http://nypost.com/2016/03/27/brussels-is...integrate/
…What happened in Brussels was a co-production by adepts of two sick ideologies.
The first one is Islamism in its many versions... The other co-producer, the mushy and politically correct “liberal” ideology that has seduced segments of opinion in Western democracies, can and must be combated by all those who wish to protect the democratic system in an increasingly dangerous world. In Brussels, it started in the 1960s when the postwar economic boom created a shortage of workers. Like other Western European countries, notably Germany and France, Belgium had to import workers on a massive scale. That, however, wasn’t simple because of Belgium’s own peculiarities...
Created as a buffer state between Germany and France in 1830, Belgium was not the natural expression of a nation’s desire for statehood…the kingdom is made of …the French-speaking Walloons, the Dutch-speaking Flemish and German speakers. From the start, the maintenance of balance among the three has been the central problem of Belgian politics.
Since most factories were located in the Walloons’ area, the owners were careful to import workers from French-speaking lands, which, at the time, made French-controlled North Africa an attractive source of labor. The Walloons also had a low birth rate, while the Flemish had large families. One source of concern for French speakers was the capital, Brussels, with its 19 districts divided across linguistic lines. The Walloons feared that their depopulated districts would be repopulated by Dutch speakers. They offered rent-free or subsidized housing to immigrants from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia who knew no Flemish but could plod along in kitchen French.
By the 1990s, most of the factories had disappeared, but the immigrants remained. By then Islam was Belgium’s second-largest religion, now accounting for over 700,000 people or 6.2 percent of the population. Of these, almost half live in Brussels, counting for 28 percent of the total population of the city, and guarding the demographically declining districts from “falling” to the Flemish.
One of the districts is Molenbeek, now infamous as the Belgian capital of jihadism, where more than 100,000 mostly North African Muslims live and where the perpetrators of recent terrors attacks against Paris and Brussels lived and hid. With their state designed across communitarian lines, the Belgians did not encourage integration, doing everything possible to prevent the immigrants from losing their original “identity.” …Belgian specialists in multiculturalism opted for the label “Islamic” as an identity badge.
That, too, was fraught with problems. To start with, many, many immigrants knew little or nothing of Islam as a religion which during over a century of French rule in North Africa had morphed into a fading collection of rites rather than a living religion. The Belgian multiculturalist elites, making a fetish of the concept of “otherness,” corrected that lacuna by financing courses in Islam, encouraging the building of mosques and Koranic schools and even subsidizing pilgrimages to Mecca. The welfare industry also had an interest in protecting the “otherness” of the immigrant community where unemployment was rising, reaching over 40 percent by the end of the 1990s. In some cases, four generations of a family could be found on the welfare register in the context of their cherished “otherness.” Radical Islamists of all ilks were welcomed to market their ideological wares.
In 1993, when France and most other Western nations banned the Algerian terrorist groups, Belgium welcomed them with open arms… The Belgian multiculturalist elite, , also secured European Union subsidies for Islamist propaganda in the shape of seminars and conferences and, ultimately, the creation of a European Fatwa Council… For the past two decades…Brussels has been the principal center for the publication of jihadist material in Europe.
In 2004, the Islamic Republic in Iran transferred its main propaganda unit, located in its embassy in the Vatican, to Belgium. The books published by Islamist groups in Belgium bear such titles as “Uniting the World Under Banner of Islam,” “The Virtues of Martyrdom” and “Imam Khomeini and Jihad.” Belgium’s liberals, meanwhile, took pride in being the “good” Western nation.
Belgium was one of few European nations to have never held Muslim colonies, unlike the …Dutch who built an empire in what is now Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country. Belgium…is also alone among Western European nations not to have a state-owned oil company and thus couldn’t be accused of “stealing Muslim oil.”
After the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks against the United States, Belgium, though member of the North Atlantic Treaty organization (NATO) and host to its headquarters, kept a low profile when the allies acted against the Taliban to dismantle terrorists bases in Afghanistan. In the US-led liberation of Iraq that followed in 2003, Belgium joined France… in denouncing “George W Bush’s illegal war.” So…accommodating, not unlike…the evil US or Britain. Belgium was sure it wasn’t a target for jihadists.
Then those same people the nation coddled set up a network called “Sharia4Belgium,” with the stated aim of transforming the kingdom into an Islamic emirate. They even wrote to the king of Belgium inviting him and his family to convert to Islam as soon as possible. It was not until 2015, when attacks in Paris had shaken the continent, that a judge labelled Sharia4Belgium a terrorist group and sentence its leader Fouad Belkacem to prison. Last year, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel admitted that his country had become a recruiting ground for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Interior Minister Jan Jambon even provided statistics on the subject, indicating that Belgium produced the greatest number of jihadists relative to its population. At least 269 Belgians were fighting in the ranks of ISIS in Syria while 117 had returned to Belgium after a fighting stint in the Middle East.
The Belgian media have been full of news of homegrown Jihadists since 2013. And, yet, no one was arrested or stopped from travelling to Syria or questioned on return from the battlefields of the Middle East. A walk down the streets of Molenbeek, a neighborhood having the air and scents of the Casbah in Algiers, reveals many signs that the caliphate in Raqqa has a strong presence not far from the headquarters of the European Union and NATO…these Belgian neighborhoods have undergone what Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood calls “moral cleansing.” Standard Islamic beards for men and hijab for women have become the rule. The archipelago of “otherness” created by liberal multiculturalism is now seeking to complete the circle by achieving political otherness as well.
America’s strength comes from its multiculturalism, but that’s only true only when all its people, all its races and religions, believe in the same values. Liberals fetishize separation, arguing that immigrants don’t need to learn English, don’t need to stop subjugating women with hijabs and arranged marriages, don’t need to become citizens. They encourage otherness rather than integration. They want immigrants to change the country, rather than the other way around. They say Islam is not the enemy — but that’s only true if Islam is a religion and not a political ideology bent on undermining democracy.
Brussels is the result of this distorted thinking. It’s what happens when immigrants are allowed to construct their own state within a state, not pushed to become part of a nation. Islam in its most violent form is already part of Europe just as much as a cancer belongs to the body it attacks…German Nazi anthropologist Sigrid Hunke, another grand lady of misguided European Islamophilia. In her book “Allah’s Sun Shines Over the West,” Hunke claims that Islam, not Judeo-Christianism, created modern Europe by shaping the Andalusian model and must at some point return to resume its work. Well, may be the prodigal son, invited back by Europe’s multiculturalist elites.
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