Belgium
May Make Major Shift Toward Fascism In Wake Of Brussels Terror
Attacks
25
March, 2016
Just
one day after the coordinated attacks in Brussels, the resounding cry
from governments, media, and national security experts is that we
need less freedoms and more security.
As
they did in the wake of the Paris
attacks, countries
across the continent rushed to tighten border security in the
immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s bombings,
which killed at least 34 people, striking the airport and a metro
station.
Meanwhile,
officials and so-called “terrorism
experts”
rushed to place the blame for the attack on Europe’s -
and more specifically Belgium’s -
supposedly lax border policies and restrictive information-sharing
rules.
British
MEP Mike Hookem declared outright
that the Brussels attack “shows
that Schengen free movement and lax border controls are a threat to
our security.”
“Open
borders,” he
added, “are
putting the lives of European citizens at risk.”
“The
European Union needs to reinvent its security
system,”
Washington
Post columnist
David Ignatius. “It
needs to break the stovepipes that prevent sharing information,
enforcing borders and protecting citizens.”
“What
we need is better cooperation, maximum cooperation between European
national intelligence and security services,” Mark
Demesmaeker, a Belgian parliament member of the European
Conservatives, told CNBC. “We
have to unite against this menace,” Demesmaeker
added, referring to the Islamic State (or ISIS),
which claimed responsibility
for the attack.
British
author and journalist Max Hastings put it even more bluntly. “Our
tolerance of electronic surveillance, subject to legal and
parliamentary oversight, seems a small price to pay for some measure
of security against threats that nobody—today of all days—can
doubt are real,” Hastings said in
an address Wednesday at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong
Kong.
In
the United States, this fervor translated into an push for lawmakers
to act quickly on controversial legislation,
that, according to The
Hill, would “create
a national commission to explore” how
the government and law enforcement could access encrypted
communications.
“Lawmakers
and investigators say authorities were likely blind to the plots
because of the secure technology,” The
Hill’s
Cory Bennett reports, “although
the exact role encryption played in each incident remains unknown.”
Rep.
Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) admitted as much in a statement, saying: “We
do not know yet what role, if any, encrypted communications played in
these attacks…But we can be sure that terrorists will continue to
use what they perceive to be the most secure means to plot their
attacks.”
In
a tongue-in-cheek blog
post on
Wednesday, investigative reporter Marcy Wheeler notes that two of the
Brussels attackers were brothers, Khalid and Ibrahim El Bakraoui.
“The El Bakraouis join an increasingly long list of recent terrorists who partner within their nuclear family (the Boston Marathon attack, Charlie Hebdo attack, and Paris attack were all carried out by brothers, and the San Bernardino attack was carried out by spouses),” Wheeler writes.
“Family ties then,” she continues, “may function to provide as much security as any (limited, given the reports) use of encryption.”
“Using [FBI director] Jim Comey, um, logic, we might consider eliminating this threat by eliminating the nuclear family,” Wheeler adds. “Sure, the overwhelming majority of people who use it are law-abiding people obtaining valuable benefit from nuclear family. Sure, for the most vulnerable, family ties provide the most valuable kind of support to keep someone healthy. But bad guys exploit it too, and we can’t have that.”
And
despite the blanket media coverage, there has been little discussion
as to how Western intervention could have motivated the mass
casualties and suicide bombing, as
former CIA member Barry Eisler pointed
out.
Barry Eisler
Things that radicalize people: clerics, sermons, the Internet, Twitter. Things that don’t: drones, invasions, occupations.
- Obviously our freedoms also radicalize people. Hopefully the TV Terrorism Experts are talking about that, too.
- The best, though is self-radicalization. This happens all by itself, like a virgin birth. No connection at all to western policies.
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- Weird, though, how being bombed radicalized us. After 9/11: mass surveillance, kidnapping, torture, gulags, assassinations…all normalized.
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- It makes me wonder whether being continuously bombed and droned might radicalize other people, too? Nah, that’s crazy hippy talk. Forget it.
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- Gonna post this “Martian tries to understand war/terrorism” piece every time TV Terror Experts talk radicalization http://bit.ly/21NIEp1
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- I mean, if instead of “Terrorism Experts,” TV brought on a five-year-old who said, “When people get bombed, they bomb back,” HUGE progress.
Guy
Trouveroy, the Belgian Ambassador to the U.K., is one European
official who is raising concerns over the rush to sacrifice the
continent’s freedoms to the so-called “war on terror.”
“I would say that to transform our countries into police states, I am not sure that would be the right response. Also because if (we do that) then we start antagonizing communities again,” hesaid on CNBC.
“You have to realize that it’s not always to protect every single place where human beings assemble and do you want to change your society to such an extent that you make your life much more difficult,” he said. “By doing so, you’re handing over a fantastic victory to these terrorists.”
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