Blaming Policy, Not Islam, for Belgium’s Radicalized Youth

New York Times ^ | April 7, 2016 | Steven Erlanger

[reaganaut1]

BRUSSELS — Yves Goldstein makes no excuses for Belgium’s failure to find Salah Abdeslam and the other Islamic State recruits who attacked Paris and then bombed Brussels Airport and a subway station.

The problem is not Islam, he insists, but the negligence of government officials like himself in allowing self-contained ethnic ghettos to grow unchallenged, breeding anger, crime and radicalism among youth — a soup of grievances that suits Islamist recruiters.

“Our cities are facing a huge problem, maybe the largest since World War II,” Mr. Goldstein said. “How is it that people who were born here in Brussels, in Paris, can call heroes the people who commit violence and terror? That is the real question we’re facing.”

Friends who teach the equivalent of high school seniors in the predominantly Muslim districts of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek told him that “90 percent of their students, 17, 18 years old, called them heroes,” he said.

Schaerbeek is almost as infamous these days as Molenbeek, two districts where Mr. Abdeslam and his group of Islamic State adherents had the space and time to live, hide and manufacture their weapons.

Adjacent to Molenbeek, Schaerbeek is richer, tidier and more mixed. Jacques Brel lived here for a time, so did René Magritte. It has a young, affluent section, which some compare to Notting Hill in London, and a large Turkish population.

The townhouse where preparations were made for the Paris attacks and where Mr. Abdeslam sought refuge for weeks is in the Turkish area, which is more well-to-do, and a better place to hide.

Brussels itself is about 25 percent Muslim — 70 percent are of Moroccan heritage and 20 percent Turkish, and the ethnic groups tend to stick to themselves, making them difficult for outsiders, like the police, to penetrate.

[reaganaut1]

The stupidity in this article is strong. In which European country has Muslim immigration been a success? When the terrorists in your country are Muslims, and when a large fraction of the Muslims sympathize with the terrorists, you should stop further Muslim immigration.

How many of the Muslim youths have full-time jobs? If Europe cut welfare, fewer people would have the time and money to plot terrorist attacks.

[Travis McGee]

[cld51860]

What continues to astound me is the lengths people will go to ignore the reality that is literally staring them in the face.

[reformedliberal]

What continues to astound me is the lengths people will go to ignore the reality that is literally staring them in the face.
______________________

They have literally marinated in inculcated lies for three generations. Everything and everyone they experience reinforces the false reality. The truth threatens cognitive dissonance to a degree capable of causing a massive panic attack. Panic attacks make people feel as though they are dying. Therefore, denial of reality is a survival technique.

I’ve now seen way too many indoctrinated fools refuse to condemn vicious, personally-experienced assaults to come to any other conclusion. They will die before admitting they are brainwashed. Actual death is preferable to simulated death. Truly diabolical.

[super7man]

The problem is not Islam, I insist, but and the negligence of government officials like himself in allowing self-contained Muslim ethnic ghettos to grow unchallenged, breeding Islamic anger, Muslim crime and Islamic radicalism among youth

There fixed it. But it should have been obvious.

[cld51860]

The problem is they will take us all down with them.