Belgian theater director Luk Perceval: ′We should see multiculturalism in a positive light′| DW.COM

2016/03/31 Leave a comment

Interesting interview but too simplistically links marginalization to violence. As others have noted (e.g., Gurski), the backgrounds of extremists and terrorists vary, although marginalization does play a role:

The great power of theater is that we don’t only recognize ourselves on stage, in one of the characters, but that we also feel included. On stage, questions are asked that every person deals with: questions of love, death, war, everything that we don’t know or are unsure of in life. The moment when we feel this sense of not knowing, this insecurity in the group, and we can laugh or cry together about it – that’s when a feeling of community is created.

Art is suspending for a moment people’s feeling of being alone. It is feeling that we are all part of humanity and we have the same problems and doubts.

To what extent should theater deal with current social issues?

I grew up in Belgium, a country that has seen so many wars in the past and has become a kind of thoroughfare for Europe. Here you’re confronted with so many cultures and languages. That’s why I personally feel the need to tell people to watch out and not erect fences. They won’t help with anything.

Should theater always send that message? I don’t know. Only if there is an honest commitment behind it. But after Paris and Brussels, it’s necessary to talk about our shock. And I think it’s important for theater to create space where people can discuss their feelings.

How optimistic are you about the future? 

I’m afraid that this is just the beginning of something horrible. I hope that the peace talks in Syria can achieve constructive results. Diplomatic solutions must be found for this war. It’s not just about the criminals in Brussels. Salah Abdeslam was able to hide in Brussels for four months. That shows how powerful the network behind him is. The fundamental question is, though, to what extent terror is also linked to tremendous injustice in the world – particularly in the Arab World.

I really am concerned that things will escalate as long as the gap between rich and poor – not just in Brussels, but worldwide – doesn’t change. Until then, I’m afraid these murders won’t end.

Source: Belgian theater director Luk Perceval: ′We should see multiculturalism in a positive light′ | Arts | DW.COM | 29.03.2016

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Why Foreign Fighters Come from Francophone Countries | Foreign Affairs

2016/03/26 Leave a comment

Interesting take by William McCants and Christopher Meserole (thanks to those who brought it to my attention), and another indicator of the failure of the French (and Belgian) models of integration (and in the case of France, laïcité):

As with the Francophone finding overall, we’re left with guesswork as to why exactly the relationships between French politics, urbanization, youth unemployment, and Sunni militancy exist. We suspect that when there are large numbers of unemployed youth, some of them are bound to get up to mischief. When they live in large cities, they have more opportunities to connect with people espousing radical causes. And when those cities are in Francophone countries that adopt the strident French approach to secularism, Sunni radicalism is more appealing.

For now, the relationship needs to be studied and tested by comparing several cases in countries and between countries. We also found other interesting relationships—such as between Sunni violence and prior civil conflict—but they are neither as strong nor as compelling.

Regardless, the latest attacks in Belgium are reason enough to share the initial findings. They may be way off, but at least they are based on the best available data. If the data is wrong or our interpretations skewed, we hope the effort will lead to more rigorous explanations of what is driving jihadist terrorism in Europe. Our initial findings should in no way imply that Francophone countries are responsible for the recent horrible attacks—no country deserves to have its civilians killed, regardless of the perpetrator’s motives. But the magnitude of the violence and the fear it engenders demand that we investigate those motives beyond just the standard boilerplate explanations.

Source: Why Foreign Fighters Come from Francophone Countries | Foreign Affairs

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Belgium’s big problem with radical Islam – The Washington Post

2016/03/24 Leave a comment

One of the better pieces I have seen, although over-mechanically emphasizes some of the causes of radicalization:

Of all the countries in the West, Belgium has produced the greatest number of foreign jihadists per capita who are fighting in Syria. The actual figure, according to researchers, is variously estimated at 470 to 553. Roughly a third of those who left to fight in Iraq and Syria have returned; many have not faced prosecution, with authorities struggling to prove that the fighters joined violent organizations such as the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL.

According to an analysis by the Royal Institute for International Relations, or Egmont, a Brussels-based think tank, the majority of Belgian jihadists are young (ages 20 to 24), have lower-than-average education levels and are mostly of Moroccan heritage.

The prevalence of Islamist extremism in Belgium predates the incidents of the past year, as well as the advent of the Islamic State. And this is not the first time an Islamic State proxy has struck on Belgian soil: In May 2014, a gun-wielding French national who had spent time in Syria killed four people in the Jewish Museum of Brussels.

The root causes of radicalization are largely familiar: high unemployment, marginalization, discrimination and a sense of alienation from the wider society.

BuzzFeed’s Joshua Hersh spent time in Molenbeek and came away with this picture of a downtrodden, disgruntled community:

“Unlike the infamous banlieues of Paris — the rundown high-rise suburbs that symbolize France’s failure to integrate its own Muslim immigrant residents — Molenbeek is practically in the middle of Brussels; it’s just two metro stops west of the central train station. Still, Molenbeek can feel deeply isolated. The immigrants of Brussels, most of them Muslim and of North African descent, are highly concentrated there — the schools they attend, shunned by white Belgian families, are disparagingly referred to as “concentration schools,” after the high percentage of immigrants enrolled, and the poor conditions. “I didn’t believe it was this bad when I first started,” said a teacher who works at a mostly immigrant school near Molenbeek. “The schools, all they do is accentuate the problems the students face in their daily lives.””

Moreover, as my colleague Michael Birnbaum reported, Belgium’s pronounced linguistic divisions between Dutch-speaking Flanders, the largely French-speaking city of Brussels and the region of Wallonia to the south have made it difficult for some immigrant groups to assimilate. This is particularly true of those living in Flanders, where far-right Flemish nationalist parties hold real sway and inveigh against the dangers of Islam.

“The Islamic State is giving them what the Belgian government can’t give them — identity, structure,” Montasser AlDe’emeh of the University of Antwerp told Birnbaum. “They don’t feel Moroccan or Belgian. They don’t feel part of either society.”

According to the Egmont report, the current crop of Belgian extremists are significantly younger than earlier generations, which went off to join the ranks of al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups. That radicalization is driven less by religious fervor than by more local factors, and it is shaped also by ties to gangs and other criminal activity:

“Their acquaintance with religious thought is undoubtedly more shallow and superficial than their predecessors’, as is their acquaintance with international politics. Geopolitics is less important to them than it once was to their predecessors, who felt motivated by the struggle against the superpowers. Injustice was often a starting point with their predecessors’ journey towards extremism and terrorism. This has now largely been overshadowed by personal estrangement and motives as the primary engines of their journey.”

Source: Belgium’s big problem with radical Islam – The Washington Post

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Belgium, Christianity and Islam: In and around Brussels, the practice of Islam is outstripping Christianity | The Economist

2016/02/22 Leave a comment

Interesting article regarding religion in Belgium and the implications of greater religiosity among Muslims:

All that is part of the background to a study of religious attitudes among Francophone Belgians, conducted by the Observatory of Religion and Secularism, a helpful resource for the study of faith in Europe.  Respondents came in equal numbers from Wallonia, the country’s Gallic-oriented south, and the Francophone majority in Brussels.

The pollsters were surprised by how many respondents still professed some attachment to a religion. Among all respondents, 20% called themselves practising Catholics and 43% non-practising Catholics; 6% were practising Muslims and 1% non-practising Muslims. With other religions accounting for a few points each, that left 26% who called themselves atheist or agnostic. Jean-Philippe Schreiber, a professor of religous studies who co-commissioned the poll, said a remarkably high number of Belgians “claimed a religious identity” even if it did not affect their behaviour much. That certainly applied to loosely affiliated Catholics; and it might also be true that not every respondent who identified with Islam actually prayed and fasted as the rules lay down.

Then turn to Brussels, some parts of which host large communities of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants, mostly from religiously conservative regions of those countries. Among respondents in the city, practising Catholics amounted to 12% and non-practising ones to 28%. Some 19% were active Muslims and another 4% were of Muslim identity without practising the faith. The atheist/agnostic camp came to 30%.

Among all respondents, levels of active adherence to Catholicism seemed to diminish dramatically with age, while the practice of Islam increased correspondingly. Thus among respondents aged 55 and over, practising Catholics amounted to 30% and practising Muslims to less than 1%; but among those aged between 18 and 34, active adherence to Islam (14%) exceeded the practice of Catholicism (12%). Admittedly the sample (600 people in all) is small. But if this trend continues, practitioners of Islam may soon comfortably exceed devout Catholics not just in cosmopolitan Brussels, as is the case already, but across the whole of Belgium’s southern half.

The pollsters are struck by the fact that many Belgians retain a cultural loyalty to the Catholic faith. albeit a diminishing one. The percentage of avowedly “practising Catholics” far exceeds the numbers who actually turn up at mass, as any cleric will confirm. But one thing is pretty clear. If anything holds Belgium together through its third century of existence, Catholicism will not be the glue.

Source: Belgium, Christianity and Islam: In and around Brussels, the practice of Islam is outstripping Christianity | The Economist

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ICYMI: ‘We did not come to be a burden.’ Belgian artists mail letters from migrants to an uncertain public | Toronto Star

2016/02/11 Leave a comment

Creative approach:

It’s not a letter home, but a letter of introduction to a new home.

Amid the increasingly xenophobic political rhetoric in Europe, a pair of Belgian artists is sending letters written by recently arrived migrants to local residents.

“Moving Stories” is a public art project that seeks to break down the invisible barriers between the migrants and those who have, somewhat reluctantly, welcomed them into safety.

“We wanted to invite people to get in touch with each other and talk to each other instead of about each other,” said the artists’ agent, Anouk Focquier. “That’s what’s missing in this entire debate.”

Dirk Schellekens and Bart Peleman got 13 migrants living in a Red Cross shelter in Antwerp to pen letters explaining why they left their homes in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and how they arrived in Belgium. The letters were then translated from the migrants’ mother tongues into Flemish and copied 166 times — one for each of the nationalities present in the city.

On Friday, the missives and their translations were put into envelopes and posted to random addresses across the Antwerp, along with return postcards inviting the recipients to send back a response.

The messages, written in Arabic, Kurdish, French, Russian and English, describe persecution at the hands of Al Shebab in Somalia, domestic abuse in northern Mali and forced conscription in Syria — not to mention hardships endured on the journey to Europe.

Focquier said the artists asked the migrants to use pen and paper in order to undermine the knee-jerk opinion forming that takes place on social media.

“When you write a letter, you sit down and think. And we wanted to slow down the process of forming opinions because that’s going really fast right now.”

Schellekens & Peleman, as the artists are collectively known, have focused their recent work on the European refugee crisis, floating a six-metre inflatable sculpture of a migrant on a small boat through Venice, Italy in November.

The “Inflatable Refugee” sculpture is made from the same materials as the boats that transport migrants across the Mediterranean Sea — “too fragile to withstand the waves,” the artists write.

“Do we see him as a human or as a problem? Is his presence an opportunity or a threat, devoid of human characteristics?”

Source: ‘We did not come to be a burden.’ Belgian artists mail letters from migrants to an uncertain public | Toronto Star

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Why Does Belgium Produce So Many Radical Islamist Militants? – The Atlantic

2015/11/19 Leave a comment

Good and interesting article on Belgian, the EU country with the highest per capita number of extremists:

Belgium has just 11 million people, and Pew estimated that about 6 percent of the population was Muslim as of 2010. But Belgian and French nationals make up around a quarter of the Europeans who went to fight in Iraq in the mid-2000s. While the government has acknowledged that hundreds of Belgians have gone to fight with ISIS or for other groups in the Syrian civil war, Pieter Van Ostaeyen, an independent researcher, calculated in October that 516 Belgians had fought in Iraq or Syria, far higher than the government’s figures. Based on his numbers, Belgium has contributed more fighters per capita to the fight in the Levant than any other European country.

The central figure in Belgian militant Islamism is Fouad Belkacem, a 33-year-old preacher and founder of the group Sharia4Belgium. He was born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, and is a disciple of the British radical Islamist Anjem Choudary. Belkacem, who had been arrested for various petty crimes, organized burnings of American flags after 9/11 and harassed gay Muslims. Sharia4Belgium became a major feeder for fighters in Syria and Iraq, including Jejoen Bontinck, whom Ben Taub profiled in an excellent New Yorker story. Bontinck, a former TV dance-show celebrity, was a convert, as many of the most prominent European ISIS fighters have been. (Van Ostaeyen calculates that only 6 percent of Belgian-national ISIS fighters are converts, however.) Others, like Abaaoud, came from secular or mildly observant Muslim families, but became radicalized. In December 2014, Belkacem and 45 other members of Sharia4Belgium were found guilty of membership in a terrorist group. He is serving a 12-year prison sentence.

Belgian jihadism seems to mimic French Islamist militancy, only more concentrated—as befits the smaller country. Both have large numbers of immigrants who are poorer and isolated from the dominant culture. Both countries have also seen far-right, anti-immigrants parties rise by loudly declaring a Muslim menace. Experts also say it is comparatively easy to acquire illegal guns in Belgium, making it an attractive base for operations. The Washington Post notes that Belgium’s unusual bilingualism—Flemish and French—makes it hard for immigrants who only speak French to find work and assimilate. And deep distrust between French- and Flemish-speaking government officials has created an elaborate and sclerotic security apparatus that doesn’t always deal with threats efficiently and promptly.In particular, Belgian jihadism is concentrated in Molenbeek. It’s a neighborhood of nearly 100,000 people in Brussels, northwest of the city center, which has had a large Muslim population for many years. There are 22 known mosques in the district. Molenbeek shares some characteristics with the banlieues in French—densely populated, large immigrant populations, very high unemployment, complaints of inadequate government services, isolation from the central city and corridors of power. In other ways, however, Molenbeek is rather different: It has a strong middle class, bustling commercial districts, and a gentrifying artist class.

“I notice that each time there is a link with Molenbeek,” Prime Minister Charles Michel said Sunday. “This is a gigantic problem. Apart from prevention, we should also focus more on repression.” (That unfortunate wording may be a failure of translation.) Interior Minister Jan Jambon added: “We don’t have control of the situation in Molenbeek at present.”

Jambon’s statement has reawakened concerns about Muslim “no-go zones” in European cities. It’s an idea Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor and Republican presidential hopeful, was heavily pushing in January. According to the myth, there were large zones that police forces had simply ceded to sharia gangs, and into which neither non-Muslims nor law enforcement dared to go. When I looked into it at the time, there was no evidence that such areas actually existed. Even Daniel Pipes, a leading alarmist about the threat of radical Islamism, argued that Jindal was mistaken in describing the banlieues that way. But there were disturbing reports of gangs of men intimidating or beating non-Muslims or residents whom they deemed insufficiently observant.

Does Molenbeek prove that no-go zones are real? On the one hand, there’s Jambon’s statement. But in other clear ways, Molenbeek doesn’t appear like a Muslim exclave in the middle of Brussels. Jambon himself pointed this out in his remarks on TV on Sunday, mentioning Molenbeek’s non-Muslim mayor and its own constabulary: “I see that Mayor Françoise Schepmans is also asking our help, and that the local police chief is willing to cooperate. We should join forces and ‘clean up’ the last bit that needs to be done, that’s really necessary.” Journalists seem to be having little trouble reporting from the area; Politico sent a reporter and photographer out in the neighborhood, and found that while residents were not eager to speak to the press, it looked in many ways like a typical, somewhat run-down district.

“Daily life in Molenbeek works well—but that’s maybe what has fooled us: that in ordinary life, there are no difficulties,” Schepmans, the mayor, said. “And next to that, there are people living in the shadow. And we have left them living in the shadow. We didn’t ask ourselves the right questions.”

Source: Why Does Belgium Produce So Many Radical Islamist Militants? – The Atlantic

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How the world is dealing with the militant threat

2014/10/15 Leave a comment

Good reporting on radicalization in Belgium (the country with the dubious honour of the highest number of “terror tourists” per capita among Western countries) and the current trial of those accused of recruiting them:

For some of the members of Sharia4Belgium, their journey to Syria did not go as planned. Mr. Bontinck, for instance, has maintained that he did not take part in any fighting, which earned him the mistrust of his comrades. He was imprisoned at various points by the al-Qaeda affiliate the Nusra Front and the Islamic State and has co-operated with Belgian authorities since his return to the country.

Family members of some of those still in Syria have attended the start of the trial looking for answers and, in some cases, accountability. The mother of one young woman who went to Syria was removed from the courtroom after she began shouting and trying to approach Mr. Belkacem, Le Soir reported.

Some experts caution that prosecutors could find it difficult to prove charges against returned fighters, particularly where they concern the activities of the defendants overseas. “The courts will not take Twitter feeds as sufficient evidence of what they have done,” said Jytte Klausen, a professor at Brandeis University outside of Boston and founder of the Western Jihadism Project, on a conference call earlier this week.

Still, others said the high-profile case is a chance for the Belgian authorities to send a message. “I am quite sure that they want to set an example for the guys who are in Syria or who want to fight in Syria in the ranks of Islamic State,” said Pieter Van Ostaeyen, an independent historian who tracks Belgian jihadis. “I do believe there will be convictions.”

How the world is dealing with the militant threat – The Globe and Mail.

Along with a good summary of how some countries are handling the issue:

 A look at how countries are battling terror networks 

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