The Flemish nationalists may sometimes be heard preaching "white Europe", but it seems the implicit multiculturalist-Jihadi alliance is not a more appealing option for some Moroccan-Belgians. Perhaps for the infamous "moderate Muslim", the only hope lies in a Flemish nationalism that may one day acknowledge and support Moroccan-Belgian allies. If the only hope for such people is the renewal of a responsible nationhood that makes real demands of youth, etc., maybe you have to start with the least bad option, the one closest to the mark (however problematic) and work from there. Or maybe it's just a great delusion. Maybe it's supporting those who will one day kick you out of the country, or worse. The thing is, no one can know in advance. It all depends on the exercise of human political freedom, and the learning process that only the interaction of strange bedfellows can bring. There is a point at which desperation and good faith meet, the point where all new religion starts...