Re: Hey, how would you like it if I came to Bruxelles, crammed my ten of my friends and I into a one bedroom apt. near the Grand Place, and then peed up your streets, took jobs away from Belgians, shot guns into the air on the 4th of July and...
David Rennie has been the Europe Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph since January 2005. He was previously posted to Sydney, Beijing and Washington DC. He lives in Brussels with his wife and two young children.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
In praise of muddling through
Posted at: 16:07
In case there was any doubt that I live in a multi-cultural part of Brussels, the local council has just put out large metal containers, on selected street corners. They are to accept the heads and skins of the thousands of sheep that my neighbours are expected to slaughter over the four day Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice.
The containers are empty for the moment, which is a relief to the hard-pressed binmen of Brussels, who are still picking up thousands of dead Christmas trees, which my Christian neighbours were invited to place on the pavements after Jan 6, and the Feast of the Epiphany.
There has been a lot of harsh comment directed at multiculturalism in recent years. Critics call it a fake policy, that ducks all the really tough questions about how to integrate millions of immigrants into Europe's urban centres.
I have reported for The Daily Telegraph on the failures of multiculturalism in places like Holland, where I covered the murder trial of the young Muslim who slaughtered Theo van Gogh, a polemical film-maker, in broad daylight.
In interview after interview, Dutch policemen, intelligence agents, politicians and ordinary Muslim residents said that Holland had been fooling itself for years. Its proud invention of multiculturalism really amounted to just throwing welfare payments and good intentions at the problem, then looking away. In the process, that meant turning a blind eye to the rise of radical Islam.
Who am I to disagree with people who have lived through all that? And yet, something in me clings to the idea that muddling through is not such a bad response to some of life's toughest questions.
And that brings me back to the sheep bins on my street corner. They have been coming under fire from several directions in the last few days, as a blatant incitement to break the law, and impose terrible suffering on animals.
There is logic behind the complaints. Given that slaughtering animals in a private home is strictly illegal in Belgium, what is my local council doing putting bins out, which are clearly there to receive the remains of home sacrifices?
There have been formal complaints lodged by Gaia, a Belgian animal rights group. In a related development, the mayor of one Flemish town, Saint-Trond attacked a memo issued by public prosecutors, advising police to collect a fixed fine from anyone caught sacrificing a sheep. These are illegal acts, said the mayor, Ludwig Vandenhove. Fixed fines sound more like fees, and a tacit green light, he complained.
The Belgian newspaper "Le Soir" yesterday interviewed the man in ultimate charge of my bins, the splendid-sounding Emir Kir[*], secretary of state for public hygiene of the Brussels capital region. Mr Kir described this year's Eid al-Adha as a marked improvement over last year.
Today, nearly 3,000 people have booked appointments to bring their sheep to municipal and regional abattoirs, where specially trained staff and imams are on hand to help them kill their animals in accordance with Islamic law, but quickly and cleanly too. That is still a minority of the 15,000 to 17,000 sheep that are expected to be killed in Brussels, a city of some 175,000 Muslim residents. But it's more than double the number killed legally last year.
What about those bins, Mr Kir was asked. Are they not an incitement to illegal acts? Yes, was the essense of his reply. But you wouldn't like the state of the streets tomorrow if they were not there.
"Our philosophy," he told the paper, "is to push people towards move away from doing this the illegal way. 2006 has seen us take a giant leap forwards in the management of the sacrifices, and you have to give the Muslim community a bit of time."
A Brussels communal official, quoted anonymously in "Le Soir", was more blunt in his defence of the sheep bins. "The carcasses have to be taken away somehow, and I'm not about to put them in my car," he said.
And here is my grand conclusion, after reading all the Belgian media coverage. I haven't got a grand conclusion, and I'm a bit wary of anyone who does.
Here are some smaller conclusions. Gaia and other groups have every right to accuse the authorities of double standards, and turning a blind eye to what is, by any name, animal suffering.
The same goes for the mayor of Saint-Trond, who is of course right that the law is there to be enforced.
Belgium could ban sheep slaughter tomorrow, and send police squads to kick down doors in support of that ban. The authorities could demand that 175,000 Brussels Muslims follow the customs of their new home. After all, in some of the Muslim world, like Saudi Arabia, you would be in similar trouble if you showed off a Christmas tree.
There's logic to all of it. But I cannot shake the sense that some battles are less worth fighting than others.
I have reported from 29 different countries over the years, and most of them faced immigrant issues of some sort. I have not yet visited a single country that has got their approach exactly right. Belgium has bred its fair share of terrorists, including - just before Christmas - Europe's first white female suicide bomber, who blew herself in Iraq after converting to radical Islam.
That kind of radical Islam, and all the poisonous mess of anti-Semitism and paranoia that goes with it, must be tackled head on, and fought.
But sheep-killing at home? It sounds horrible. I guess it has to stop, sooner or later. But as long as every year the number of Muslims who bring their sheep to a legal abattoir carries on doubling, more or less, then Mr Kir's slow, pragmatic approach appeals to me more than the alternatives.
telegraph.co.uk
[*] BELGIAN TURKISH DEPUTY APPOINTED STATE MINISTER
Emir Kir, a dual Turkish-Belgian citizen, yesterday was appointed a state minister in the Belgian government. Kir won a seat in the Belgian Parliament in last month’s regional elections running from the country’s Socialist Party. /Sabah/
byegm.gov.tr
Of course, we've got our own brand of Judeofascist grousers --clue:
Meet the Mayor of Brussels: She's a Muslim
From the desk of Paul Belien on Mon, 2006-01-16 00:33
Faouzia Hariche (38) is the acting mayor (or “bourgmestre” – burgomaster, from the Dutch burgemeester) of Brussels, the capital of Belgium and of the European Union. Ms Hariche was born in Algeria in 1967. She moved to Belgium when she was seven years old. Though Brussels was historically a Dutch-speaking city and is also considered to be the capital of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium, the city was forcibly “frenchified” after the establishment of Belgium in 1830 by French radicals who used French-speaking Wallonia, Belgium’s southern half, as a power base to conquer Flanders.
Since 1830 the Dutch character of Brussels has been deliberately eradicated, although the mayors of the city have usually been bilingual, speaking French as well as Dutch. Ms Hariche, who replaces Freddy Thielemans whilst he is on sick leave, is bilingual too, speaking French and Arabic but no Dutch.
[...]
brusselsjournal.com |
