Recently I’ve been to Belgium on a meeting. The place looked nice and affluent, and in general, a pleasant country overall. Except for one thing. I’ve seen King Leopold III’s photos in my hotel and in a restaurant I've visited framed.
This got me thinking (after I calmed down). Here we are, in the 21stcentury, and we can see a mass murderer’s picture displayed openly. This person was responsible for the death of about ten million people in the Belgian Congo. This makes him one of the worst mass murderer you have never heard of. While we know about Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and other monsters (although Saddam’s worst acts were committed under US protection in the ‘80s, and they have only become publicized in the media when he became a “bad” dictator after ’91), somehow the less-than-savoury acts of Western politicians are less advertised. We don’t read much about the engineered famine in India, which killed about 3 million under Churchill. We hear about the approximately 60 thousand US causalities of Vietnam, but not the 1-4 million (nobody knows for sure exactly how many) Vietnamese dead; we don’t read much about the Latin American death squads, the School of Americas, the genocide in East Timor... It seems like history really is written by the victors. And it makes the constant finger-waggling, and moral superiority of the Western powers sound a little hypocritical. You’d expect people who demand constant historical retrospection a little bit more eager to follow their own advice.
Showing posts with label belgium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label belgium. Show all posts
Friday, April 8, 2016
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Molenbeek and the problem of terrorism in Europe
It seems like Western Europe has become an exporter of Islamic terrorism. France, Belgium, the United Kingdom have all had their share of radicalization, and their citizens joining ISIS... and committing acts of terror in their native lands where they grew up. There are no-go areas in these countries where it's surprisingly easy to get weapons, where the police and ambulances don't really dare to go, where the population is isolated by their choice and by their will from the rest of the society. These areas (Molenbeek is one example), with the very effective help of Saudi Arabia which does its darnest to export their brand of fundamentalist Islam, have essentially became breeding grounds for home-grown terrorism.
But it seems like nobody really cares. There are the usual talk about the victims, about how bad these terrorists are, but nobody really looks into their communities where they found shelter. Like it or not, the Muslim communities in these regions did nothing to expose these "few bad apples", which makes them accessories to these acts; they even attacked the police when they arrested Salah Abdeslam. Like it or not, these countries, by letting these no-go areas form and grow without intervention, allowed these communities to develop. You can use all the feel-good messages that #notallmuslims and that "they are not real Muslims", you probably should look into how the mastermind of the Paris attacks managed to evade detection in Belgium for four months before being captured. He was not living in some cave, or some isolated safe house. He was living in the heart of Belgium in a metropolis. Apparently in the very center of Europe, the fact that sizeable communities reject the values of the majority, and even commit violent acts against them, is something you are not supposed to mention in a polite company. In this light Orban's speech sounds like a wake-up call that nobody's going to heed. Perhaps because the Eastern part of the EU lacks the white guilt of the former colonial powers, they don't bind themselves into knots they cannot escape from. Who knows.
But one thing is for sure. I think in order to tackle this threat you really, really should address this issue. Before, you know, the far right grows strong enough to try to tackle it themselves both on the political arena and on the streets; because at this point it's going to be even less pretty.
But it seems like nobody really cares. There are the usual talk about the victims, about how bad these terrorists are, but nobody really looks into their communities where they found shelter. Like it or not, the Muslim communities in these regions did nothing to expose these "few bad apples", which makes them accessories to these acts; they even attacked the police when they arrested Salah Abdeslam. Like it or not, these countries, by letting these no-go areas form and grow without intervention, allowed these communities to develop. You can use all the feel-good messages that #notallmuslims and that "they are not real Muslims", you probably should look into how the mastermind of the Paris attacks managed to evade detection in Belgium for four months before being captured. He was not living in some cave, or some isolated safe house. He was living in the heart of Belgium in a metropolis. Apparently in the very center of Europe, the fact that sizeable communities reject the values of the majority, and even commit violent acts against them, is something you are not supposed to mention in a polite company. In this light Orban's speech sounds like a wake-up call that nobody's going to heed. Perhaps because the Eastern part of the EU lacks the white guilt of the former colonial powers, they don't bind themselves into knots they cannot escape from. Who knows.
But one thing is for sure. I think in order to tackle this threat you really, really should address this issue. Before, you know, the far right grows strong enough to try to tackle it themselves both on the political arena and on the streets; because at this point it's going to be even less pretty.
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