Opinion

To help prevent future Paris attacks, stop stigmatizing Muslim communities

There was an important paragraph in today’s New York Times article about Molenbeek, the immigrant district in Brussels in which several of the Paris attackers were apparently based. The report describes

a Belgian security system ill equipped to deal with a tight knit community like Molenbeek, where a mostly white police force has only tenuous links to a largely immigrant population resentful of being labeled potential terrorists.

Police the world over know that most crimes are solved or thwarted by informants. The “underwear bomber,” who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet on its way to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had been turned in earlier by his own father, who went straight to the CIA station in Abuja, Nigeria. But security agencies stumbled, and only an alert passenger prevented Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from succeeding.

Preventing future attacks will require cooperation from within communities like Molenbeek. So even just looking at the problem from the law enforcement angle, does it make sense to stigmatize an entire people and an entire religion? The flood of Syrian refugees surely includes people with valuable language skills and first-hand knowledge; is it wise to reject them?

What’s more — and I have no proof of this — but isn’t it at least possible that genuine progress toward human rights in Israel/Palestine and an end to the occupation might make otherwise hesitant people in neighborhoods such as Molenbeek more likely to come forward?

30 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

To help prevent future Paris attacks, stop Islamic fundamentalism.

Normal people just don’t become bloodthirsty terrorists overnight, because of “stigmatization” or any other reason.

That`s actually true – the best preventive way is to connect to the many Muslims that don`t want all this mayhem and wish to live peacefully. Israel has done that for years and was careful to avoid Islamophobia (it is done only by fringe groups in it) and there is little question that such cooperation was highly helpful.
But there is also a background here. In Europe there is a deep sense of discrimination and rootlessness among the many immigrants there while, in contrast, in Israel the Arabs are not immigrants and don`t live in neglected neighborhoods but rather where they used to live all along – even before Israel was established – and while there are discrimination complaints (not just from them but also from Sephardi Jews in the past and from Ethiopian Jews now) – there is a meaningful degree of integration within the country. The situation in the Palestinian territories is different but even there has been a decent degree of cooperation.

The article also spent some print on the bigger problem with Belgium – it is the illegal arms capital of Europe. This is a significant problem that has needed addressing for many years.

Aside from that, there are good reasons why families may be reluctant to approach law enforcement/security services if they suspect a relative of possibly becoming radicalized. On too many occasions instead of scaring the individual(s) back onto the straight and narrow they have instead exploited the trust of families and used these people – pushing them further into criminality – in order to try to reach up the criminal/terrorist foodchain for a higher value catch. Iirc, it happened on a number of occasions in the UK during the IRA years, and there have been at least a couple of similar stories since 7/7.

It is unfortunate that Western nations deliberately provoke a hornets nest, by attacking Muslim nations (too many to mention), and then seem surprised when extremists, who need an excuse to vent their anger, do so in the most terrible ways. Then we have the media, who as if on cue, start interviewing idiots who take the opportunity to demonize all Muslims. Now some Americans only want Christian refugees to be allowed in, again we see the discrimination. It is almost like a script. Geller and other Islamaphobes, have all been on this campaign to demonize Muslims, and now they have the opportunity to once again paint all Muslims with the Jihadist/terrorist brush again.

Western nations want Muslims to take the bombing, toppling of their governments, interference in their political system, and have puppet governments, with a smile, and not utter a word of protest. Unrealistic.
Americans should now realize how innocent Iraqis felt when we dropped bombs over them, killing thousands (far more than these terror attacks), but then we always think we are right,
and do not care if brown skinned Muslims are killed.

It is the same situation with Israel. They blockade, occupy, steal lands, and keep these poor people in open prisons for decades, and then when some retaliate in ways they don’t like, they whine and call it terrorism. Actions have consequences, and sometimes those actions are made exactly to get that response. Killing unarmed civilians in large numbers is a form of terrorism.

Americans have their brains drilled with the word “Islamic” or “Muslim”, so that they will associate the religion and people with these scumbags who terrorize people using their twisted form of the religion to justify their killing. I just listened to translation of a statement by a French official regarding the killing of some suspects, and the word “Muslim” never came up, they referred to the suspects as “terrorists”. There is a deliberate attempt in the zionist media in the US to cover this using very discriminatory wording against Muslims.

France undeterred, will take in the 30,000 refugees it said it would.

Meanwhile in the world’s greatest democracy, many states are acting like cowards afraid of women and children, and refusing to let them in. How compassionate we are.