Despite the discovery of detonators, weapons, and Abdeslam’s fingerprints in a safe house days earlier and growing evidence that the Brussels terror network was stronger than previously understood, law enforcement officials only briefly questioned Abdeslam because he was still recovering from surgery after being shot in the leg during his apprehension, according to a senior Belgian security official, who asked for anonymity to speak about the investigation.
“He seemed very tired and he had been operated on the day before,” the official said, adding that law enforcement officials did not question him again before Tuesday.
“They were not thinking about the possibilities of what happened on Tuesday morning,” said a second source with knowledge of the process.
Un-friggin-believable. HE WAS TIRED, they said. I would’t give a shit if he had to talk through one of those Stephen Hawking creeptastic voice boxes, you shoot him up with whatever drugs are required and you work dat ass. I’m completely sure he wasn’t faking it or anything. I mean, he was shot in the leg, for chrissakes. It’s not like he’s got chest tubes and shit in. The Belgians are soft, man.
And back to the fact that he was in Moleenbeek the whole time. He was able to live there safely for almost FIVE MONTHS. So much for that theory that we will get intelligence from the Muslim community. I noticed that nobody called the cops on him, after all, even though he grew up there and every single person in that immediate vicinity knew who he was.
Worst of all, one of the 786 police chiefs the Belgians have in the country (more on that in a minute) actually held a press conference after the airport bombings and said they had good intelligence on where Abdesalam was hiding out back IN DECEMBER, except, gosh darn it, the man with the file never really thought it would be relevant to pass that information on.
After Belgium’s Dutch-language media broke the news on Friday, Mechelen police chief Yves Bogaerts told reporters that it was not clear back in December that Abdeslam might be hiding at that address, so his small department had not passed the address to the federal anti-terrorism unit responsible for hunting him down. “There was no information deliberately withheld,” Bogaerts told reporters in Mechelen. “A mistake was made internally in the police force.”
Abdesalam was later arrested at the address that this bumbling Belgian police chief Bogaerts didn’t pass on because he was busy waffling about. The incompetence is shocking. It’s like they don’t take this seriously. Like the murder and mutilation of your citizens is just an annoyance. A local crime story, not an attack in a religious war.
ISIS suspect still on the run.
It doesn’t help that Belgium is a political basket case anyway. Thanks to the great reporting of guys like ABC correspondent Aaron Katersky, I’ve really learned a lot more about how Byzantine the maze of Belgian government really is. The government is sharply divided between its Flemish-speaking and French-speaking population. The country actually had no functioning government for 541 days only a few years ago. So you already have a massive culture clash between the European natives. Now throw in Mollenbeek, an area of 100,000 people, virtually all Muslim. It might as well be its own country.
Another major fault is the way the police system works in Belgium. The country is divided up into 589 different municipalities. All of these have their own fiercely territorial local politicians and law enforcement who don’t share information. There is little in the way of a national police department, something like our own FBI. Brussels alone has 19 different boroughs, which up until recently had 19 different police forces and mayors. It still has 19 mayors, but the number of police departments has been consolidated to “only” six now. In a city of 1.4 million people, you have six different police departments. It’s absurd.
I got that information from reading this great article by Tim King, arguing that Belgium is, in fact, a failed state. Here’s a good nugget from the King story: Prior to 1998, each of the then-520 municipalities had responsibility for printing their own passports. There was no central passport for the country of Belgium, if you can believe it. All you had to do to get one was break into the local town hall.
As for the Muslim neighborhood of Molenbeek, they are over 100 police officers short due to budget cuts. I suspect it goes beyond that. If you’re a Belgian police officer, are you anxious to be assigned to Molenbeek? Doubtful. Even if you had enough police officers, you probably wouldn’t be able to find any who want to work there.
The United States has been screaming at the Belgians to do something about their domestic threat. Listen to this:
During the meetings last Nov. 3 and 4, former U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia Jake Walles — now the State Department’s senior advisor on foreign fighters — warned Belgium that “returning fighters pose a significant destabilizing threat and noted the relatively high number of Belgian fighters,” the cable said.
Frank Arnauts, the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ director for Security Policy, agreed, saying that his country “likely has provided the largest number of fighters in Syria per capita.” But Arnaut also said that Belgium was slowing the flow.
By November, he told U.S. officials, about 500 people had left Belgium to fight in Syria, and 200 or so remained there. Another 100 were somewhere in transit, he said, about 70 more had been killed in fighting and at least 128 had returned home.
You read that correctly. Belgium was foolish enough to let 128 battle-hardened jihadis right back into their country. How could they do this? There is one reason that people travel to Syria, and it’s to go train to fight the holy war. And that number, “128,” is awfully specific. It’s clear that authorities know exactly who every one of these guys are. So why are they letting them back in? You’ll love this: They believed that social programs would help soften the jihadis:
According to the cable, Belgian officials “highlighted” their efforts to track, rehabilitate, and reintegrate into society some returning fighters on the local level, while prosecuting others. They cited improved efforts to reduce the number of new recruits, and more funding for social prevention programs in 10 “hot spot” cities throughout Belgium.
This is like a stereotype of muddle-headed academic leftist thinking. So you’re going to track 128 hardened jihadis trained to evade authorities and cause mayhem? You’re going to convince them of the righteousness of your beer and waffles and they’ll suddenly drop this whole “kill the infidel” thing?
And the United States officials have long warned Belgium about the problems of domestic terror:
Belgian security chiefs have repeatedly complained that they cannot handle up to 900 home-grown Islamist militants, among the highest per-capita rates in Europe. Belgium does not divulge the exact number of personnel in its security services and military intelligence, but security experts say they appear under-resourced compared to European counterparts.
“Add to that the problem of two languages (French and Flemish), lack of Arabic speakers, and weak coordination between national and local government, you have a huge discrepancy between threat and response,” said former CIA official and White House advisor Bruce Riedel, now at the Brookings Institution.
And there’s more. Thankfully, our FBI is highly skilled at capturing bumbling jihadis by way of long practice. And they are trying to help Belgium, and are shocked at what they see:
The twin terror attacks in Brussels that left at least 30 dead and 230 injured on Tuesday, despite repeated warnings from Washington, left U.S. officials fuming.
A senior U.S. intelligence officer likened the Belgian security forces to “children.”
“It’s really shitty tradecraft,” the agent told The Daily Beast…
…“Even with the EU in general, there’s an infiltration of jihadists that’s been happening for two decades. And now they’re just starting to work on this. When we have to contact these people or send our guys over to talk to them, we’re essentially talking with people who are—I’m just going to put it bluntly—children. They are not pro-active, they don’t know what’s going on. They’re in such denial. It’s such a frightening thing to admit their country is being taken over.”
Now, it’s one thing to hear that from your local kooky columnist. But maybe hearing it from U.S. intelligence officials might carry a bit more weight.
Recall that the two brothers who carried out the airport attacks were, of course, well known to authorities. One of them, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, had been picked up at the Turkish-Syrian border, detained and questioned by the Turkish authorities, and then deported back to Europe. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan claimed that he had warned European authorities that the man was a foreign fighter, but his warning went ignored:
Khalid el-Bakraoui, the metro suicide bomber, and brother Ibrahim.
Ibrahim El Bakraoui was deported last year from Turkey after being detained near the Turkish-Syrian border and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said Belgium ignored a warning that he was a militant.
“One of the attackers in Brussels is an individual we detained in Gaziantep in June 2015 and deported. We reported the deportation to the Belgian Embassy in Ankara on July 14, 2015, but he was later set free,” Mr Erdogan said.
“Belgium ignored our warning that this person is a foreign fighter.”
Belgium is now claiming that, while they were aware that Ibrahim had been arrested at the border, they didn’t receive any word that he was a foreign fighter. This seems like splitting hairs to me. If a guy is arrested at the Syrian border, he’s up to no good. WHY would you let him into your country? And his brother, Khalid, had an INTERPOL warrant out for his arrest on terrorism charges, yet was never picked up by any sort of law enforcement.
Right after the Paris attacks, police received intelligence about where Abdeselam was hiding out. But the police had to wait until sunrise to kick the door in because of some crazy law they have prohibiting night raids unless an “active crime” is taking place. One would think that the Paris attacks that killed 130 people would have met that criteria, but the cops waited. Yes, really!
PARIS — The authorities in Belgium said on Wednesday that one of the Paris attackers may have been holed up in a house in Brussels two nights after 130 people were killed and hundreds more injured — but that he could have escaped because of a law banning police raids on private homes from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., according to the country’s justice minister.
The revelation by the justice minister, Koen Geens, that the suspect, France’s most wanted man — Salah Abdeslam — might have gotten away because of an arcane law intended to safeguard family privacy only adds to the picture of a severely dysfunctional and ineffective government in Belgium.
Eric Van der Sijpt, the spokesman for the federal prosecutor in Brussels, who is leading the investigation, said Mr. Abdeslam would have been caught if he were in the house, but acknowledged in a telephone interview that “the immediate surroundings and the streets surrounding the property were not sealed off during the night.”
I thought that was a joke when I first read about it. By the time they acted, he was already gone. Who thought of that rule? Where did that come from and how did it get pushed into law? Were anti-police activists behind this? It goes back to 1969, so the origins are pretty muddy. I’m still looking into it. Oh, and the justice minister quoted above, Koen Geens, and the interior minister, Jan Jambon, both apparently offered to resign. Inexplicably, this was refused by the prime minister! Even after this colossal failure. It all goes with this reluctance of action.
Don’t blame anyone. Don’t take responsibility. Let’s just all get along. It’s shocking to me.
Remember, police knew there was a credible threat to the airport and hadn’t beefed up security. Recently, the Belgians had hired an Israeli security firm to assess its airport operations. The results were unambiguously shitty:
The Israeli firm was not alone in underlining the urgency of security upgrades at Zaventem airport in recent weeks. On Feb. 29, European Union security agencies called for an immediate overhaul of the security measures at Belgian airports and borders, which were wide open to access by terrorists and lacked the tools for inspecting passengers on arrival and departure.
Too little, too late. And no matter how much security you have, it will never be enough for crazy men who don’t mind blowing themselves up just to take a few infidels with them.
Honestly, I’m at a loss. I look at the response of the European nations to this wave of refugees and Islamic terror, and these seem like the actions of a society that has no interest in continuing to exist. I’ve been forever screaming about the massive parallel societies that the Europeans have created in their midst. It had been suggested to me this week, with a straight face, that it was bigoted to suggest that questions of ethnic loyalties, tribalism, and religion may have actually played a factor in Europe’s terrorism.
I know, I can’t believe it either. Let’s not talk about the role religion plays in this, because that’s not a story or anything. Let us not be so GAUCHE as to imagine that different ethnicities might have tension between them. And definitely don’t bring Islam into this, because it’s completely irrelevant and totally not a theocratic political system bent on domination. People actually think this. It’s remarkable.
It is true that tribes, and societies, eventually cease to exist. Now, I would guess that during the vast majority of history, this was due to some violent external force. A terrible war or natural disaster. A famine, maybe. Something that created chaos that proved too much for the tribe to overcome. Rarely, I imagine, did a civilization fall as a result of inviting in another tribe in ever-increasing numbers, allowing it to accumulate political and social power until it eventually overwhelmed the natives. And all of this within several generations, not over hundreds of years. And after a long history of violent struggle with Islam, to observe Europe seemingly approach the cusp of surrendering to it is remarkable.
Speaking of accumulating political power, in 2012, two Muslim politicians won seats in Brussels’ municipal elections. Their party name? Why, the Islam Party, of course. I wonder what kind of platform these councilmen will pursue?
During a post-election press conference in Brussels on October 25, the two future councilors, who will be officially sworn in on December 3, said they regard their election as key to the assertion of the Muslim community in Belgium.
“We are elected Islamists but above all we are Muslims,” Ahrouch said. “Islam is compatible with the laws of the Belgian people. As elected Muslims, we embrace the Koran and the tradition of the Prophet Mohammed. We believe Islam is a universal religion. Our presence on the town council will give us the opportunity to express ourselves,” said Ahrouch, who refuses to shake hands or make eye contact with females in public.
That’s great. Oh, but here’s the good part:
Ahrouch says that his ultimate goal, creating an Islamic state in Belgium based on Islamic Sharia law, has not changed.
Speaking to a reporter from Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (RTBF), the public broadcasting service of the French-speaking part of Belgium, Ahrouch said: “The agenda is still the same, but our approach is different now. I think we have to sensitize people, make them understand the advantages to having Islamic people and Islamic laws. And then it will be completely natural to have Islamic laws and we will become an Islamic state.”
Muslims demonstrate against the visit of Dutch Member of the European Parliament Geert Wilders
The reporter interjected: “An Islamic State in Belgium?” Ahrouch replied: “In Belgium, of course! I am for the Sharia. Islamic law, I am for it. It is a long-term struggle that will take decades or a century, but the movement has been launched.”
You have Islamists openly talking about what they are going to do. They are telling you that they are going to use the refugee crisis to smuggle their fighters into Europe. They are telling you that they intend to turn the European continent into an Islamic stronghold. And Monsieur Ahrouch is telling you exactly what he and his political party are intending to do through the political process. It’s not like this is a mystery, so I find the slow and inadequate response baffling.
In my opinion, over time, the secular, Western democracies of Europe will morph into an Islamized, Eastern theocracy as the imams gain control of an ever-increasing number of pliable Muslim politicians, and with absolutely no push-back against it. If that is to be the future of Europe, so be it, I suppose. The Euros seem resigned to it, so perhaps I should be as well. But I love Europe. It pisses me off.
Maybe that’s what we are seeing here. Maybe the Belgians’ hearts just aren’t in this thing. If you listen to dopes like this Belgian diplomat, maybe the natives just don’t have the heart to push back anymore. It seems they have been sufficiently cowed and browbeaten to believe that frank discussion of Islam and Europe is tantamount to a hate crime.
But Belgium’s Ambassador to Australia Jean-Luc Bodson has cautioned against linking the issue with the deadly attacks in his homeland this week.
“It’s dangerous because it’s precisely what ISIS wants — that we would make a confusion between terrorism and migrants and between terrorism and Islam,” Mr Bodson told ABC News Breakfast.
“My view is that the terrorists who committed the latest attacks and in Paris and in Belgium are European-raised and born. Maybe from foreign origins, but they are Europeans.
“So it has nothing to do with the refugee crisis and I think that is the main danger to assimilate that.”
This is absurd. It’s all connected. Radical Islam. Huge numbers of immigrants. An overwhelming of the immigration system. Failure of assimilation. Social media and smart phones making it easy to remain insular. Check out this letter that Brussels residents wrote back in December, begging for some relief in their neighborhoods:
In Brussels, the situation has been deteriorating rapidly, and we have a real crisis on our hands. The Belgian government has abandoned its responsibilities and the official system has broken down: The ‘pre-accueil’ facilities for new arrivals provided by the Red Cross at the World Trade Centre III do not provide sufficient shelter, leaving hundreds in the streets every night, until they are finally able to register at the immigration office, with a waiting time of more than two weeks at this point. In the meantime, new arrivals are left to their own devices and have to rely on Brussels citizens to fulfil what should be the government’s responsibility.
Members of our informal Community Support Group, alongside numerous similar initiatives, have been engaged in helping refugees for many weeks now, at great financial and personal cost. This has included hosting and feeding refugees in hotels and private homes, organising and paying for their medical care, regular food distribution in the streets and train stations, as well as donations of clothes, hygiene articles, sleeping bags and other essentials.
And because of this massive tidal wave of humanity, the immigration system and law-enforcement systems are completely overwhelmed. Listen to this from The Atlantic:
Some analysts blamed the overstretched capabilities of Belgian counterterrorism officials for not catching and disrupting the Paris plot, even though many of the attackers were known to be linked to terrorism and had had scrapes with the law before last November. Then, in the wake of the November lockdown, Belgian authorities “made a series of seemingly contradictory announcements about the security situation,” The Guardian reports.
“Belgian security services appeared—despite the quality of many individual officials‚ overwhelmed. It was revealed that a few hundred agents were supposed to watch over thousands of potential militants. ‘We are simply exhausted,’ one senior security official said in an email.” Belgian security officials told BuzzFeed’s Mitchell Prothero that practically every possible detective and investigator in the country was detailed to investigating jihad.
How long is this supposed to go on? The fear and resentment of Muslims by the European Belgians will continue to fester. And whatever cannot be won by violence by the jihadis will be won through increasing political power and demography. After all, 40 percent of schoolchildren in Antwerp are Muslim, if you can believe it. Twenty-six percent of Brussels residents are Muslims, as of 2013. It’s probably a few points higher than that now. Almost all of the Muslims are of Moroccan descent, and thus have not been as involved in the West’s Middle Eastern misadventures. Yet they identify with the jihad as fellow Muslims. If there are this many problems now, what is it going to be like in 20 years? Belgium is only six percent Muslim—about 11 million countrywide. What will it be like a generation from now, when they really start running things?
Mollenbeek is a lost cause. Listen to this former hipster resident, culture anthropologist Teun Voeten. This is a pretty long excerpt, but it’s fascinating and illustrates the complete failure of any kind of assimilation. And remember, this is written by a very urbane, sophisticated European leftist:
I was part of a new wave of young urban professionals, mostly white and college-educated — what the Belgians called bobo, (“bourgeois bohémiens”) — who settled in the area out of pragmatism. We had good intentions. Our contractor’s name was Hassan. He was Moroccan, and we thought that was very cool. We imagined that our kids would one day play happily with his on the street. We hoped for less garbage on the streets, less petty crime. We were confident our block would slowly improve, and that our lofts would increase in value. (We even dared to hope for a hip art gallery or a trendy bar.) We felt like pioneers of the Far West, like we were living in the trenches of the fight for a multicultural society.
Slowly, we woke up to reality. Hassan turned out to be a crook and disappeared with €95,000, the entire budget the tenants had pooled together for our building’s renovation. The neighborhood was hardly multicultural. Rather, with roughly 80 percent of the population of Moroccan origin, it was tragically conformist and homogenous. There may be a vibrant alternative culture in Casablanca and Marrakech, but certainly not in Molenbeek.
Over nine years, I witnessed the neighborhood become increasingly intolerant. Alcohol became unavailable in most shops and supermarkets; I heard stories of fanatics at the Comte des Flandres metro station who pressured women to wear the veil; Islamic bookshops proliferated, and it became impossible to buy a decent newspaper. With an unemployment rate of 30 percent, the streets were eerily empty until late in the morning. Nowhere was there a bar or café where white, black and brown people would mingle. Instead, I witnessed petty crime, aggression, and frustrated youths who spat at our girlfriends and called them “filthy whores.” If you made a remark, you were inevitably scolded and called a racist. There used to be Jewish shops on Chaussée de Gand, but these were terrorized by gangs of young kids and most closed their doors around 2008. Openly gay people were routinely intimidated, and also packed up their bags.
There you go. It went the exact opposite direction it was supposed to. Instead of immigrants coming and assimilating into the dominant culture, they instead created their own society.
And a point that I feel I need to keep hammering home when it comes to a connection with the recent migrant crisis: By adding in an enormous amount of immigrants in such a short time, Belgium is creating a huge pool for these jihadis and their financial support to move about in freely. And it allows all of the other accompanying crimes to continue. Think of it as a vast net that the jihadis are casting over Europe. Human trafficking. Prostitution. Smuggling routes. Currency, jewels, and precious-metal smuggling for finance purposes. Drugs, for the more liberal Islamists. Points of contact. Weapons. False papers and passports. Other ISIS fighters. Political connections. Law-enforcement connections. Coordination between plotting ISIS organizers and sympathizers. All of these see an increase, and are aided through massive immigration, as authorities are overwhelmed and undermanned.
Belgian authorities have little to no penetration into the Muslim communities like Mollenbeek. It’s hard enough to look for and follow five guys moving about in a community of, say, 5,000. Now try looking for and following 500 guys in a population of around six million Muslims, many of whom are hostile to police and have, to whatever extent, some sort of sympathy for the violent jihadis. Again, Abdesalma was able to live next door to the home he grew up in for four and a half months, undetected. And nobody tipped off the cops. What does that tell you? They don’t want to talk to the cops. They are the infidel and the enemy.
These guys aren’t stupid. And this is only going to get worse. Encryption technology is causing a huge headache for counterterrorism officials. And eventually, the jihadi cells will be able to bypass tools like Twitter and iPhone encryption, which have aided in their communications considerably, and just create their own. And they remain insulated through social media and the Internet, which link them to news reports and TV in their own language. The Internet also allows them to avoid getting up in the morning to go to work with the natives:
The problem isn’t intolerance. It’s the multiculturalist socialist paradise that the entire European Union affords Muslim immigrants.
As a result, welfare is abused by Muslims across Europe — some 80% of Muslim immigrants to Europe are on the dole, and more than half are “economically inactive.” Muslims claim disability more than any other group.
In the EU capital of Belgium, as well as neighboring Netherlands, Muslims are roughly 5 percent of the population yet consume 40% to 60% of the welfare budget. Belgium spends more on unemployment benefits than any other country outside Denmark.
The entire attitude from the European authorities is one of paralysis. I wrote the following right after the Paris attacks last November, and I believe the exact same thing holds true today and into the future:
An ACTUAL step that a serious country would take would be the immediate closing of the borders, massive deportations, and a complete halt of all permanent immigration from Islamic countries until you regain some control over the jihadi cancer in your country, both foreign and domestic.
This isn’t how immigration is supposed to work. It works when you admit people from other cultures slowly, giving them time to acclimate and assimilate to the dominant culture, while adding a bit from their own. When you do it with extremely large numbers, it creates resentment not only within the native population, but within the immigrants themselves, who rapidly begin to congregate and form ethnic ghettos. There is no moral requirement for Western countries to admit massive, inexorable tides of humanity from alien cultures into their countries, forever, in perpetuity, overwhelming the native population.
Indeed. Deporting anyone who isn’t supposed to be in the country. Massively slow permanent immigration while you redouble assimilation efforts. Rounding up and jailing known jihadis who have gone to train and fight in Syria—all 128 of the known guys who have returned should be hunted down and thrown in prison. This is called “doing something.” And do something you must. Everything else is doing nothing. When your citizens are getting slaughtered by explosives at the airport, it’s time to get serious. Europe’s Schengen Agreement will almost certainly be a casualty soon.
I don’t know what kind of carnage it will take before the beard-scratchers at the EU take hard, unpleasant measures to protect themselves. Eight guys killed 130 people in Paris. Five guys killed over 30 in Brussels. There are still 120 people in the hospital, with over half in intensive care. Thirteen jihadis and hundreds of Europeans have been killed or maimed. This cannot go on. And for people who are slow to take hard action, I would ask this: How many more of these will it take? How many more bodies are we willing to see bleeding out in pieces before taking unpleasant, necessary action, as one would do in a war?
And would anything work, anyway? At this point, I think Europe is too far gone. Mark Steyn, among others, has been yelling about this for a decade, and has been marginalized and laughed at. Maybe if they had started 20 years ago, something could have been done. Now, it’s too late. They are paralyzed, and nothing will change. The attacks will continue, the yawning gulf of suspicion and distrust between the Europeans and the Muslim immigrants will continue to widen, the inexorable tide of demography will mathematically turn to the Islamist’s favor, and soldiers carrying guns in the streets will be the new normal in Europe. It is unbelievable to watch.
@BKactual
News Roundup special: Terror in Brussels, bumbling law enforcement, and Europe’s uncertain future
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News Roundup special: Terror in Brussels, bumbling law enforcement, and Europe’s uncertain future
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As the world continues to react to the horrific terrorist attacks in Brussels, it is becoming increasingly clear that the European authorities are utterly baffled.
