April 22, 2018
A masked youth taunts Belgian police in Molenbeek, Belgium, on April 2, 2016 (Picture: Reuters)
The French acronym of Belgium's ISLAM Party stands for "Integrity, Solidarity, Liberty, Authenticity, Morality". The leaders of the ISLAM Party apparently want to turn Belgium into an Islamic State. They call it "Islamist democracy" and have set a target date: 2030.
According to the French magazine Causeur, "the program is confusingly simple: replace all the civil and penal codes with sharia law. Period". Created on the eve of the 2012 municipal ballot, the ISLAM Party immediately received impressive results. Its numbers are alarming.
The effect of this new party, according to Michaël Privot, an expert on Islam, and Sebastien Boussois, a political scientist, could be the "implosion of the social body". Some Belgian politicians, such as Richard Miller, are now advocating banning the ISLAM Party.
The French weekly magazine Le Point details the plans of the ISLAM Party: It would like to "prevent vice by banning gaming establishments (casinos, gaming halls and betting agencies) and the lottery". Along with authorizing the wearing the Muslim headscarf at school and an agreement about the Islamic religious holidays, the party wants all schools in Belgium to offer halal meat on their school menus. Redouane Ahrouch, one of the party's three founders, also proposed segregating men and women on public transport. Ahrouch belonged in the 1990s to the Belgian Islamic Center, a nest of Islamic fundamentalism where candidates for jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq were recruited.
The ISLAM Party knows that demography is on its side. Ahrouch has said, "in 12 years, Brussels will principally be composed of Muslims". In the upcoming Belgian elections, the ISLAM Party is now set to run candidates in 28 municipalities. On first glance, that looks like a derisory proportion compared to 589 Belgian municipalities, but it demonstrates the progress and ambitions of this new party. In Brussels, the party will be represented on 14 lists out of a possible 19.
That is most likely why the Socialist Party now fears the rise of the ISLAM Party. In 2012, the party succeeded, when running in just three Brussels districts, in obtaining an elected representative in two of them (Molenbeek and Anderlecht), and failing only narrowly in Brussels-City.
Two years later, during the 2014 parliamentary elections, the ISLAM Party tried to expand its base in two constituencies, Brussels-City and Liège. Once again, the results were impressive for a party that favors the introduction of sharia, Islamic law, into Belgium. In Brussels, they won 9,421 votes (almost 2%).
This political movement apparently started in Molenbeek, "the Belgian radicals' den", a "hotbed of recruiters for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant". Jihadists there were apparently plotting terror attacks all over Europe and even in Afghanistan. The French author Éric Zemmour, facetiously suggested that instead of bombing Raqqa, Syria, France should "bomb Molenbeek". At the moment in Molenbeek, 21 municipal officials out of 46 are Muslim.
"The European capital," wrote Le Figaro, "will be Muslim in twenty years".
"Nearly a third of the population of Brussels already is Muslim, indicated Olivier Servais, a sociologist at the Catholic University of Louvain. "The practitioners of Islam, due to their high birth rate, should be the majority 'in fifteen or twenty years'. Since 2001... Mohamed is the most common name given to boys born in Brussels".
The ISLAM Party is working in a favorable environment. According to the mayor of Brussels, Yvan Mayeur, all the mosques in the European capital are now "in the hands of the Salafists". A few weeks ago, the Belgian government terminated the long-term lease of the country's largest and oldest mosque, theGrand Mosque of Brussels, to the Saudi royal family, "as part of what officials say is an effort to combat radicalization". Officials said that the mosque, was a "hotbed for extremism".
A confidential report last year revealed that the police had uncovered 51 organizations in Molenbeek with suspected ties to jihadism.
Perhaps it is time for sleepy Belgium to begin to wake up?
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
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