Why is the Belgian police conducting anti-terrorist raids now? What was the obstacle to conducting them two weeks or two months ago?
Question
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
Why is the Belgian police conducting anti-terrorist raids now? What was the obstacle to conducting them two weeks or two months ago?
Clarissa's Blog 
I suspect that they had new intelligence following the events in Paris, Intelligence agencies cannot monitor everything, but if Their attention is called to something, they can react. I don’t think this is surprising at all.
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Molenbeek is not everything. It should be the #1 place in all of Europe for constant monitoring. Marseilles should be #2.
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Western European governments are reactive (almost all governments are, but WEuropean ones in particular). They seem totally unable to think two steps ahead.
They wait for something to happen and then spend some time looking around for a precedent to try to figure out how to react. Quite pathetic actually.
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I heard that Belgian police are especially crappy and lazy. of course, it’s not like anybody has anything all that great to say about the French law enforcement either.
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The whole Belgian government (many layers, all incompetent) is pretty crappy. There’s no such thing as national pride and so there’s no will to clean up any particular messes.
It’s an artificial construct with no real reason to exist anymore except nobody knows quite how to get out of it (a perfect metaphor for the EU project).
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I’ve always wondered about this, too. You read stuff like ‘even police doesn’t dare to go into these areas’ and you’re like what the fuck.
I’m sure the government will trot out excuses (‘oh, we don’t want to offend their sensibilities’) but I suspect the answer is that they just don’t care. The prevalent attitude to crime in the poorest areas has always been that as long as they remain in their ghetto and kill each other, we’re willing to look the other way.
At least that’s the case in american ghettos. Kill each other, it’s all good. Kill someone in the wrong zip code, there’s hell to pay.
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Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. IT’s laziness, carelessness, and then when something happens, it’s all, “How could we have possibly not known??” It’s ’cause you didn’t want to know, that’s why!
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Yeah, the statements ‘We couldn’t have known’ and ‘This area is too dangerous for us’ are in complete contradiction with each other.
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In addition to the typical inefficiencies that plague every large organization (nepotism, fiefdom-building, etc.), I can think of two reasons why they didn’t act earlier.
Firstly, the sheer number of potential bogeys is too much for the State Security Service’s present capabilities. Most areas of Brussels not named Ixelles look like a worse version of Paris’s peripheral arrondissements. It’s impossible to detect imminent attacks without an NSA-style dragnet that monitors the electronic communications of every single citizen. Furthermore, merely preaching Salafisism is not a crime (and making it one will only push the problem out of sight).
Secondly, every police and SIGINT organization in the world first tries to map out the entire graph of enemy agents. You cannot do this if you imprison their foot-soldiers the minute you suspect something. Letting them roam without suspicion eventually leads you to more important (and dangerous) people, like the ones making suicide vests within Europe, their handlers, recruiters, etc.
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Within reason, you cannot imprison people for bad thoughts. So if no one has done anything, or there is no evidence that they have collected bomb-making materials, what exactly is the basis for a raid?
(1) The US is crossing the line into the world of thought police. That’s a world in which politically incorrect thought gets a jail sentence. Or deported. It’s plausible that in 2017, someone like Cruz or Trump will be defining political correctness.
We already have a “past practice” of deporting citizens who voice non-pc opinions. That started in the Civil War but we’ve deported Hispanics who are American citizens as well. INS doesn’t check the papers until they are out of the country, if at all. The cost of getting back into the US is born by the victim. Pull the trigger first, then aim the gun.
There is no evidence that arresting people for impure thought makes anyone safer.
(2) The Europeans appear to place a higher value on civil liberties that the US does. I’m not going to criticize them for that.
(3) The Israelis have a top notch intelligence and security service — and cannot prevent terrorist attacks. The latest was just a couple of days ago.
Belgium public safety officials have been humiliated by this mess, and they will take actions to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again. By the way, that’s exactly the way that American police think. Of course, the next attack will come in a different way, so what they do now won’t make anyone safer. It will just force terrorists to be more creative. The next attack may be coordinated through Italy, Germany, Ireland or Switzerland (or someplace else). It is fair to say that there will be another attack, and Belgium is not a required design element.
So the point of Belgium-bashing is what, exactly?
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That tiny post consisting of two short questions is bashing? In that case, “what’s your name and DOB?” is an outright assault.
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