Democracy Now! 23 Mar 2016: Belgium has begun three days of mourning after at least 31 people died and over 230 were injured Tuesday in bombings targeting the Brussels Airport and a crowded subway station near the headquarters of the European Union. ISIS took responsibility for the Brussels bombings and claimed more would follow. The bombings took place just days after authorities arrested Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the November Paris attacks that killed 130 people. A massive manhunt is underway for a 24-year-old Belgium man named Najim Laachraoui, who is suspected of being involved in Tuesday’s attack as well as the Paris bombings. Over the past decade, hundreds of young Belgian men have left their home to fight with ISIS and other militant groups in the Middle East. We speak about the Brussels attack to Frank Barat in Brussels, journalist Joshua Hersh and Yasser Louati of the the Collective Against Islamophobia in France.
... Democracy Now!: Frank, one of the points that you’ve made is that you believe that a lot of the radicalization of Muslim youth in Belgium is occurring not through the mosques or through trips to Syria, but through stints in prisons in Belgium. Could you talk about that?
FRANK BARAT: I mean, it’s—I don’t want to generalize, of course, and it’s a mix, a mixture of a lot of things. But if you see—I mean, when I was talking about jails and prison, it’s—the people that did the attacks in Paris, Coulibaly and the two brothers, had spent years in jail, together, actually, in the same jail. They met there. They were radicalized through jail and radicalized also through the people they met—that they met in jail, including a radical Islamist preacher. But it’s a mixture of things. But what we see—and the families have often talked about it—is that they were—you know, they came to jail as maybe small-time delinquents, and they came out completely transformed and radicalized. So sometimes this happened in a couple of years. The family just couldn’t sort of recognize their sons after that. So it’s—obviously, there’s a lot more to it than this, and, you know, radical Islam is also a factor. But we’re talking about sort of a disenfranchised youth in Paris and in Brussels, that is therefore left opened to being led into such a such path by people that actually maybe offer them something that they have never been offered before by sort of society and their peers.
Democracy Now!: Frank Barat, you are coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine—that’s Bertrand Russell—and president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. Can you talk about what political ideology is espoused by these young men and what you think is important to bring out?
FRANK BARAT: I mean, what’s important to bring out, I mean, in a way, we have to look at it—we’ve got two options, right? We either continue the status quo, we continue and we follow what sort of our so-called leaders are saying this morning and have been saying for—since even before, but since September the 11th—you know, those people hate our freedoms, they hate our culture, they do not like life the way we do, and they are waiting to go to paradise to meet whatever how many virgins—so we either do this and continue the sort an-eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth war and more sort of revenge-type of things that have led to nothing but more terrorism on the ground—I mean, the end of al-Qaeda and the killing of bin Laden was celebrated, but it only created something even more powerful in ISIS—so, we either do this and we follow sort of a maybe Fox News analogy or Donald Trump analogy, or we decide to stop and start to ask the tough questions and the questions that need to be answered.
We need to—I mean, as an example, in Norway, a country, actually, that most Trump supporters probably don’t know exist, we—after the attacks of Anders Breivik in 2011, which killed more than 70 people, the prime minister of Norway said that Norway’s response to terror would be more openness, greater political participation and more democracy. It’s words we don’t hear nowadays. You know, there’s been—the prime minister of Belgium has announced more security in the streets, more security at airports. So it’s either, you know, they don’t want to look at the real problem, and they don’t want to face their role in it and their responsibility in it, or they’re simply lying. So now the civil society has to be clear that we need answers from them.
... Democracy Now!: Frank, one of the points that you’ve made is that you believe that a lot of the radicalization of Muslim youth in Belgium is occurring not through the mosques or through trips to Syria, but through stints in prisons in Belgium. Could you talk about that?
FRANK BARAT: I mean, it’s—I don’t want to generalize, of course, and it’s a mix, a mixture of a lot of things. But if you see—I mean, when I was talking about jails and prison, it’s—the people that did the attacks in Paris, Coulibaly and the two brothers, had spent years in jail, together, actually, in the same jail. They met there. They were radicalized through jail and radicalized also through the people they met—that they met in jail, including a radical Islamist preacher. But it’s a mixture of things. But what we see—and the families have often talked about it—is that they were—you know, they came to jail as maybe small-time delinquents, and they came out completely transformed and radicalized. So sometimes this happened in a couple of years. The family just couldn’t sort of recognize their sons after that. So it’s—obviously, there’s a lot more to it than this, and, you know, radical Islam is also a factor. But we’re talking about sort of a disenfranchised youth in Paris and in Brussels, that is therefore left opened to being led into such a such path by people that actually maybe offer them something that they have never been offered before by sort of society and their peers.
Democracy Now!: Frank Barat, you are coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine—that’s Bertrand Russell—and president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. Can you talk about what political ideology is espoused by these young men and what you think is important to bring out?
FRANK BARAT: I mean, what’s important to bring out, I mean, in a way, we have to look at it—we’ve got two options, right? We either continue the status quo, we continue and we follow what sort of our so-called leaders are saying this morning and have been saying for—since even before, but since September the 11th—you know, those people hate our freedoms, they hate our culture, they do not like life the way we do, and they are waiting to go to paradise to meet whatever how many virgins—so we either do this and continue the sort an-eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth war and more sort of revenge-type of things that have led to nothing but more terrorism on the ground—I mean, the end of al-Qaeda and the killing of bin Laden was celebrated, but it only created something even more powerful in ISIS—so, we either do this and we follow sort of a maybe Fox News analogy or Donald Trump analogy, or we decide to stop and start to ask the tough questions and the questions that need to be answered.
We need to—I mean, as an example, in Norway, a country, actually, that most Trump supporters probably don’t know exist, we—after the attacks of Anders Breivik in 2011, which killed more than 70 people, the prime minister of Norway said that Norway’s response to terror would be more openness, greater political participation and more democracy. It’s words we don’t hear nowadays. You know, there’s been—the prime minister of Belgium has announced more security in the streets, more security at airports. So it’s either, you know, they don’t want to look at the real problem, and they don’t want to face their role in it and their responsibility in it, or they’re simply lying. So now the civil society has to be clear that we need answers from them.
And we need to look—I mean, those young Muslims and others, actually, that were radicalized, it didn’t come out of nowhere, right? It came out of radicalization through what’s happening in Syria, which is actually key to understand the creation of ISIS. Syria and what’s happened in Syria in the last few years is a betrayal, a total betrayal, in part of the Western world. You know, people rising to fight its oppressor and the West sort of turning its back on them, allowing slaughter, this created so much anger, so much rancor. And when you put this on top of the failure of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism, when you put this on top the sort of ambitions of the West in terms of oil, in terms of trade routes and in terms of supporting dictators and Israel, you know, it creates a powerful and very dangerous mixture that then manifests in the form of ISIS or al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organizations. So we have to ask the tough questions. And we need answers.
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