The jihad continues

On Tuesday morning Belgium was the latest European country to suffer a major terrorist attack. It is a disturbing reminder of the war that has not gone away. After the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, chief suspect over atrocities at the Bataclan centre in Paris last November, Belgian officials warned of the prospect of revenge attacks: perhaps spectacular atrocities, aiming at killing hundreds. They came four days later in Brussels airport and Metro — a demonstration of the jihadis’ ability to act quickly.

After such an attack we can expect to be offered a blizzard of explanations, many of them erroneous. One commonly heard claim is that Islamist terrorism is a response to western foreign policy. Yet few countries have been less active in foreign policy than Belgium. The harder truth is that Belgium’s problems, like those of its French neighbour, are primarily domestic. As the raids in Molenbeek showed, there are areas which the police and security services enter only with trepidation and where some locals are willing to give cover and shelter to known terrorists. As we reported in the wake of November’s Paris attacks, Belgium and France’s problems come down to an issue of mass Muslim migration and a rejection of assimilation by some of those incomers. In Belgium and France, as in the UK, the areas where Muslim populations are particularly dense are disproportionately likely to be the places from which the terrorists come. After the arrest of Abdeslam in Molenbeek there were reports of local youths attacking Belgian security forces. This was not simply because the police were in ‘their’ area, but because the authorities had taken away someone that some of them admired.