by Giulio Meotti
“Football unites peoples”, “football erases differences”. How lovely! What a magnificent moral lesson!
In Belgistan there was popular jubilation! After Morocco defeated Belgium in the World Cup, the former’s fans – all Belgian citizens, it goes without saying – took to the streets and decided to set Brussels on fire. Why should “fans” go wild at the victory of their own country’s rival team? How naive we are, in order not to see that what burns is the hatred of a parallel society that has nothing to do with football.
Young migrants used their former country’s victory to show Belgian society who will one day wear the pants. The crucial question is what those images say about the state of integration when migrants, after a victory for the country they come from, devastate the streets of the country that welcomed them.
It is a question that we Europeans have long since stopped asking ourselves. Nobody wants to hear the answer. The center of Brussels was destroyed. A horde attacked the police, looted, destroyed. They even stoned the ambulances. Ambulances, I repeat. Liège Droixhe police station was attacked by 50 people waving Moroccan flags, smashing windows and vandalizing police cars.
In Borgerhout, a man climbed onto the balcony of a house and tore down the Belgian flag. Maybe this was his way of expressing gratitude for being taken in.
“We really had to show blindness and try at all costs to align reality with the ideology of coexistence in order not to see that the Moroccans’ sympathy in Belgium went to the Moroccan team and not to that of ‘their second country”, writes in Le Figaro the former Belgian senator Alain Destexhe. “In Molenbeek, Anderlecht, Schaerbeek and Brussels, the Moroccan community is more numerous than the others, including Belgians of origin. You should have seen the enthusiasm of these fans honking their horns and displaying Moroccan flags on the streets of the capital with their Belgian registered car. For many Belgians, this show broke the myth of integration (nobody talks about assimilation in Belgium anymore) and had a side excessive or even indecent for Belgium which allowed these Moroccans to live in a prosperous country and to benefit from the advantages of the welfare state.
The television channels did not show this symbolic image of a demonstrator pulling down a Belgian flag from a building to the applause of the crowd, nor the surprising face-to-face meeting between hundreds of Moroccans dancing and singing together a few steps away from Brussels’ Grand Place, blocked by a cordon of policemen, all European, with helmets and clubs, forbidding them to enter the city centre.
According to Statbel, the Belgian statistical office, the population of Brussels today is 46 percent of non-European origin and only 24 percent of Belgian origin. Moroccans make up 7 percent of the kingdom’s population, but 12 percent in the Brussels-Capital Region, most of them Belgian nationals. The growth in the number of Moroccans in Belgium was exponential: 460 in 1961, 39,000 in 1970 and 800,000 forty years later.
The country now has 26 regional or federal deputies of Moroccan origin and several mayors, who often encourage communitarianism. Among under-18s, Moroccans outnumber Belgians of Belgian ancestry, and many Brussels schools are made up exclusively of children of non-European ancestry. In those of the public network where parents can choose the religion course, Islam is now followed by the majority of students.
The evolution is remarkable in a few decades and modifies the physiognomy and social life of the great Belgian cities. The veil is increasingly present and is worn by the majority of women in some municipalities. During Ramadan, almost all shops and restaurants are closed in some neighborhoods. The number of mosques is exploding and all currents of Islam are represented in Brussels where tensions between Sunnis and Shiites or even between Moroccans and Turks are sometimes high, particularly within the Belgian Muslim Executive, a structure which authorities have tried to set up so as to promote a dialogue with a single interlocutor, but that goes from crisis to crisis.
The most distressing thing is the denial and total absence of debate on the issues of immigration and integration in the French-speaking part of the country. Neither the media nor the political parties talk about it. Sunday’s riots were blamed by the mayor of Brussels on ‘thugs and scoundrels’, a speech widely echoed, without further clarification or analysis. As if Belgium had accepted its fate as a multicultural city with, shortly, a Muslim majority in the capital and a new normal of urban riots, shootings and terrorist attacks”.
For Europe’s elites, immigration is just a “resource”. The immigrants are not human beings with their own culture, values, religion and mentality very different from ours, who must be respected for what they are, while taking the necessary measures to prevent Brussels from becoming Burqina Faso. No, “resources”. Could it be that for these elites immigration and multiculturalism mean exotic restaurants, warm winter holidays, oriental art in museums and foreign nannies?
Violence against health workers in many areas of Sweden is so endemic that they want to set up a “protection system” in no-go zones with large migrant populations hostile to the authorities. Ambulance drivers refuse to go to certain addresses without the police protecting them. The problem has been going on for years. Gordon Trattidge, president of the paramedics union, says: “The accidents are more frequent and the violence is more brutal.
A month ago, the English city of Leicester was plunged into chaos. Knife attacks, stone and bottle throwing, cars destroyed, religious symbols under siege and dozens injured, including many policemen. The outbreak of violence began after the cricket match between India and Pakistan, with the first the winners. Some exponents of the Indian community in Leicester celebrated with the choir “Pakistan Murdabad”, “Death to Pakistan”, dating back to the time of partition. A Sikh was attacked in the street. Social networks spread the false news that he is a Muslim. The house of a Hindu family celebrating the Ganesh Chaturthi holiday was attacked and social networks go wild with the false news of a “premeditated attack against a Muslim”. Then another fake: a Muslim girl was allegedly harassed by three Hindus. so hunt for Hindus in the streets.
Demography is the law that governs the rise, fall and transformation of European societies. The Islamic Ummah thrives across the open borders, external and internal to Schengen, and thanks to the generosity of European welfare states it occupies the territories – neighborhood after neighborhood – which become “no-go zones” with street gangs and crime to protect them. High birth rates ensure the longevity and expansion of these areas.
What will tomorrow’s Europe be like, two Italians I guided in Israel for a week asked me? If we do nothing, I answered them, it will look like this: big cities will be Islamized and Balkanized (Dörtmund, Brussels, Leicester, French cities, are already not recoverable), medium-sized cities will save themselves according to the level of economic attraction (the more opportunities there are, the more they will be Islamized) and small centers will remain (at least for a while), the enclaves from where the “last whites” (like Nietzsche’s “last men”), not yet gentrified, will observe the decline of Europe.
