By Mark Steyn
March 22, 2016
A picture released by the Belgian Federal Police shows a screengrab of the airport CCTV camera showing suspects of Tuesday's attacks at Brussels Airport, in Zaventem. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
The bloodbath in Brussels? As I said to Hugh Hewitt on a previous occasion, all the stories are different, and yet they're all the same. And, alas, it becomes harder to mourn the dead when we never avenge them. No doubt that narcissist wanker who plays "Imagine" is already dragging his piano to the airport or the metro.*
A decade ago, I cited a Tim Blair reader's unimproveable parody of all those dreary navel-gazing warnings that the actual deceased don't matter except insofar as they portend a hypothetical attack against the real victims here:
British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing
But the old jokes don't play when everyone who matters in our world does them for real.
This time round the government official with direct responsibility for dealing with today's slaughter, a slice of ham with the absurdly Tintinesque name of Jan Jambon, issued the usual halfwit apologia the day before the atrocity. As M Jambon, the Belgian Interior Minister, told CNN on Monday:
Jambon says the majority of young Muslims are well integrated into Belgian society, but admits his government has more to do to make some feel "at home" in their own country, given that a sense of alienation can leave them open to the threat of radicalization.
"We're talking about third- and fourth-generation [immigrants]; these youngsters are born in Belgium, even their fathers and mothers are born in Belgium, and still they are open for these kind of messages. This is not normal -- in the U.S., the second generation was the President; here, the fourth generation is an IS fighter -- so that is really something we have to work on."
So "British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing" is now joined by "Belgian Cabinet Minister Says Tomorrow's Train Bombing Is All Our Fault".
So "we" have to work on it. That means you, the Flemish frequent flyer, poking your head up from the rubble at the airport concourse. And you, the Walloon strap-hanger blinking into the dust and chaos and wondering where the lower part of your left leg went. You are going to "have to work on" it, harder and harder and harder.
Just how are they going to work on it? In Brussels, the terrorists blew up the area outside the secure zone. Which was entirely predictable. As I wrote six years ago:
The second thought that strikes you is that the ever-longer lines to get into the "secure" area are now the least secure area in America. Why not blow up the security line? You could kill as many people as on an airplane, and inflict more long-term economic damage. But don't worry. The TSA has plans to expand the "secure" area, so the insecure perimeter will be somewhere else, with even more vulnerable people standing around waiting to get into it.
Clearly we need a secure zone outside the secure zone - maybe, say, outside the concourse. So everyone has to crowd on the sidewalk. And then when they blow that up we can move it back to the perimeter of the airport. And then...
Where's the "safe space" against an enemy that wants to blow up everything? One year ago, after Copenhagen, I wrote:
I would like to ask Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what's their happy ending here? What's their roadmap for fewer "acts of violence" in the years ahead? Or are they riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish "Troubles" "an acceptable level of violence"? In Pakistan and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead their teacher in front of the class. And it's all entirely "random", as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a while, and it's tough if it's your kid, but that's just the way it is. If we're being honest here, isn't that all Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but don't worry, we'll do our best to contain it - and you can help mitigate it by not going to "controversial" art events, or synagogues, or gay bars, or...
As I've said so often now, I'm Islamed out. I happen to be semi-Belgian, although my family is from Sint-Niklaas rather than Brussels, an ancient city in a minor kingdom hideously transformed into the "capital city" of "Europe" and brutalized by the Eurocrats' reach-for-the-sky monuments to their own visionary genius. On my last visit, the totalitarian skyscrapers towering over the mere mortals in the vast empty plazas below were decorated with giant billboards dangling down 30 stories of rain-streaked concrete bearing the inspiring slogan "Strengthening Europe Through Governance."
No, sir. Killing Europe Through Demographic Transformation. As I wrote after Paris:
So I say again: What's the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn't prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his "pitiless war" isn't serious.
That's the only thing that will make a difference - recognizing that, as "vibrant" and "diverse" and "multicultural" as we are, we cannot assimilate Islam on the scale Frau Merkel and others are demanding. This isn't Belfast. It can't be held down to "an acceptable level of violence". In the long-term, there's no assimilation, only civilizational suicide.
I regret having to begin every other paragraph with "As I wrote...", but the fact is this problem was in plain sight a decade ago - and all M Jambon and the rest of the European political class did was sit back and accelerate the rate of Islamization. As I wrote (last time, I promise) in my book America Alone:
In June 2006, a 54-year old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six – what's that word again? – "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be – quelle surprise! - of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive."
No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in "their" country do Mr Demoor's two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the – here it comes again - "youths". In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed.
Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country's Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The "youths" get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older.
M Jambon can demand all he wants that aging Flemings and Walloons re-double their efforts to make these alienated third-generation Belgians feel "at home". But on that remorseless arithmetic it will be their home, and you'll be the ones having to "work harder" at "integrating" with them.
As for M le Ministre's regret - that in America a second-generation immigrant can be president while in Belgium he's a jihadist - oh, don't worry: a second-generation Euro-Muslim will be prime minister of Belgium soon enough. As I wrote (okay, one more) in 2007, a decade ago Muslims were already ten out of seventeen members of the ruling party on Brussels city council - or 59 per cent. What will it take to make them feel "at home"? Eighty-nine per cent? Well, then, we have to work on it!
~When America Alone came out in 2005, I was interviewed by Michelle Malkin about this very subject. Today she's re-posted that interview:
Today's bloody jihad attacks in Brussels are yet another stark reminder that the Islamization of Europe didn't happen overnight...
Ten years ago, I sat down with the incomparable Mark Steyn for an interview about Europe, Islam, demographics, and his trenchant and timeless book, America Alone.
Click below for Part One:
For parts two, three and four of my interview with Michelle, please see here.
*UPDATE: Re "Imagine", looks like these guys beat him to it. God Almighty. As I write (look, honestly, it's really the final one) last time round:
'Imagine there's no countries...'
Keep this up and there won't be.
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