Frank Barat talking:
I don’t want to generalize, of course, and it’s a mix, a mixture of a lot of things. But if you see—I mean, when I was talking about jails and prison, it’s—the people that did the attacks in Paris, Coulibaly and the two brothers, had spent years in jail, together, actually, in the same jail. They met there. They were radicalized through jail and radicalized also through the people they met—that they met in jail, including a radical Islamist preacher. But it’s a mixture of things. But what we see—and the families have often talked about it—is that they were—you know, they came to jail as maybe small-time delinquents, and they came out completely transformed and radicalized. So sometimes this happened in a couple of years. The family just couldn’t sort of recognize their sons after that. So it’s—obviously, there’s a lot more to it than this, and, you know, radical Islam is also a factor. But we’re talking about sort of a disenfranchised youth in Paris and in Brussels, that is therefore left opened to being led into such a such path by people that actually maybe offer them something that they have never been offered before by sort of society and their peers.
what’s important to bring out, I mean, in a way, we have to look at it—we’ve got two options, right? We either continue the status quo, we continue and we follow what sort of our so-called leaders are saying this morning and have been saying for—since even before, but since September the 11th—you know, those people hate our freedoms, they hate our culture, they do not like life the way we do, and they are waiting to go to paradise to meet whatever how many virgins—so we either do this and continue the sort an-eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth war and more sort of revenge-type of things that have led to nothing but more terrorism on the ground—I mean, the end of al-Qaeda and the killing of bin Laden was celebrated, but it only created something even more powerful in ISIS—so, we either do this and we follow sort of a maybe Fox News analogy or Donald Trump analogy, or we decide to stop and start to ask the tough questions and the questions that need to be answered.
We need to—I mean, as an example, in Norway, a country, actually, that most Trump supporters probably don’t know exist, we—after the attacks of Anders Breivik in 2011, which killed more than 70 people, the prime minister of Norway said that Norway’s response to terror would be more openness, greater political participation and more democracy. It’s words we don’t hear nowadays. You know, there’s been—the prime minister of Belgium has announced more security in the streets, more security at airports. So it’s either, you know, they don’t want to look at the real problem, and they don’t want to face their role in it and their responsibility in it, or they’re simply lying. So now the civil society has to be clear that we need answers from them.
And we need to look—I mean, those young Muslims and others, actually, that were radicalized, it didn’t come out of nowhere, right? It came out of radicalization through what’s happening in Syria, which is actually key to understand the creation of ISIS. Syria and what’s happened in Syria in the last few years is a betrayal, a total betrayal, in part of the Western world. You know, people rising to fight its oppressor and the West sort of turning its back on them, allowing slaughter, this created so much anger, so much rancor. And when you put this on top of the failure of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism, when you put this on top the sort of ambitions of the West in terms of oil, in terms of trade routes and in terms of supporting dictators and Israel, you know, it creates a powerful and very dangerous mixture that then manifests in the form of ISIS or al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organizations. So we have to ask the tough questions. And we need answers.
Joshua Hersh talking:
a raid that took place in a town in eastern Belgium in January of last year, and it was right in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. And so, it didn’t really get a lot of attention at the time. But what I did is I went back and looked at it, and I noticed that the description of it, the reporting on it, the way that the prosecutor talked about it fit with the pattern that we tend to hear about these raids: Somebody who’s a psychopath of some sort, who goes to Syria, who returns back to Brussels, he’s a very Islamist radical, and he wants to blow himself up and kill everyone. And that made some sense, but there was a third guy in that house. And they grouped him together in that category, but he didn’t really fit there. He seemed to be someone who had—he had never gone to Syria. Everyone I met said he wasn’t radicalized at all. Some people said he may have had no idea what he was doing there.
This was a raid in a town called Verviers where they killed everyone except him. And this guy jumped out the window, and the prosecutor conceded that he didn’t seem prepared to die like the other two.
you may have heard about the firefight in Saint-Denis after the attacks in Paris. It was exactly the same thing. I mean, it was a many-minutes-long battle.
This is after Charlie Hebdo, so it was much earlier. And what I realize is that people like this guy seem to exist—they come up all the time in these attacks. They’re people who play kind of smaller support roles, who have connections to the people who we think of as the terrorists, through childhood, through growing up in the neighborhoods together, through pretty criminality, but they aren’t terrorists in the way we think of it. And if we realize that actually those are the people we need to focus on, it helps us to understand that the foundation for the terrorism structure that exists in cities like Brussels and in Paris of people who are going abroad and coming back, it may be much more mundane than the sort of high rhetoric we hear about people trying to defeat democracy and they hate our freedoms and things like that. It’s actually people who exist within a sort of lower spectrum of local grievances and criminality and things that actually are maybe easier to deal with, but also more complicated to try to understand.
neighborhood of Molenbeek is just two metro stops away from the central station, which was striking to me, because I’m used to thinking of the suburbs in Paris, which are really isolated geographically. Molenbeek is right in the middle of the city, more or less. But it’s still really isolated, and the people who grow up there will tell you that they feel like they can’t really access other parts of the city. The other parts of the city feel like a foreign land to them. They can’t get apartments there. They can’t really get jobs in other places. And so, they’ll—I spoke to one young man who lived there, who told me—he said, “People always say that we refuse to leave, we refuse to integrate.” He said, “That’s not the case. We’re not allowed to integrate. We’re not allowed to go elsewhere.”
This is Mohamed, yeah. And he was, I think, characteristic of some of the people. Mohamed was in the piece I wrote. And he was describing how, among other things, for example—this is a young man who’s very well educated. He’s very smart. He’s studying at one of the higher colleges in the city and actually was able, through his education, to get out. He’s, I think, the only nonwhite Belgian in his school. And he still feels like he can never really be Belgian when he’s at school. He had a job. It was working in a department store. And he told me that it was the best job he could get—I mean, he tried for years to get another job—despite his education, and he speaks English, speaks French. And at this job, he was responsible for folding clothes and cleaning up, and the people he worked with refused to learn his name. They would just call him “worker.” And this was a daily reflection of what—how distant he was always going to be from society.
one of the things that happens in Western Europe that we don’t deal with quite as much here in the U.S., although we have all—we have our faults, but integration is really hard to pull off in some of these countries in the Western—in Western Europe. And it has to do with a very strong sense of identity that these countries bring to the table. So when you arrive from North Africa or when you’re the child or grandchild of people who arrive from North Africa, which is really more often the case, you find yourself butting up against this reality, that you just can’t be considered Belgian. It happens in France. It’s going to happen quite a lot, I think, in Germany. And that creates a real tension, and it creates a sense of the ceiling of opportunity for you is rather low.
And I think that that ultimately got exploited by people. I mean, you know, we have to remember, early in the war in Syria, many, many people were going off to Syria to fight, and it was before ISIS. It wasn’t about radicalization. It wasn’t—it was actually, I think, to some extent, welcomed by the Belgian government, which, by its policy, supported the rebels against Assad. It was welcomed by the French government. They sort of turned a blind eye. So you had a huge number of people going rather freely, and that created an opening for people who wanted to exploit it.
Yasser Louati talking:
It’s again a feeling of déjà vu. I’ve been following the news with the Brussels attacks, and it is the exact same feeling—shock and horror, people crying, people dead, and then we have politicians, you know, trying to advance their agenda on the bodies of our victims. And again, now, we have—we are facing the same problem, and we still refuse to address the question: Why do these things keep happening? What would make someone hate his or her country so much to the point of acting on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization?
So now the feeling is that the governments—I mean, like, I can speak for the French government, especially—four months after the November attacks, is not doing what should be done in addressing the root causes of terrorism. And every single guest, you know, on your program that spoke before me spoke about them. As long as you have foreign domination, imperialistic wars, social injustice, exclusion, strong identity against the minorities, etc., you will definitely push one of the weakest elements in the hands of these terrorist groups. And you don’t need a thousand of them; one or two are enough. And Brussels was just a plain demonstration of it.
We hope the Belgian government will not act like the French government did, meaning brutality against the Muslim population and holding it responsible, directly or indirectly, for what happened. So far, the Belgian government is sending positive signals, and we hope that it won’t go down the path of said brutality against minorities. To give you a clear example of the French failures in the aftermath of the November 13th attacks, so far, after four months, 3,400 raids have been carried against homes, mosques, Muslim restaurants, etc., in total brutality, with a willingness to humiliate people. In the end, only four or five inquiries have been opened against—on the terror charges. This means that for four months you have been terrorizing innocent people and holding them accountable for your own failures. So I hope the Belgian government will look at the French failures and take another path, meaning that—you know, showing more solidarity, more unity in the face of a common threat.
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Frank Barat
author and activist based in Brussels, Belgium. He is president of the Palestine Legal Action Network.
Joshua Hersh
New York-based journalist who reported from Brussels following the Paris attacks in November. He wrote a piece headlined “What They Missed: The Anti-Terror Raid That Asked All the Wrong Questions.” At the time, he was the BuzzFeed News Michael Hastings fellow.
Yasser Louati
spokesperson for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France.
— source democracynow.org