Taroudant - Yves Goldstein, Secretary of the Government for the Brussels-Capital Region and the Board of the Common Community Commission (COCOM), said that government officials are to blame for the radicalization of Muslim youth in Belgium.
Taroudant – Yves Goldstein, Secretary of the Government for the Brussels-Capital Region and the Board of the Common Community Commission (COCOM), said that government officials are to blame for the radicalization of Muslim youth in Belgium.
According to the New York Times, the Belgian official said that the roots of radicalized Muslims in Belgian is not due to Islam, but rather the policies of the Belgian government.
“The problem is not Islam,” Goldstein said, insisting that allowing some ethnic minorities to concentrate in ghettos with negligence on the part of the government created good conditions for “breeding anger, crime and radicalism among youth.”
He added that such social conditions help Islamist recruiters to find jihadists among vulnerable youth.
Goldstein said that “in Brussels, everyone lives in the city, and we chose a model of diversity through mixing of populations in the same neighborhoods.”
However, the official admitted that his government “failed in Molenbeek” and Schaerbeek, too, to ensure the mixing of populations.
The Belgian official claimed that 90 percent of Muslim students between the ages of 17 and 18 in the predominantly Muslim districts of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek called the terrorists responsible for the most recent attacks in Brussels heroes.
Goldstein stressed, “We don’t give these young people the keys to think differently, to think outside the little box, the little neighborhood where they live — this ideological box, this closed-eyes box.”
He added that young people whose parents or grandparents were immigrants face serious questions of identity.
For the young Belgian official, the solution is “to fight racism and discrimination with the same force” as radicalization.
