BELGIAN MAYOR HOLDS RESPONSIBILITY FOR TURNING MOLENBEEK INTO JIHADIST ENCLAVE

Gatestone Institute wrote about a former Brussels mayor who has to shoulder some blame for enabling the Molenbeek district to become a haven for jihadists:

Testimonials to a city in fear. Much of the responsibility for this apparently rests with Philippe Moureaux, member of the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste), who was mayor of Molenbeek from 1992 until 2012. Confronted with the complaints of his citizens, he regularly denied the unsustainable conditions in his town: "It makes me angry when people pick out tiny details and lie about them," he said in the quoted report. Molenbeek is "not the Bronx;" the problems with criminality only concern a small number of streets, said Moureaux.

Then Moureaux showed his true colors: "Molenbeek is a symbol that certain people want to destroy. But only over my dead body." Certain people? Does the mayor actually believe in a conspiracy against his district of misery? One does not have to search for long to realize that Moureaux, on whose initiative Belgium passed an "anti-racism law" in 1981, is an anti-Semite -- not exactly common even in Belgium. At the same time, he downplays and supports the violence of young Muslims -- also against Jews.

There was heavy rioting in 2009 during Ramadan in Molenbeek. Muslim youths set up barricades made of burning tires, set cars ablaze, threw rocks at firefighters who came to put out fires and, equipped with rocks and crowbars, looted stores. According to unconfirmed reports, the police received the following order: "Do not provoke them, do not search them, do not intervene, even if dozens of them come together, do not issue warnings for harassment, not even if they throw rocks at you."

Jewish shop-owners were also harassed other than at Ramadan. In 2008, the Flemish magazine Dag Allemaal reported on "youths" yelling, "The Jews are our worst enemies," in the streets of Molenbeek. There used be many stores run by Jews on the Rue du Prado and the Chaussée de Grand in Molenbeek, but in 2008, with the exception of one furniture store, they suddenly disappeared. And nobody seemed bothered by this, especially not Mayor Moureaux.

History should record this man as one of Europe's worst allies for the enemies. It's socialists like him who've destroyed what was decent about the continent.