“The threat of new terrorist attacks continues to be high,” Franco Frattini, the European Commissioner for Justice and Security, told the European Parliament yesterday. Mr Frattini’s warning followed the arrest of Islamist terrorists in Germany and Denmark earlier this week. The EU Commissioner referred to Spain, Italy, Belgium, Britain and Germany as countries in the terrorists’ fireline.
One of the listed countries, however, was quick to downplay the danger. Jean-Claude Delepi√®re, the head of OCAD, the Belgian government’s terrorism watchdog, told his compatriots in the Brussels newspaper De Morgen on Thursday that “there is no substantial evidence” that the risk of a terror attack in Belgium has grown. “There is always a threat,” he said, “because Belgium hosts a number of institutions, such as the EU and NATO headquarters as well as SHAPE [NATO’s European military HQ], which may have a symbolic value to terrorists. On the other hand, however, Belgium is careful to avoid any aggressive attitude that may provoke negative reactions from Muslims.”
This statement is revealing. Mr Delepière argues that the threat in Belgium has not grown because his country is friendly towards Muslims, thus asserting that terrorism has something to do with Islam. This statement from the head of OCAD contradicts the view of Freddy Thielemans, the Socialist mayor of Brussels, which is the capital of Belgium as well as the EU and NATO. Just four weeks ago, on August 9, Mr Thielemans banned an anti-Islamization demonstration which the Danish-British-German organization Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE) intended to hold on September 11 in front of the European Parliament buildings in Brussels.
His grounds for banning the demonstration, the mayor explained, are that SIOE deliberately equates terrorism with Islam by coming to Brussels on 9/11. “First and foremost the organizers have chosen the symbolic date of 9/11,” he wrote. “The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. […] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly pronounced judgments condemning this type of acts.”
According to the mayor the demonstrators are “racists,” “xenophobes,” hence criminals under Belgian and European law. “With regard to the planned demonstration of September 11 […] my mind is made up. And my decision is final: it will not take place,” he said. In The Wall Street Journal Europe of 27 August Mr Thielemans added: “I won’t have Brussels regarded as the capital of racism.”
Yesterday Anders Gravers, the Danish SIOE president, who still intends to protest in Brussels next Tuesday despite the interdiction, received a phone call from the Brussels authorities asking him to cancel the demonstration because the authorities fear that there may be “terrorist attacks against the demo.” According to Gravers this is “the final desperate tactic from the authorities” to prevent the demonstration from taking place.
So far Belgium has never been the scene of Muslim terrorism, although Islamists frequently use the country as a logistical support base for actions elsewhere.
The Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004 were in part planned in Belgium, as was the murder of Afghan anti-Taliban fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud on 9 September 2001.
It has even been suggested that the Belgian authorities have struck a deal with Islamist terrorists, agreeing to turn a blind eye to conspiracies hatched on Belgian soil in exchange for immunity from attack. In a statement from GIA, the Algerian section of al-Qaeda, addressing the Belgian King Albert II but posted to the French embassy in Brussels in June 1999, the Algerian terror movement explicitly referred to such a deal.
This makes it very unlikely that there will be a terrorist attack in Brussels next Tuesday. Unless the Islamists regard an anti-Islamization demonstration in Brussels, even though banned by the Brussels authorities, as a unilateral breach of the deal by the Belgians who –as their terrorism expert Monsieur Delepi√®re is so eager to point out– have always “carefully avoided any aggressive attitude that may provoke negative reactions from Muslims.”
It is a strange phenomenon that frightened, Islamist-appeasing authorities are allowed to draw a link between terrorism and Islam as they warn citizens not to be “provocative” towards Muslims. Yet, these citizens themselves are considered “racists” and “xenophobes,” – hence criminals according to European legislation – when they are perceived as making this link.
The current attitude of the Belgian authorities brings to mind their attitude in 1939 with respect to Nazi Germany. When SS-General Karl Gebhardt came to Brussels to complain about “German unfriendly remarks” in the Belgian media, Belgium’s Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak (who after the war became one of the EU’s founding fathers as well as Secretary-General of NATO), begged his colleagues in the Belgian cabinet “to consider the possible consequences of the press campaigns against Germany,” whereupon Brussels introduced press censorship and prohibited the distribution of “anti-German and unpatriotic publications.” This did not prevent Belgium from being invaded by the Nazis the following year. The only result of the censorship was that some Belgians, who had never learned from their media how evil Nazi Germany was, welcomed the Germans as liberators from the corrupt Belgian regime.
This week’s botched terror attacks in Denmark and Germany also confirm what many European citizens know but are no longer allowed to say: that terrorism and Islam have something to do with each other. Last Tuesday, Danish authorities dismantled a group of eight young terrorists, six of whom held Danish citizenship but all of Muslim immigrant origin, who were preparing a bomb attack. According to Justice minister Lene Espersen it is the most serious terrorist case in the country so far. Denmark has emerged as a target for Islamic terrorists in the wake of last year’s publication of cartoons relating to the Prophet Muhammad.
The three arrested terrorists in Germany, who were planning massive attacks on Frankfurt airport and the U.S. air base at Ramstein, were three Muslims, one of them Turkish-born, the other two indigenous Germans who converted to Islam. According to German terror expert Rolf Tophoven, the phenomenon of terrorist Muslim converts is extremely dangerous. “They are driven by a deep hatred towards society,” he said yesterday [link in German].
But is hatred the sole motive? Is it surprising that young people come to despise a society such as Europe which for generation after generation has made appeasement towards its mortal enemies into a habit? Hatred may lead people to kill innocents. However, in order to team together and meticulously plan these types of crimes, hatred must be reinforced by ideology. Mr Delepi√®re confirms that the ideology behind today’s terrorism is Islam, which leads the jihadist extremists to believe that Allah will compensate them immensely for their atrocities.
Paul Belien is an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute and the editor of The Brussels Journal
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