Violent clashes took place in Belgium after the Morocco-Belgium football match during the World Cup in Qatar.
Riots took place in Brussels, Antwerp and Liege, where a police station was attacked by about 50 “youths”, and also in several cities in the Netherlands. Beyond these incidents, the popular jubilation in the predominantly Moroccan neighborhoods of Brussels, especially in Molenbeek, revealed that in these areas, the Moroccan identity has remained much stronger than the Belgian one, even though most of the inhabitants have dual nationality.
{snip}
For many native Belgians, this spectacle broke the myth of integration into the host country, perhaps because the celebrations may have seemed excessive and even indecent for Belgium, which has allowed these Moroccans to live in a prosperous country and to benefit from the advantages of the welfare state.
The television channels did not show images of a man taking down a Belgian flag from a building to the applause of the crowd, nor a striking face-to-face between hundreds of Moroccans dancing and singing just a stone’s throw from the Grand-Place in Brussels, blocked by a cordon of police officers, helmeted and baton-wielding, blocking them from access to the city center.
According to Statbel, the official Belgian statistics office, 46% of the population of Brussels is now of non-European origin (in the sense of the European Union plus the United Kingdom) and only 24% of Belgian origin. Moroccans represent 7% of the population of Belgium, but 12% in the Brussels-Capital Region, most of whom also hold Belgian nationality. The growth in the number of Moroccans in Belgium has been exponential: only 460 in 1961; 39,000 in 1970, and 800,000 forty years later; a large number for a country of only 11 million. As a result of this demographic evolution and the ease of acquiring Belgian nationality (in some instances after three years of residence without any other conditions), the country now has 26 regional or federal deputies of Moroccan origin and several mayors, who often encourage communitarianism, or “belonging to one’s community.”
{snip}
While the slaughter of animals without first stunning them is forbidden in Flanders and Wallonia, the Muslim lobby in the Brussels Parliament has succeeded in blocking a legislative proposal in that direction. During trials or elections, it is common to see women arriving with their husbands, and explaining that they cannot be retained as jurors or assessors because they do not speak any of Belgium’s official languages, thus attesting to a completely failed policy of integration. The “vivre ensemble” (“live together”) praised by the Belgian political world is a myth, with communities living side by side but not mixing with each other. Moroccans marry Moroccan women and Turks marry Turkish women, whom they often bring over from their native country. Family reunification is now the primary source of immigration in Belgium, as in France.
{snip}
