Belgium: Brussels Jewish Museum shooting was the first terror attack by the Islamic State in Europe

Paco Cantero and Ana Pouvreau wrote an article @ Causeur, about the terrorist attacks carried out in Brussels and wonder who had really understood what had been simmering in "Molenbeekistan" (a reference to Molenbeek, a Brussels district known to have become an Islamic terrorist hub).

The authors make the interesting, but generally neglected point, that the Jewish Museum shooting was the first attack by the Islamic State in Europe and "the first anti-Jewish attack in Brussels since the Second World War", as noted by Maurice Sosnowski, the then president of the Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium.

Mehdi Nemmouche at the Museum

They state that the attack perpetrated at the Jewish Museum by French islamist Mehdi Nemmouche in 2014, which left four dead, should have prompted the Belgian people to come out of their lethargy and the political authorities to take appropriate measures to avoir further bloodshed.

What is in no doubt, they argue, is that for many Belgians the attack had targeted a particular community and as such they saw no reason to be unduly concerned.

As in France, where the shooting at the Jewish school Ozar HaTorah-Toulouse, three children and a father were killed by Mohamed Merah in 2012, was the harbinger of a descent into hell, the Brussels anti-Semitic attack should have set alarm bells ringing, all the more so because anti-Semitism had been on the rise for several years, and risen markedly since the second intifada.

Like many of the Paris and Brussels terrorists, Mehdi Nemmouche had  links with Molenbeek where he had been living for six weeks on his return from Syria, and it is assumed that he prepared the killings there. And the horror does not stop here. Ex-hostage in Syria, journalist Nicholas Hénin, revealed that Nemmouche ‘tortured prisoners’ and claimed to have raped and killed young mother before beheading her baby.

read the article in French