Belgium Can’t Save Itself by Betraying Its Jews

Published originally under the title "Belgium Has Betrayed the Jews, but It Is Next."

A large anti-Israel protest in Brussels on October 11, 2023, four days after Hamas terrorists murdered over 1,200 people in Israel.

“If we look at what is happening in Belgium there is reason to fear the emergence of an emirate in the heart of a contrite Europe, blinded by guilt and cowardice”, the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud has just denounced in the weekly Le Point.

And even Jean Quatremer, the historic Brussels correspondent of Libération, goes so far as to say: “Belgium capitulates and has truly become the advanced base of political Islam”.

Now comes a scoop to confirm it.

“If we look at what is happening in Belgium there is reason to fear the emergence of an emirate in the heart of a contrite Europe, blinded by guilt and cowardice.” -- Kamel Daoud

The Journal du Dimanche reveals that the European Commission has financed the NGO Al Sharq for a total of 110,279 euros. On August 2, the international organization Al Sharq in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul paid a “last homage” to “martyr Ismaïl Haniyeh,” the leader of Hamas. Al Sharq presents itself as an NGO that aims to “consolidate the values of pluralism and justice.”

Are they stupid? Are they reckless people who give away public money to any Islamic NGO that asks for it, as blackmail? Are they colluding?

“There is a democratic taqiya in Western countries, the Muslim Brotherhood propagates Islam through political, associative and non-violent means,” denounces France’s most famous anti-terrorism judge, Marc Trévidic.

Belgium’s Minister of Justice, Paul Van Tigchelt, put it in black and white: Hamas is active in Belgium (and elsewhere in Europe) through “humanitarian” societies. Islamist tentacles also extend into the heart of old Europe.

One of the major Dutch novelists and intellectuals, Leon de Winter, has just written an essay in the Swiss magazine Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

“What is the central message of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran? Permanent war: there will be peace only when all non-believers on earth have been killed or have submitted to Islam. Many Iranians do not share this view, but in Iran there is no room for public dissent.

“According to the guardians of Shia political Islam, the Jewish state and all Jews in the rest of the earth must be subdued or killed in the name of Allah. The mandate has no expiration date nor does it include anything as anti-Islamic as the goal of a ‘two-state solution’. The leaders of the Iranian auxiliary armies Hamas, Houthis and Hezbollah are fanatical believers who think in the same time frame as the leaders of Tehran: Judgment Day is the inevitable end point.

“It is not about the land. The Shiite revolution of 1979 was the first step towards the complete end of the Western world.” -- Leon de Winter

“Shia leaders are the servants of Allah in a battle much bigger than the State of Israel: the apocalypse must be near. These fanatics think in terms and images that radically surpass the imagination of the materialist Western world. Average Western politicians and journalists, all children of thought since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, have no idea who they are dealing with in Tehran, Gaza, Lebanon or Yemen. They can only imagine the struggle of the religious elites in Tehran.

“It is not about the land. The Shiite revolution of 1979 was the first step towards the complete end of the Western world. So for these extremist believers Israel is a shame. But temporary. What took place in Israeli border villages on October 7 were ritual massacres by murderers in a religious frenzy, triggered in part by stimulants such as Captagon, made in Syria and composed mostly of amphetamines.

“Hamas wanted to convince young people that the massacre of Jews was not a crime, but a consecration of the Prophet and that robbery and rape were permitted means of struggle. Hamas wanted to show the Jews what they would expect if they remained in Israel: mutilations, rapes, burnings.

“But our enlightened leaders and useful idiots in the media cling to the suicidal idea that the conflict is over the land. This is a deception. Political Islam in Tehran is not just waging a war against Israel. The West is an even greater enemy than the Jews. An appeaser is someone who feeds a crocodile in the hope that the crocodile will eat him last, Winston Churchill once said.

“The US and the EU lead these peacemakers. Ursula von der Leyen, Kamala Harris: I fear that they too, deluding themselves that they can stay out of danger, will betray the Jews and deliver them to the fire.”

Meanwhile, as Quatremer writes, the Belgian and EU capital is the pinnacle of appeasement, as demonstrated by the funding of Islamic NGOs.

Israeli Frisbee athletes are declared personae non grata in Belgium after authorities in Ghent barred them from an international tournament due to “security concerns.”

In June, the football match between Belgium and Israel scheduled for September 6 in Brussels was cancelled. The mayor of the Belgian capital, Philippe Close, had decided this, according to which it would be “simply impossible” to guarantee safety. Now Israeli Frisbee athletes are declared personae non grata in Belgium after authorities in Ghent barred them from an international tournament due to “security concerns.”

The European Ultimate Federation, organizers of the 2024 European Youth Championship in Ghent, announced that the Israeli team has been banned from the event. The reason given was an action by anti-Israel activists who wrote slogans on the tournament venue in the village of De Pinte near Ghent. The Federation stated that the municipality of Ghent “prohibits the participation of the Israeli delegation” and “the presence of the Israeli delegation”, as well as “any reference relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”. A Ghent municipal decree states that “there is a high risk of disturbing public order due to the presence of an Israeli team” and that some “frisbee organizations oppose Israel’s participation in the tournament due to the ongoing conflict in Gaza ".

In Le Figaro the former Belgian senator and head of Doctors Without Borders, Alain Destexhe, writes:

“The Brussels police are used to high-risk situations. European summits and NATO, violent demonstrations by farmers and trade unions that sometimes end in scuffles: never has an international event been canceled under the pretext of not being able to guarantee security.

“The explanation therefore lies elsewhere. The north of Brussels, where the majority of the population lives and where the Heysel national stadium is located, has a high concentration of Muslim population which is probably already a majority or on the verge of becoming one in municipalities such as Molenbeek, Anderlecht, Schaerbeek or the city of Brussels. 61 percent of Brussels’ population is now of non-European origin. Since October 7, almost weekly demonstrations have taken place in the streets of Brussels, some of which brought together tens of thousands of people, during which anti-Semitic slogans are often chanted.

“Most municipalities and the regional parliament passed resolutions hostile to the Jewish state and calling for immediate recognition of a Palestinian state without demanding the release of the hostages. The only large-scale demonstration against anti-Semitism brought together only a few hundred people. Arabic, Turkish and Urdu were widely used in election leaflets. A deplorable image of the ‘capital of Europe’”.

A tour to Brussels was enough for Charles Baudelaire to gain the vision of Belgium as the rotten nucleus of the European continent, as it is promptly demonstrating today.

A tour to Brussels was enough for Charles Baudelaire to gain the vision of Belgium as the rotten nucleus of the European continent, as it is promptly demonstrating today. His “Pauvre Belgique!” is a corrosive book. But also prophetic.

Baudelaire writes that “the stupidity of Belgian people resembles the stupidity of all peoples”. Baudelaire saw the Belgians as a people who were easy to oppress but impossible to crush, thanks precisely to their mellifluous stupidity of being everywhere and with everyone and never anywhere.

Baudelaire visited Liège, Bruges, Namur, Malines, Antwerp, Ghent and concluded that it is a harlequinade, as well as a bâton merdeux, but also a spongy experiment that acts as the decline of the West, but without flags, and of a continent that today it pretends to be united by virtue of a simple numerical sum: the more we are, the more we count.

And the city that finances those who mourn Hamas and ban their Israeli victims shows us the Baudelairean theater of European self-destruction as a common future.

Giulio Meotti is a Rome-based journalist for Il Foglio national newspaper. He is the author of twenty books, including A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism, The Last Western Pope (translated into Spanish and Polish), The End of Europe (Prize Capri San Michele), and The Sweet Conquest (with a preface by Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal) about the creeping Islamization of Europe. He writes a weekly column for Arutz Sheva and has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, the Jerusalem Post, Gatestone Institute, and Die Weltwoche.
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I recently witnessed something I haven’t seen in a long time. On Friday, August 16, 2024, a group of pro-Hamas activists packed up their signs and went home in the face of spirited and non-violent opposition from a coalition of pro-American Iranians and American Jews. The last time I saw anything like that happen was in 2006 or 2007, when I led a crowd of Israel supporters in chants in order to silence a heckler standing on the sidewalk near the town common in Amherst, Massachusetts. The ridicule was enough to prompt him and his fellow anti-Israel activists to walk away, as we cheered their departure. It was glorious.