The Twenty-Twenty Vision of Hindsight

A Nice Little Suburb

The intelligence and police authorities in Belgium have come under censorious criticism in recent days.  They have shown signs of incompetence.  The public is angry.  It appears that terrorists have found a welcome nest in Belgium.

It pays to remember that in such circumstances the public is a fickle beast.  On the one hand, it champions maximum licentiousness as a mark of sophistication and superior culture.  But, the instant it is threatened with real danger by conspirators with malice aforethought, it demands absolute competence and efficiency from its spies and intelligence services.  Such attitudes and responses bespeak petulant childishness.  The public should have been pressuring the authorities long before this most recent outbreak. 

It is now reported that most actual terror attacks in Europe have come from terrorists operating out of Brussels which is regarded as a metropolitan "safehouse" amongst the terrorist networks.  Moreover, more foreign fighters in Syria come from Belgium than any other European country, according to The Guardian.  It is not insignificant, albeit ironic, that Brussels styles itself as being the "heart of Europe".

One suburb in particular has been singled out.

Molenbeek: the Brussels borough becoming known as Europe's jihadi central

Neighbourhood on the edge of Belgian city where seven people have been arrested in connection with the Paris attacks has a reputation for its battle-hardened militants

The Guardian

Across the canal from Brussels’ shabby chic centre for designer fashion, cafes, and bohemian bars sits the borough of Molenbeek, just over two square miles housing almost 100,000 people and one of the poorest areas in Belgium cheek-by-jowl with the country’s wealthiest.

Molenbeek is the source of the highest concentration in Europe of jihadi foreign fighters going to fight in Syria and Iraq and returning battle-hardened and determined to take their fight to the capitals of Europe. It came as little surprise to locals therefore that a number of those alleged to be involved in Friday’s Paris attack lived in the area.

It is a borough both down-at-heel, with large communities of Moroccan and Turkish origin, and thoroughly middle-class, with handsome bourgeois villas and green spaces. . . .

Molenbeek, nonetheless, occupies a unique place in European jihadism. Almost invariably when an Islamist atrocity takes place on the continent, attention turns to the district on the north-western fringes of Brussels’ city centre. From the post 9/11 assassination in Afghanistan of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Taliban leader and the 2004 Madrid train bombings, to last year’s killings at Brussels’ Jewish museum and this summer’s foiled shooting spree on a high-speed Amsterdam-Paris train, investigators’ lines of inquiry lead to Molenbeek.

“Almost every time there’s a link with Molenbeek,” the Belgian prime minister, Charles Michel, said on Sunday. “We’ve tried prevention. Now we’ll have to get repressive. It’s been a form of laisser faire and laxity. Now we’re paying the bill.”

Now, that represents a damning admission by the Prime Minister: "a form of laissez faire and laxity".  No wonder questions are being raised about the ineffectual activities of the intelligence community.  But then again, it appears, in the light of the PM's admission, that the authorities in general were asleep at the wheel.  We suspect that the sleep was not caused by exhaustion or overwork, but because of a liberal, "live-and-let-live" world-view by the authorities.  Such misplaced liberalism doubtless has prided itself on its wilfully ignoring the very real threats to citizens' lives which was festering in Molenbeek.

Seven people were arrested over the weekend in raids that including the deployment of bomb disposal units and army demining teams, according to the Belgian justice ministry. At least one of the cars used in the Paris attacks had Belgian plates, and a parking ticket found in the vehicle proved the driver had been in Molenbeek. The driver, a French national, was arrested in Molenbeek after returning to Belgium from Paris on Saturday, along with two other people. They were using a different vehicle from that seen at the site of the Bataclan concert hall massacre. Belgian prosecutors said another Belgian vehicle was involved, both of them rented last week.

All the signs are there and have been for some time. It's just that the authorities have chosen not to connect the dots or take matters seriously.  The Islamic guerillas have taken advantage.  They are not dumb, ignorant, and illiterate.  They are resourceful, smart, motivated, with clear tactical and strategic objectives--and they are ruthlessly committed irregular soldiers.  But the self-satisfied complacency of the authorities has protected them. 

There are at least 22 mosques in Molenbeek, but Khannous [the borough’s deputy mayor] admits that the hardline Salafist circles and recruiting sergeants for holy war have clandestine prayer sites and meeting points, usually in the front rooms of houses and apartments.  “It’s all about the networks,” he said.

His boss, the Molenbeek mayor Françoise Schepmans, said that the seven people arrested seemed to suggest a network based in Brussels connected with the Paris attacks.  As the investigations intensify – French detectives were in Brussels on Sunday – the Molenbeek connections seem to thicken, although several of those said to be involved in various jihadi plots and foreign fighter networks appear to be non-Belgian nationals using the borough as a base.

“I need to examine why this borough remains a problem,” Belguim’s interior minister, Jan Jambon, said. “But one thing’s for sure. We just can’t accept this situation any longer.”

Let's hope never again will such a situation be accepted.  But that's probably being far too optimistic. After all, Europe's cultural "superiority" and  "sophistication" are at stake.  Never before had secular idolatry been festooned with such smug arrogance.  The "heart of Europe" indeed.  But now it has morphed into angry arrogance.  One wonders where a sacrificial lamb will be found. 

Meanwhile, keep those migrants coming: it's the European way.  What's facilitating a few "Jihadi Centrals" when such a grand utopian project is under construction.