On the occasion of the publication of a new academic essay on Islamism, CNRS researcher Florence Bergeaud-Blackler expresses concern about Islamist influence in the Belgian capital.
It is a book that, despite almost no media coverage, has been a hit in Belgian bookshops for a few weeks. At least among those who dare to sell it. Published last May, ” Concealing Islamism. Veils and Secularism under the Sway of Cancel Culture” paints a disturbing portrait of the Belgian and European capital, which is under clear Islamist influence. Its author, Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, gave an interview to L’Express. “Islamism has been established in Belgium for forty years in the wake of northern Moroccan and Turkish immigration,” explains the CNRS researcher, who evokes a “brotherhood” sphere that knows how to conquer peacefully – by means of NGOs, lobbying and cultural associations.Since the 1980s, she explains, the Muslim Brotherhood specifically targeted Brussels, which was identified as “the soft underbelly of the European soft underbelly”. As a result, the city has become “a kind of haven for Islamism in Europe” over the last decade.
An additional problem is that the Belgian and Brussels authorities are doing little to improve the situation. “Since the 2015 and 2016 attacks and the police response, the most political fringe of the European Brotherhood has allied itself with the Turkish Brotherhood of Erdogan’s movement to keep the Salafist and jihadist fringes on the sidelines until the situation calms down,” Florence Bergeaud-Blackler sums up. Worse still, talking about the issue has become very complicated, explains the researcher, according to whom Belgians no longer even dare to use the term “Muslims”, preferring instead to speak of “diversity”.In fact, local authorities would fail to understand that “fraternism is a peacetime progression that is slowly and surely becoming accustomed to the countries and regions in which it resides”. In the rare cases when the issue is properly addressed, those who speak out are victims of the ” cancel culture” that the researcher mentions in the title of her book. According to the researcher, this culture of silence is the work of “a small network of notables close to Ecolo (the Ecologist Party) and the Socialist Party”.