Molenbeek, the new Kabul?

On March 27th, the Boston Globe asked the question "why there are Muslim ghettos in Belgium, but not in the US?".

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2016/03/27/why-there-are-muslim-ghettoes-belgium-but-not-united-states/zek1CSRR0epWhLmSCiPWKK/story.html

True, the whole world is pointing a finger at Belgium, a "breeding ground for Islamist extremists". Admittedly, it is not an easy task to squeeze into fifty lines a broad and comprehensive analysis of that evil's roots. But the article does not even attempt to name the roots.

One can hardly disagree on the first part of the assessment. Yes, some of Brussels' inner "quartiers" have indeed left Belgium, to become dreadful and dangerous places, where occupants make native Belgians understand that they are not welcome in their own country.

Even though the problem is discovered today, it is not today's problem. The new Molenbeek's mayor has inherited a situation created by her predecessor, an old-fashioned and pedantic socialist, who based his rule on buying support with generous distribution of fake jobs, public lodgings, subsidies to "cultural" associations, and courting of muslim preachers. All of the terrorists responsible for the blind and savage attacks were funded with tax money. Abdeslam and his kamikaze-brother lived in a council house (and his family still lives there). Others have been given fake jobs in "associations" (vectors of radicalisation), or even in public "services". One of the Abdeslam brothers even "worked" in the "integration" unit of the Molenbeek's city hall. Four months later, when Abdeslam was finally discovered 400 yards from his domicile, it was in another public housing. Other terrorists have been receiving generous support to launch an enterprise: it is the case of another killer, Amrani, who shot several people dead in a Christmas market in Liège. His weapons had been funded with that generous "entrepreneurial credit", the city officials being too lazy or too scared to control the use of public money. Others, like the killer of Jewish children in Toulouse, had sham job-training funded with taxes.

Public extortions are often hidden in complex schemes, as Belgium has reached the world's highest rate of income taxes (the predatory rate of 50% starts as low as 3.000$ per month!). Public companies, such as utilities, have "solidarity rates", intended to subsidize consumption by large families (more often than not, prolific muslims) while taxing heavily the singles (usually retired and native). A family from Kabul with 5 children receive a first "ration" of 8 gallons a day at a symbolic, below-cost, 3$/Ccf. A retired Belgian, with modest resources, will pay more than ten times that price: 30$/Ccf above an administratively-fixed daily ration of 40 gallons. This racket (called "redistribution" in socialist-speak) is not without benefits for the politically-connected thieves: Brussels' mayor presides the water distribution company. That company feeds 100 directors, all incompetent, all political accomplices. By contrast, the water company in the District of Columbia has 10 directors, and charges a uniform tariff of 2,80$ per Ccf. The Abdeslam family, no doubt, has not de-registered his terrorist sons, and continues to benefit from those subsidized rations and "redistributive" rates.

This perversion, and many others, shows how fiscal racketeering finances policies that have made idleness, clientelism (and its corollary, electoral blackmail), and auto-segregation possible. With the expected results: rapid descent of education into Third-World standards, obscurantism, self-victimization, affirmative action (to the detriment of natives) and, ultimately, religious fundamentalism. Yes, Belgium is a "hell-hole", as Mr Trump says. But it is Belgian politicians who have made it so.

Belgium is a non-functioning state. Push and pull, by right-wing independence-claimers on one side, and unreformed communist collectivists on the other, led both sides to tear the country apart, while building piles upon piles of "common" institutions (pompously labelled "federal"), pretending to bridge the widening chasm. After six so-called "state reforms", today's Belgium is nothing but an institutional bric-a-brac. Not unlike what it was when Madison and Jefferson took it as a counter-example, when designing the U.S. constitution. Then, as now, Belgium (the "Belgic states" at the time of the founding fathers) was everything a state should not be. It is not even a state. But, forced to maintain a fiction, it is more rapacious and more inefficient than any state.

And that explain why the new mayor of Molenbeek, quoted in your article, pretended that is was not her job to track possible terrorists, even though she received from the anti-terror brigade a list of potential muslim terror suspects, before the Paris massacres. It might be true that she had no authority or legal basis to arrest or even control the movements of these suspects. But the real question should then be asked upstream: what is then the use of such a warning, and who is in charge?

And that leads to a second reason for the decay of a state at the heart of Europe: the universal rejection of responsibilities. It would be very hard to find in this country anybody, anywhere, who takes responsibility for anything. In Belgium, "the buck stops... nowhere!") This has very perverse effects: in a society where everybody rejects the responsibility on someone else, improvements are impossible. Worse, the system tends to promote incompetent people, until they are discarded, and replaced by people still less competent. The previous CEO of the largest power utility (state-owned...) is now managing a fast-food joint. Probably her true level of competence.

The article reverts to a comparison between muslim behaviour in America, and their radicalisation in areas such as Brussels. The figures used are not proving anything. They are even rather supporting the opposite position.

The surprise in the first question ("Why hasn't America become a hotbed of Islamic extremism?") is based on two figures: Belgium has 650.000 muslims, while America is said to have "five times as many". Doesn't the relation between the size of the overall population count for something? The Belgian population being 11 millions, the muslims represent more than 6% of the total. The US population being 320 millions, the muslims are hardly more than 1%. Proportionately, Belgium has to cope with six times more muslims than the US, not five times less!

Nevertheless, the fact that "America's melting pot still works" is not in doubt. But if America is still "melting" newcomers, isn't it entirely due to the fact that the state does not splash public money on "integration", unlike Molenbeek and other muslim enclaves have been doing? "Free" health-care, public jobs, "free" schooling, council housing, lavish subsidies to "cultural associations", children allocations, are not exactly American "values". In Molenbeek, they are the rules. With the result that it is not newcomers who are "melting", but the state itself...

So the article can proclaim that, for the moment, the process of "Americanisation" keeps America safe. But if, until now, "patriotic assimilation turns profoundly dissimilar foreigners into proud and happy Americans", there is no guarantee that, when the US will have the same proportion of muslims as Belgium (6%, or ... 20 millions instead of 3 millions), the melting-pot will still work.

To conclude, if the article does downplay the impact of muslim terrorism in America, it forgets to mention the most horrific terror crime of all, on the 11th of September 2001. The number of victims of that infamy, added to the most recent terror attacks on US soil, still outweighs the total of victims in Europe. And the perpetrators of the most recent massacre, in San Bernardino, were given public jobs and were "Americanized". As for me, I lived for years in the US, kept my own identity and nationality, and never traded for the American citizenship. Even though I never "melted", I felt very much at home. Which is not, as a Belgian, how I feel in Molenbeek.