Anti-Islam protest banned

Back in March I mentioned the planned anti-Islam demonstration organised by the group Stop the Islamisation of Europe (Sioe), due to be held on September 11th, in Brussels. Now, I read that the mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, has banned the demonstration, on the grounds, first, of public safety, and second, that it might upset Muslims living in Brussels.

As to the first point: I find it unlikely that the protesters would be the ones causing the trouble. After all, the people at Sioe have taken all steps to cooperate with the authorities, and it would greatly undermine the message they are trying to send for the thing to degenerate into a riot. The Belgian magazine Expatica says that "Thielemans fears the event could lead to incidents between the protestors and the local ethnic population". In other words, he fears that offended Muslims could get violent, something that they have indeed been known to do, on occasion. This first reason for objecting to the march would, therefore, seem to flow directly from the second reason for preventing it: Muslim anger.

Obviously, as mayor of Brussels, Thielemans has a duty to prevent a riot taking place. But it seems to me that that could easily be prevented by sensible policing, keeping the Sioe demonstrators and any Islamic or leftist thugs that might show up well apart from each other. If the Brussels police have even a modicum of competence, this should not prove impossible. And they would seem to have some experience of managing protests: each year the authorities in Brussels receive between five and six hundred requests to hold protests, and in the past five years just six of these have been banned.

However, it is quite clear that only the second argument made by Thielemans actually motivated his decision. While he must know that the threat of violence could easily be contained, he genuinely does fear angering the Muslims. And with good reason. As Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang movement has pointed out, Muslims have votes. And in Brussels, they have even greater influence than they do in Britain. Paul Belien at the Brussels Journal has written that 22% of municipal councillors in the Belgian capital are non-European immigrants. A substantial number of these are Muslims, and the overwhelming majority of these are, like Thielemans, socialists. With Belgium, and Brussels as a whole, this far down the road to Islamification, Thielemans was faced with a choice: do the decent thing and allow the march to go ahead, and then kiss his career goodnight, or ban the march, play the dhimmi, but keep the Muslims onside. Unsurprisingly, being a socialist politician, he chose to sell out Western civilisation, and keep his place on the gravy train.

However, despite Thieleman's disgraceful actions, there is one big positive point that can be extracted from all this: the Muslims and their leftist allies are scared. They are scared that the people of Europe are beginning to see the destruction that is being wrought on our countries by the left-Islamic axis, and they are scared that the people of Europe are going to do something about it. This is what lies behind the ban on this rally, and the various other attacks made on those who have challenged the Islamification of Europe (such as the repeated prosecutions of Nick Griffin, for doing nothing more than telling the truth about Islam). The traitors and little Vichyists are scared. And so they should be.