In a piece entitled "The Arabian Panther", Salon takes a look at the Belgian-based Arab European League and its "charismatic" leader, Dyab Abou Jahjah (via LGF: subscription required):
Shortly after 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in December, a young man named Ahmed Azzuz marched into a Belgian television station, burst onto the set of the evening news and, standing beside the startled anchorwoman and directly before the cameras, unfurled the red, black, green and white flag of Palestine. "Stop the hypocrisy!" he demanded in Dutch as news crews scrambled behind the scenes to regain control. It was the 16th anniversary of the first intifada, and Azzuz had a message: "Israel must vanish," he said, his voice calm and even. "The killings of Palestinians must cease."When he had finished speaking, he calmly thanked the audience, rolled up his flag, and walked away. The whole episode took less than two minutes. Police were called, but lacking sufficient grounds for his arrest, he says, they simply gave him a ride home.
Azzuz is a founder and the Belgian president of the Arab European League, or AEL, an outspoken self-styled civil rights movement with a growing membership -- and growing influence -- in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and beyond. Combining Arab nationalism with impassioned Islamism, it positions itself as an uncompromising defender of European Muslims, eschewing assimilation and espousing confrontational political ideas such as the introduction of sharia law in Europe. It has warned of -- or threatened -- an "almost unpreventable" attack on Antwerp's Jewish community if it does not "cancel its support for Jewish policy as fast as possible and distance itself from the state of Israel." (Azzuz's "Stop the hypocrisy" was a reference to those Belgian Jews who, he claims, join the Israeli army, which he sees as proof that Belgium is biased toward Israel.)
The Arab European League combines Islam with some of the tactics and language of the civil rights movements of the sixties. Updated Malcolm X, in fact, with added intolerance: they've even adopted his "by any means necessary" slogan.
Jahjah and his followers vehemently insist that Middle Eastern immigrants and their children must preserve their own culture and religion; comparing assimilation to "fascism" and "rape," Jahjah demands that the cultural and religious traditions of Middle Eastern immigrants and their children be not just preserved but integrated into the culture of the West. "I'd rather die than assimilate," Jahjah has said.When asked by a Belgian television reporter if terrorism or a revolution were possible in the Lowlands, he offered a curt reply: "With the AEL, it could very well happen."
Jahjah and the AEL burst into the headlines in November 2002, when Moroccan youths (Belgians of Moroccan descent are simply called "Moroccans") looted shops, threw stones, smashed cars and staged a three-day standoff with police after a psychologically disturbed Belgian shot and killed a young Muslim teacher on the streets of Antwerp for no apparent reason. Belgian officials blamed Abou Jahjah. Though Jahjah insisted his only part in the event was trying to calm everybody down, police arrested him after the chaos had subsided and thoroughly searched his home. The AEL called this proof of Belgium's ongoing vendetta against their movement; Belgian lawmakers contended that Jahjah posed a danger to the community of Antwerp. Jahjah was released after an Antwerp court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to hold him.
Either way, the arrest propelled his name and the league's cause into the international arena. To some, he was a celebrity radical, an alluring combination of sex symbol and martyr; the Belgian media frequently called him the "black angel of integration."
That was hardly the first brush with notoriety for the league. In April 2002, enraged by Israel's massive military assault into the West Bank in response to a Palestinian terrorist attack, Moroccans and AEL members smashed the storefronts of Jewish-owned shops, calling for jihad and chanting "Osama bin Laden!" Before the U.S. invaded Iraq a little over a year ago, league members hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails during anti-American demonstrations staged at the Antwerp harbor.
In 2003, almost a year after Pim Fortuyn's assassination, the league opened a Dutch chapter; soon after, Mohammed Cheppih was appointed to head it. But earlier statements from Cheppih supporting suicide bombers in Palestine and the death penalty for homosexuals provoked such an outcry that he was forced to step down. Still, he remains an influential consultant to the league.
Today, behind a motto that is early Malcolm X -- "by any means necessary" -- the Arab European League reports steady growth, with members now in 12 countries. In Holland, it says, membership has surged from 200 in March 2003 to about 1,000 now. A new office has opened in France, and last summer, the league deployed a new political wing, the Muslim Democratic Party, to represent its views in European Parliamentary elections this year.
For its adherents, the AEL offers a united platform and an amplified voice. This is especially true for the second- and third-generation children of immigrants who came here -- primarily from Turkey and Morocco -- as guest workers in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, kids struggling to define their identity in a post-9/11 and increasingly nationalistic Europe. The children and even the grandchildren of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants are still considered "Turkish" or "Moroccan," rather than Dutch or Belgian. To these boys, Jahjah is a role model, a hero; for girls, he is a star. One newspaper quoted a young girl saying to Jahjah's bodyguards outside a talk he gave in Holland: "I just want to see him in the real."
In person and via the league's Web site, Jahjah speaks directly to these disenfranchised youth. He is deeply mistrustful of the Western press, arguing that no matter what he says, he will be misquoted or that his words will be twisted by "the Zionist lobby" in an effort to turn popular opinion against him. Non-Muslim reporters are barred from Jahjah's lectures and speeches, and he pointedly ignored Salon's several attempts to reach him. Other AEL officers rarely speak to non-Muslim members of the press.
However, Jahjah's Belgian lieutenant, Azzuz, agreed to an interview in December, after a series of protests that led to the arrest of 10 league members -- including some who hung the Palestinian flag over the Dutch Parliament building in The Hague and Azzuz's own television caper. Speaking by phone from Antwerp, the 27-year-old Belgian AEL leader, the son of Moroccan immigrants, was cordial but direct. The deaths of 9/11 were "collateral damage" -- a term, he says, that Muslims learned from Americans. "Finally, something had happened to those who kill our women and children," he said of the terror strikes that have reshaped world politics. "But America still blames others. They didn't learn their lesson at all." What lesson is that? "Stop supporting the terrorist state of Israel," Azzuz replied. George Bush "doesn't hold the strings," he says, the Zionists do.
I've been a regular visitor to Antwerp for a number of years now (my wife is from there). Nothing gets the Flemish going as much as the topic of immigration; I've got so used to the complaints about the Moroccans (it's always "the Moroccans") that I've tended to block it out and change the subject, even though the moans have recently become even more anguished. "Nice people", I think, patronisingly, "but what a shame about their racism."
Yesterday my wife met an old school friend, still living in Antwerp: difficult to classify her as the usual bourgeoise scared by change: she hates the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Blok party, and does voluntary work for a Gay Rights group. Her take on Antwerp: there are now whole areas of the city she's scared to go alone, and, yep, it's all down to the Moroccans. My smug dismissal of these people as racist is beginning to look a bit threadbare.
I once had a very bizarre encounter with a woman in a bar in Brussels. She come up to me and bought me a drink (bizarre enough in itself, for me) and, after some general conversation, started up a tirade about how Belgium was being over-run by immigrants, how muslims could never assimilate, how terribly muslim men (an ex-boyfriend included) treated women and so on and so on.
Well, nothing out of the ordinary there, you might think, but not only was this woman herself unquestionably (by her appearance) of north African origin, she was actually wearing a hijab! I made my excuses and left after a couple of drinks, not wanting to find myself in some kind of Fatal Attraction type of situation.
Posted by: Martin Adamson | June 16, 2004 at 02:41 PM