Brussels Mayor Philippe Close and Françoise Schepmans, the mayor of Molenbeek, have issued an order to stop the Flemish Vlaams Belang as well as Wilders from visiting the Brussels neighbourhood, home to the jihadists that carried out the Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks.
“We do not want Mr. Wilders to export his message of racist hatred on the territory of Brussels,” Close said on Thursday.
Speaking at a press conference on Friday with Vlaams Belang party member Filip Dewinter, Wilders said he would appeal against the ban, because he “finds it unacceptable that parts of our cities are not accessible to parliamentarians”.
Dewinter said he had wanted to show Wilders life in “Europe’s capital of jihad”.
Wilders responded to the ban by saying that “the threat of arrest is totally unacceptable”.
By some estimates, Belgium has supplied the highest per capita number of jihadists of any European nation, out of a total population of 11 million that includes fewer than half a million Muslims. Some experts have blamed the partice of Dawa.
On the surface, Dawa, or Muslim outreach, seems to be a benign missionary activity to convert non-Muslims. Legal in Western societies, it is allowed to proceed unchallenged by the media or government.
Dawa generally attracts little attention, except when converts suddenly turn up in the news headlines as deadly jihadists.
“In Western countries, dawa aims both to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and to bring about more extreme views among ex犀利士
isting Muslims. The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with strict sharia,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali noted in her book, The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It.
Western leadership is unconcerned about organisations such as Tablighi Jamaat, iERA and ICNA, according to critics. They are however preoccupied with fighting “hate speech”, “Islamophobia” and “white supremacists”, while ignoring the cultivation of religious hate speech and supremacist attitudes towards non-Muslims.
According to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this cultivation occurs during Dawa, as was evident from the most recent downtown New York terror attack. The terrorist, Sayfullo Saipov, originally from Uzbekistan, was only radicalized after he had moved to the United States.
The mosque he attended in New Jersey had been under surveillance by the NYPD since 2005. A 2016 US-commissioned report said Uzbek nationals were “most likely to radicalize while working as migrants abroad,” according to the US State Department.