The Belgians should be rioting, not crying. Enough of the wreath laying. You’re filling landfills, which is where your government and its security apparatus belong. Make government officials cry. Overthrow your flaccid overlords. The contempt this left-liberal, impotent outfit evinces for the lives of its citizens is unparalleled.
The Turks are way better than the Europeans. When the butcher Brahim Abdeslam commenced his pilgrimage to Syria, the Turks were sharp enough and responsible to send him packing back to Brussels, where he was wanted, but not a Wanted Man. Brussels let Brahim go.
This time, even Washington, less diligent than Ankara, is hot under the collar about indifference and incompetence that goes beyond what is expected from government. (Government can never do anything right, because the incentives are inverted; the worse the functionaries do; the more funding they get.)
European citizens, like Americans, are being placed in danger by their governments’ policies of egalitarian, indiscriminate mass immigration. The only thing individuals can do is refuse to die; which means stop frolicking like idiots. Realize that the mindless mantra, “Don’t let the terrorists win,” is also the European State’s mantra. Other than East-European governments like Hungary’s, western power brokers like Angela Merkel want their citizens to soldier on; die to maintain status quo. Smart Europeans will boycott hotbeds of violence and incivility–Belgium—until the power base gets scared that the tax base is goign to dry up.
Background courtesy of The Daily Beast.
… “Jihadists think that Europe is the soft underbelly of the West and Belgium is the soft underbelly of Europe,” said French terror expert Gilles Kepel.
Many of the major recent attacks in Europe have clear links to Belgium. In May 2014, French ex-Syria jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche went to the Belgian capital to attack the Jewish museum in Brussels. There are Brussels links to the weapons used by Amedy Coulibaly in his attack on a Jewish supermarket on Jan. 9, 2015, shortly after the Jan. 7 attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the Paris attack in November last year has clear ties to the Molenbeek neighborhood specifically. Many of its attackers either resided or grew up in the borough.
Jean-Charles Brisard, the author of a biography of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s earlier incarnation al Qaeda in Iraq, said it’s more useful to think about the ISIS phenomenon in Western Europe as a Francophone network because the operatives in Brussels are a mix of French and Belgian nationals.
Brisard calculates that 534 Belgians have gone to Syria and about 200 have returned; he believes the French-Belgian ISIS apparatus is much greater than European security officials initially thought.
Tracking the individuals is a mammoth task.
“For now, the networks comprise basically 20 individuals around the 10 [Paris] terrorists,” he said. “So it’s least 30. It’s still looking like four or five connected but there might be more that we don’t know yet.” For every terror suspect being surveilled it takes between 20 and 25 counterterrorism officials to track him. Coulibaly, for example, was using 20 different phones, according to Brisard, and each required a different officer to monitor the incoming and outgoing calls.
The Belgians are unwilling or unable to commit that kind of manpower, one of the country’s counterterrorism officials told BuzzFeed a week before the attack.
“Frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links,” he said.
The problem is exacerbated in Brussels because the local police force is divided into six police corps spread over 19 boroughs (particularly odd since the population is only 1.3 million). Sharing intelligence is complicated by the silos.
Robin Simcox, a British-born specialist on European terror networks who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says the Paris and Brussels attacks prove that European intelligence agencies have been comforting themselves—and their constituencies—with a fallacy for a decade.
“What have they been saying since 7/7?” Simcox asked, referring to the al Qaeda bombings in London in July 2005. “‘Oh, those kinds of attacks are not possible anymore. Any time a network gets too big, we find out about it. Anyone tries to construct a suicide vest, we’ll get it. The attacks will be knives and guns.’ Well, it’s the emperor has no clothes, isn’t it? It happened in Paris, now Brussels; it nearly happened in Verviers back in January [2015]. All kinds of assumptions about the kind of threat we were going to be facing in coming years. And we were all too complacent about it.”
The Belgian field commander, if not quite the “mastermind” of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had previously been linked to four separate terror plots in Europe. He got away each time.
He was thought to have “guided” Nemmouche, the Frenchman who shot up the Jewish museum in Brussels. In the attack planned but later aborted in Verviers, Abaaoud had remotely instructed two Belgian nationals, Sofiane Amghar and Khalid Ben Larbi, who fought with ISIS’s elite Battar Brigade.
Abaaoud had been in Greece at the time, and subsequently returned to Syria after Belgian commandos raided Amghar and Ben Larbi’s safe house in Verviers. (The operation constituted the largest firefight in Belgium since the end of World War II.) Abaaoud was also involved in the failed attack on a high-speed train from Paris to Amsterdam in August 2015. It failed only because three American tourists, two of them in the Oregon National Guard, wrestled the AK-47-wielding gunman to the ground before he could kill anyone.
In a February 2015 issue of ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, Abaaoud boasts about being able to slip by a continent-wide dragnet for him, despite the fact that European security services all had a recent photograph of him, which had been published by a Western journalist.
“I suddenly saw my picture all over the media, but… the kuffar were blinded by Allah. I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance! This was nothing but a gift from Allah!”
Abaaoud’s turn from first-generation Belgian into international terrorist follows an all-too-familiar script to those who monitor European jihadism. Although he was once enrolled in the Catholic college Saint-Pierre, an elite school in a tony suburb of Brussels, he dropped out and took to a life of gangsterism and petty crime.
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