Belgium: Abou Jahjah to create a political party

Readers of this blog are familiar with Dyab Abou Jahjah:

"I have only one phrase to all the Zionists invaders in Palestine: La valise ou le cercueil (either the suitcase or the coffin)."

Via The Algemeiner: Europe’s Rising Islam-Based Political Parties by Abigail R. Esman  

Abou Jahjah

(...) But it was Denk’s success, above all, that inspired Lebanese-Belgian activist Dyab Abou Jahjah to establish his newest political effort: a party (to date, unnamed) aimed at “Making Brussels Great Again, a la Bernie Sanders,” according to an interview in the Belgian newspaper de Morgen. 

This would be a third attempt at political relevance for Jahjah, who first came into the public eye in 2002 as the founder of the Brussels-based Arab-European League, a pan-European political group that aimed to create what he called a Europe-wide “sharocracy” — a sharia-based democracy.  

In 2003, the AEL organized a political party, RESIST, to run in the Brussels elections; it received a mere 10,000 votes. Now, Jahjah, who also runs an activist group called Movement X, hopes to run in Brussels’ 2018 elections. While his party has yet to declare a platform, his anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and anti-European rants on Facebook and elsewhere give an indication of his plans. So, too, did a recent blog post in which he wrote: “we must defeat the forces of supremacy, the forces of sustained privileges, and the forces of the status-quo. We must defeat them in every possible arena.”  

And he is not alone. Days after Denk’s win, fellow Belgian Ahmet Koç announced his own initiative, the details of which are also yet to be determined. But some things are easy enough to predict on the basis of his past: the Turkish-Belgian politician was thrown out of Belgium’s socialist party in 2016 for supporting Erdogan’s efforts to censor Europeans who insulted him publicly. He also called for Belgian Turks to rise up against the “traitors” of the 2016 coup.  

Both Koç and Jahjah will have to reckon with the ISLAM party, which has already established itself in the Brussels area. Founded in 2012, ISLAM–  which is as an acronym for “Integrité, Solidarité, Liberté, Authenticité, Moralité” — is unapologetically religious. Its leaders pride themselves on following the koran, not party politics. With branches already in place in the Brussels districts of Anderlecht, Molenbeek (the center of Belgian radicalism) and Luik, the party now plans to expand throughout the Brussels region. 

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