'Make some noise and do some dawa' 4Sharia

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1 Response

  1. martijn says:

    Comment send in by E.H. from Gent, Belgium:

    This is a very useful overview with a very important conclusion. Let me add a few comments, from Belgium.

    1. I have not yet read a clear portrait of the ‘organisation’ S4B. It may be a rather loosely connected group of people, or more than that. Anyhow, there is a connection with heavy violence, war weapons and preparations for terrorist attacks on civilians, which is far more than just physical resistance to the police. Two members of the group are in a Jemeni prison, suspected of terrorism, two others belong to an Antwerp terrorist group arrested in 2010, one was noticed to have a kalasjnikov. Whether all this is to be seen under the organisational responsibility of S4B is difficult to decide, but S4B is quite martial in its videos and at least affiliated with heavy violence.

    2. The prime result of the recent actions of S4B is an upsurge of racism. Belgian politicians, from the French speaking prime minister Di Rupo to the Dutch speaking minister of justice Turtelboom or the leader of the Flemish nationalist party NVA Bart De Wever are talking about annulating Belcacem/Abu Imran’s Belgian nationality, in order to send him to Morocco. Mass newspapers are campaigning for his expulsion. (The expulsion as well as the campaign are, I think, highly undemocratic. S4B is a Belgian brand produced by Belgian citizens, and to be coped with by and in Belgium. The expulsion would be the equivalent of the often criticized muslim concept of takfir.)

    3. The French muslim who attacked with a knife and wounded two members of the Belgian police (one of them a woman with muslim background) is said to have acted as a lone wolf, not as a member of an organisation. He had press clippings in his pockets about the niqab riot in Molenbeek, about S4B and about the extreme right wing politician Filip De Winter, who had publicly offered 250 euro for anyone who signals a niqab wearing woman to the police.

    4. There has been another incident recently at a university in Brussels (het ULB, Université Libre de Bruxelles). There the French author Caroline Fourest was invited to speak. The action Boerkablabla disturbed the session, protesting against the fact that Fourest, criticized as islamophobic, was given too much free podium and no serious opposition. There was excessive media coverage of this event, immediately equated with the destruction of Belgian democracy by islamofascists. A leading man of the protesters, Souhail Chichah, working at the university, was object of a disciplinary procedure, results of which are to be released soon. The so-called islamic fundamentalist protesters however were not at all islamofascists, but rather left-wingers. The media and the politicians refuse to make any distinction and sum up all protest as the threat of islamic fundamentalism.

    5. The politicians and the media in Belgium are extremely cooperative with S4B by giving it a gigantic press coverage (while serious and calm work to improve the social climate is often ignored or neglected). This coverage avoids a discussion about the reasons for the protest, the racism on which the anti-burqa law and other laws and rules about headscarves are based. They are polarizing society and muslims of the middle ground are squeezed, feel obliged to take a distance from S4B and often dare not point to the islamophobia that is at work.

    6. So I share your fear about a spiraling movement, with more people like Breivik and Merah taking up arms against those whom they perceive as horrible enemies. Instead of sweeping statements by politicians, that are of personal use in view of the coming elections in Belgium, true statemanship should work to calm down things and to oppose the islamophobia and the hysterical reactions that feed and reinforce S4B and whatever similar groups or people there are. That means normal legal prosecution of offenders, without over-exposure, and shifting the attention to islamophobia. This shift is not to be expected, so we’ll have to see how the spiraling works.

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