A few months after taking office at the municipal council of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, Mohammed Kalandar is in trouble and his office seems to be on the brink of collapse.
Will Mohammed Kalandar be able to weather the turmoil that started on Tuesday the 18th of February? La Libre uncovered old statements in which the Molenbeek councillor for sport and health made polemical remarks that the RTBF equated with ‘extremism’, in this case Islamist extremism. Local politicians let the press know that the maintenance of the municipal majority could be in danger.
Mohammed Kalandar, who comes from Iraq, was already denounced for this reason on the 22 January, when the Belgian parliament questioned him about a text message from 2020 in which he welcomed the capture of his hometown of Mosul by the Shiite militia Hashd al-Shaabi. At the time, he had stated that he was mainly celebrating the expulsion of the Islamic State from that city and that he knew nothing of the human rights violations committed by Hashd al-Shaabi. His apology was approved by the local council.
Only this Tuesday, the alderman’s past resurfaced. In 2014, he celebrated the assassination of a Danish cartoonist who had cartooned Muhammad: ‘Please publish this information because a sister in Palestine had a vision that God will make anyone who publishes this information happy […] Time brings great joy, but he who endeavours to resist will suffer great sorrow,’ he wrote. Two years earlier, he had also shared a photo showing Bashar Al Assad, Hassan Nasrallah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leaders of Syria, Hezbollah and Iran, respectively representatives of the Shiite axis formed by Tehran.
Mohammed Kalandar admits that he ‘used social networks inappropriately’ and that he would no longer do so today. Nevertheless, several party members are likely to call for the deputy’s removal from office, as members of the local section of the Socialist Party confided to the newspaper Le Soir. One socialist MP even assured the RTBF that there would otherwise no longer be a majority. The mayor Catherine Moureaux (PS) has not yet reacted officially.