Belgium: How Low Can a Low Country Get?

by Bruce Bawer • January 28, 2018 at 5:00 am

French journalist Éric Zemmour facetiously suggested that France should forget about bombing Raqqa and should instead bomb Molenbeek.
Even the New York Times, of all places, ran an exposé about the ineffectiveness of Belgium's anti-terror efforts, pointing up the chronic laxity, buck-passing, and turf-confusions that characterize every level of its government.
Shut up. Zip it. It is a pathetic and cowardly way of responding to reality, but it is, alas, a widespread behavior pattern in Western Europe today – and, at least in certain milieux in poor little Belgium, it has been all but raised to a sacrament.

Riot police guard a road in the Molenbeek district of Brussels, after raids in which several people, including Salah Abdeslam, one of the perpetrators of the November 2015 Paris attacks, were arrested on March 18, 2016. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

In the 15 years that followed the Napoleonic Wars, a messy series of events -- international conferences, great-power land swaps, treaties, riots, military skirmishes, and, finally, a brief revolution -- resulted in a redrawing of borders in the Low Countries and the establishment of a new country called Belgium. Even in the best of times, it was hardly a country, fatally divided into a French-speaking south and a Flemish-speaking north, whose residents had little sense of shared identity. If, when the European Union came along, the Belgians embraced the idea so ardently -- and welcomed the transformation of their own capital into the capital of the EU -- it was largely because they had far less of a sense of nationhood than their Western European neighbors, and felt, or hoped, that the EU would artificially supply something ineffable that their own history and culture had failed to give them.

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Living in Pakistan - A Hell for Non-Muslims

by Rahat John Austin • January 28, 2018 at 4:30 am

In Pakistan, Muslims burn the homes of non-Muslims, burn their places of worship, burn their holy books, even burn their women and children alive -- and there is no law or punishment to prevent this criminal behaviour or to make non-Muslims safe.
Non-Muslim women and children are raped and forcibly converted; this is considered a religious obligation to please "Allah," the god of Islam. These taskmasters see themselves as "Soldiers of Allah". Even if a case of "blasphemy" is not proven against Christians, they still can be killed by an angry mob or while in police custody. Non-Muslims can also easily be sentenced to death by a court: even a single claim by Muslim against a non-Muslim is enough to "prove" him guilty.
Christian leaders and organizations, especially the Pope, have failed to give any hope to persecuted Christians. Providing a press release or sending a note is not enough. The Pope truly needs to come to help his flock, to establish policies to safeguard these persecuted people from the Islamic world.

Asia Bibi and two of her five children, pictured prior to her imprisonment on death row in 2010 for "blasphemy."

According to the official results of Pakistan's 2017 census, as of August 25, 2017, the population of Islamic Republic of Pakistan is 207.74 million.

The country is divided into an overwhelmingly Muslim majority of 96.28%; and the remaining 3.72% are Christian, Bahais, Buddhists, Hindus, Ahmadis, Jains, Kalasha, Parsis and Sikhs, who are identified as non-Muslim minority Pakistanis.

Religious minorities in the territory of present-day Pakistan, at the time of the partition of India in 1947, were almost 23% of Pakistan's population. But instead of their numbers increasing, they have decreased to the current 3.72%. If the Muslim population has grown, why have non-Muslim minorities not grown also?

This 23% represents millions of people; how have they vanished?

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Turkey: No Longer a Friend but Not a Foe

by Amir Taheri • January 28, 2018 at 4:00 am

(Image source: kremlin.ru)

In May 1994, during a trip to Istanbul to address a conference of Turkish women, I asked colleagues whether there were any rising stars in the then obscure firmament of Turkish politics. Their almost unanimous answer was: Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a 40-year-old politician who had won the mayoralty of Istanbul, the nation's most populous city, against all odds.

However, their recommendation came with a caveat: Erdogan had a history of activism within several Islamist associations and political parties, a fact that, Turkish friends believed at the time, limited his prospects in a system founded on a peculiar understanding of secularism.

But, a few days later when we met Erdogan in his office, we found ourselves in the presence of an energetic reformer more interested in pragmatic concepts than ideological shibboleths.

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