Cohen:
BRUSSELS — There are military trucks parked in Molenbeek, and soldiers with submachine guns patrol the jittery streets of the Brussels district that has been the epicenter of European terrorism in recent months. On the Place Communale idle youths loiter, shooting glances at the police. This is where the Paris and Brussels attacks, with their 162 dead, overlap.
Salah
Abdeslam, the only surviving direct participant in the Paris attacks, hid in
Molenbeek before his arrest on March 18. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected
chief planner of the Paris attacks, lived in Molenbeek. In all, at least 14
people tied to both attacks were either Belgian or lived in Brussels.
One of
them is Mohamed Abrini, a Belgian of Moroccan origin who grew up in Molenbeek
and was arrested in Brussels on Friday. He has told the police he is “the man
in the hat” caught on surveillance cameras leaving Brussels airport after two
accomplices blew themselves up on March 22. Cameras also placed him in Paris
last November with the Paris attackers.
Sleepy
Brussels: goodbye to that image. Yet even today there’s something soporific
about this French-speaking city marooned within Flemish-speaking Flanders,
beset by administrative and linguistic divisions and the lethargy that stems
from them, home to a poorly integrated immigrant population of mainly Moroccan
and Turkish descent (41 percent of the population of Molenbeek is Muslim), and
housing the major institutions of a fraying European Union.
It is
hard to resist the symbolism of the Islamic State establishing a base for its
murderous designs in the so-called capital of Europe at a time when the
European idea is weaker than at any time since the 1950s. A jihadi loves a
vacuum, as Syria demonstrates. Belgium as a state, and Belgium as the heart of
the European Union are as close to a vacuum as Europe offers these days.
Belgium
— a hodgepodge of three regions (Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and
Brussels), three linguistic communities (Flemish, French and German) and a weak
federal government — is dysfunctional. That dysfunction finds its most powerful
expression in the capital, where Flemish geography and French culture do not
align. The administrative breakdown assumes critical proportions in Molenbeek,
the second-poorest commune in the country, with 36 percent of people younger
than 25 unemployed.
As
Julia Lynch noted recently in The Washington Post, Molenbeek’s radicalism is
not new. It was “home to one of the attackers in the 2004 commuter train
bombings in Madrid and to the Frenchman who shot four people at the Jewish
Museum in Brussels in August 2014. The Moroccan shooter on the Brussels-Paris
Thalys train in August 2015 stayed with his sister there.”
This is
an outrage. Splintered Belgium had lost control of Molenbeek. A heavily Muslim
district of Brussels had in effect seceded. If this were the extent of the
problem, it would be grave. But Molenbeek is just the most acute manifestation
of a European failure.
The
large-scale immigration from Turkey and North Africa that began a half-century
ago at a time of economic boom has — at a time of economic stagnation — led to
near-ghettos in or around many European cities where the jobless descendants of
those migrants are sometimes radicalized by Wahhabi clerics. As the French
prime minister, Manuel Valls, warned recently, an extremist minority is
“winning the ideological and cultural battle” within French Islam.
The
fact that the jihadis, often Syrian-trained, are a minority, and that many
Muslims who immigrate to Europe are leading successful and integrated lives, is
little consolation. After the carnage in Paris and Brussels, the laissez-faire
approach that had allowed those clerics to proselytize, private Muslim schools
to multiply in France, prisons to serve as incubators of jihadism, youths to
drift to ISIS land in Syria and back, and districts like Molenbeek or
Schaerbeek to drift into a void of negligence, has to cease. Improved
intelligence is not enough. There is an ideological battle going on; it has to
be waged on that level, where it has been lost up to now. The moderate Muslim
communities of Europe need to do much more.
Europe,
of which Brussels is a symbol, presents an alarming picture today. The Dutch,
susceptible to propaganda from Russia, have just voted in a referendum against
a trade agreement with Ukraine for which more than 100 Ukrainians died in an
uprising in 2014. The British are set to vote in June on whether to leave the
Union. The euro has sapped economies insufficiently integrated for a common
currency. A huge refugee flow has raised questions about a borderless Europe.
President Putin plots daily to do his worst for the European Union.
There
is a vacuum. Vacuums are dangerous. The answer is a reformed, reinvigorated and
stronger Europe, not the kind of division that produced Molenbeek — a microcosm
of what fragmentation can bring.
My two
older children were born in Schaerbeek. My daughter, now a doctor in New
Mexico, took some of her first steps at Brussels airport. This is not the
Europe I imagined for them.
