Since 6 May 2024, activists have been occupying a building at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In their press release, they shamefully claim to have taken this decision “after more than 7 months of genocide and 76 years of an uninterrupted Nakba”, without a word, of course, for the pogrom of 7 October.
It took just two days for the co-president of the Union des Étudiants Juifs de Belgique (UEJB), Gad Deshayes, to be hit in the face and stomach by an activist who then tried to strangle him, and for two students who had the nerve to pass by with an Israeli flag to be attacked to the sound of “Zionists, fascists, you’re the terrorists!”
The Belgian political class is perhaps more characterised than any other in Europe by its denial of what is currently happening in the Middle East. This has been particularly true since the pogrom of 7 October, which seems to have moved people far less than Israel’s response. In recent weeks, there has been one appalling and revolting comment after another:
Since the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October, the conflict has been raging once again in the Middle East, while its inevitable import is causing considerable damage in Europe and Belgium in particular, not least because of a worrying resurgence of anti-Semitic acts. Physical and verbal attacks, tags, publications and other visuals comparing Israel with Nazi Germany… The list of manifestations of hatred towards the Jewish community is long, so much so that Jewish schools and places of worship are under tighter control throughout Belgium, particularly in Brussels and Antwerp.
Young people are particularly affected by this conflagration. It was therefore essential to provide schools as soon as possible with a distanced look at the tragic events currently unfolding in Israel and the Gaza Strip.
The French Ministry of Education therefore undertook to provide a teaching aid on this subject as soon as possible. The fact sheet was finally published after four long weeks. And its content is disappointing, to say the least. A look back at a difficult birth.
For several years – some witnesses say more than 15 years – Muslim students have been praying every day in part of the library of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). A practice that has become so commonplace that they have even stored a few boxes of equipment there: prayer mats, veils, laminated texts of invocations to recite. And the statue that decorates the room is permanently covered with a sheet. But ever since the facts came to light in the press, thanks to the anonymous testimony of a member of staff, the question has come up again and again: “So what’s the problem?” So, I’m going to try and answer it.
Solidaris is the name of the socialist mutual societies in Belgium. A venerable institution, it was founded in 1869 as a cooperative and mutual aid fund in Fayt-lez-Manage, Wallonia. Since then, the Mutualités Socialistes have grown considerably, with a grassroots presence in Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels, working “on a daily basis to humanise change and reinvent a model of society that is inclusive, emancipating and sustainable”.
Every year since 1998, Solidaris has been organising a festival in Namur that brings together “a family audience where all generations come together around the same desire for togetherness, social justice and the fight against inequality”.
Imam Mohamed Toujgani is affiliated to the Council of Theologians of Belgium, a very opaque organisation, close to the Executive of Muslims of Belgium (EMB). The other Muslim organisations in Belgium accuse the members of this executive of being co-opted in a “nepotistic manner”. Its board is currently chaired by Imam Tahar Toujgani, Mohamed’s cousin, who is also head of the European Council of Moroccan Ulemas.
The imam of the famous al-Khalil mosque in Molenbeek, Mohamed Toujgani, is now banned from Belgium for 10 years. He was on holiday in Morocco when the official announcement was made that he was not allowed to return to Belgium.
The local press widely reported the tug of war between him and the Belgian Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Sammy Mahdi, who initiated the procedure for banning the Molenbeek imam, following a report by the Belgian State Security Service describing him as “a danger to national security”.
The issue of the organisation of Muslim worship in Europe is not new. It is linked to many aspects, including cultural, national and linguistic ones. Since the end of the 1980s, public authorities in several European countries have been urging Muslim leaders to manage their faith. But the institutions designed to organise the Muslim faith remain unstable and unrepresentative.
This report by the Belgian State Security Service was drawn up in the context of the “Ihsane Haouach affair”, named after this veiled community activist who was appointed government commissioner at the Institute for the Equality of Men and Women last May and then forced to resign a few weeks later following the revelation of her “close contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood”.
The report criticises the entryism practised by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to “influence public debate and policy-making (governmental or local)” and warns against the Muslim Brotherhood’s “doctrine of concealment” “by which they allow themselves a certain flexibility with regard to certain orthodox Islamic prescriptions, adapt their discourse to their audience, and conceal their true intentions and convictions”.
He concludes that the Muslim Brotherhood “cultivates a public image of well-integrated, moderate and (relatively) progressive European Muslims”, but “aims in the long term at the progressive Islamisation of European society in all its components”.
