A piece in The New York Times (April 7, 2016), about Muslims in Brussels, reported the views of city official Yves Goldstein. The original text is offered (in blockquotes), with interpolated suggested edits (not blockquoted), by way of a taking-to-task rewrite:
BRUSSELS — Yves Goldstein makes no excuses for Belgium’s failure to find Salah Abdeslam and the other Islamic State recruits who attacked Paris and then bombed Brussels Airport and a subway station.
Yves Goldstein is in no mood to make excuses for the Muslims in Molenbeek and Schaerbeek, among whom Salah Abdeslam and other Islamic State recruits were able to hide for months before, between, and after their Paris and Brussels attacks.
The problem is not Islam, he insists, but the negligence of government officials like himself in allowing self-contained ethnic ghettos to grow unchallenged, breeding anger, crime and radicalism among youth — a soup of grievances that suits Islamist recruiters.
The problem is Islam, he insists, or more exactly, in the immutable texts of Islam and the negligence of government officials in not taking those texts seriously. Goldstein has thus broken ranks with most of Europe’s officialdom, with its bizarre and panicky insistence, after every terrorist attack by Muslims, that “it had nothing to do with Islam.” And he claims that the inability, or rather refusal, of Muslims to integrate into the larger non-Muslim societies, despite the endless efforts made by European states to provide every possible benefit, including the health, education, housing, and other benefits lavished on Muslim migrants, stands in sharp contrast to the ability, and desire, of non-Muslim immigrants – Chinese, Hindus, Vietnamese, Bolivian Indians, sub-Saharan Christians, Filipinos – to integrate into the larger secular society.
Friends who teach the equivalent of high school seniors in the predominantly Muslim districts of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek told him that “90 percent of their students, 17, 18 years old, called them heroes,” he said.
Mr. Goldstein, 38, grew up in Schaerbeek, the child of Jewish refugees from Nazism. Now a councilman from Schaerbeek, he is also chief of staff for the minister-president of the Brussels Capital Region.
But “we failed,” he said. “We failed in Molenbeek” and Schaerbeek, too, to ensure the mixing of populations.
Mr. Goldstein describes this situation as “intolerable” and “unacceptable,” and finds “terrifying” the reports that 90 percent of the Muslim high school seniors in Molenbeek and Schaerbeek described the Brussels attackers as “heroes.”
“I never thought I’d see such a recrudescence of antisemitism in Europe as we are now witnessing in the Muslim neighborhoods, and not only in Brussels and Paris,” says Mr. Goldstein, the child of Jewish refugees from Nazism.
“Obviously there has been a failure,” he said. “We failed in Molenbeek” and Schaerbeek, too, to prevent, in our own country, the inculcation of hatred toward us as Infidels. We failed to understand the ideology of Islam. We accepted the sanitized version, presented to us by taqiyya-masters, and parroted by non-Muslims terrified of the truth. But we all see how impossible it is to overcome the determination of Muslims not to integrate into the larger society. We failed to realize how deeply hostile the Muslims in Molenbeek – and Schaerbeek, too – are to us, the Belgians, who have bent over backwards to make them as welcome as all other immigrants in this country. It may be that this is a problem without a solution, and we will have to rethink our entire immigration policy. Remember the old adage — Gouverner c’est prevoir – “to govern is to foresee.” We’ve got enough evidence now, from everything we’ve already endured, to allow ourselves to foresee what’s to come with the Muslims in our midst. And to govern accordingly. So what’s keeping us?
“We have neighborhoods where people only see the same people, go to school with the same people,” he said. “What connection do they have with the whole society, what connection do they have with real diversity? It’s the establishment of the ghetto,” he said, “and it’s the thing in our urban development that we have to tackle.”
It will be hard, and I’m beginning to think impossible, for the Muslims of Molenbeek to ignore those verses in the Qur’an telling them that they should “not take Jews and Christians as friends.” The result is there for all to see: they have established their own ghettoes, where they flout the authority of the Belgian state, and even try to impose the laws of Shari’a on themselves and their fellow Muslims.
Jews have left Schaerbeek, and the last two synagogues are being sold. Instead, there is a kind of suffocating, insular, ethnic uniformity. “These young people will never go to museums until 18 or 20 — they never saw Chagall, they never saw Dalí, they never saw Warhol, they don’t know what it is to dream,” Mr. Goldstein said.
The Muslims in Belgium, Goldstein said, choose to live among other Muslims in neighborhoods they have rendered increasingly hostile to non-Muslims. They may live in Brussels and the West, but remain closed to that same West. “They have no interest in the art, or music, or any of the cultural artifacts of our secular civilization,” he notes. “We hold little interest for them; we are simply the temporary possessors of land that is part of Dar al-Harb,” Goldstein says sadly. “They regard Belgium, as a place where for now Infidels still rule but which, inevitably, they will win through demographic conquest. They are confident that Islam will come to dominate, and Muslims to rule. Have we done anything to lead them to think otherwise?”
Of course there is poverty and unemployment, he said. “But we don’t give these young people the keys to think differently, to think outside the little box, the little neighborhood where they live — this ideological box, this closed-eyes box.”
The levels of poverty and unemployment – and crime, too – of Muslim migrants far surpass those not only of the non-Muslim natives, but also those of all other non-Muslim migrants. And this situation, Goldstein said, obtains in every European country. It is impossible not to think that the ideology of Islam surely must explain the economic underperformance of Muslims.
As for the terrorists, “religion for them is a pretext,” he said. “They believe in nothing. But Islam is the way they find to express, to crystallize their radicalization.”
As for the terrorists, religion for them is a text they follow, or rather, a series of texts – Qur’an, Hadith, Sira – and not an independent moral code. They believe in nothing but Islam. From the rules that regulate their daily lives, to a Complete Explanation of the Universe, Islamic texts represent the first and last authority on everything.
Young people whose parents or grandparents were immigrants face serious questions of identity, Mr. Goldstein acknowledged, speaking during and after a conference here of the German Marshall Fund. “But identity is a two-sided relation” — between young Muslims and ourselves.
“We have to fight racism and discrimination with the same force” as radicalization, he said, because “our society gives to these young people a bad idea of who and what they are.”
Muslims who have been allowed into our countries need to understand that their endless reliance on a false victimization — charges of “racism” when Islam is not a “race” — will no longer work. It is hardly “discrimination” to insist that Muslims must obey the same laws, observe the same rules, as non-Muslims. They have to decide whether to accept the identity of a citizen in a Western secular state that is now available to them, or to cling solely to their Islamic identity, the one that assures them that they are the “best of peoples” and admonishes them not to take “Jews and Christians as friends.” They need to understand that acts have consequences, and that the observable behavior of Muslims, including the terrorist attacks by those who justify themselves by quoting from the Qur’an, naturally has helped to form our view of Muslims and of Islam. How could it not?
And if even I, Yves Goldstein, have managed to believe all this before breakfast…

dumbledoresarmy says
Bravo.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
Remember the old adage — Gouverner c’est prevoir – “to govern is to foresee.”
In other words, “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html
Strangely, this first — and arguably most important — sentence of this speech does not appear in the Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Blood_speech
Angemon says
Brilliant!
Georg says
Brussels is set to have a Muslim majority sometime between 2030-2050. We have seen nothing.
Jay Boo says
“Islamic State recruits were able to hide for months before, between, and after their Paris and Brussels attacks.”
——————————————————–
— NPR / BBC wanted to (know what was wrong) with the —- police.,
They were continually running interference as well trying to get out ahead of the story and the obvious reason it took so long to capture Muslims among fellow Dar al-Harbi’s.
Debi Brand says
“The problem is not Islam, he insists….”
Well, of course the problem is not Islam!
Who would or for what reasons could anyone think, much less believe the problem was Islam?!
It is almost as if “stupid” people believe Muslims actually regard the guidance of their “prophet.”
As spoken of in depth in the following: Salah Abdeallah, “hiding in plain sight”: Citidal a la Ummah
Read more: http://islamexposed.blogspot.com/2016/04/salah-abdeallah-hiding-in-plain-sight.html
dajjal says
I want everyone in Dar al-Harb to become acutely aware of the texts and teachings of Islam which make it inimical to human life and liberty. Towards that end, I uttered and published a blog post outlining Islam’s mercenary mission and violent method. It quotes the most significant ayat, ahadith and shari’ah relevant to the matter. It links to them so that the reader can verify the quotes and check the context. It answers the most common objections.
I believe “what’s Wrong With Islam & Muslims?” to be a vital adjunct to your excellent post explaining why the Ummah succors and shields the most damnable demon spawn on the face of the earth.
To facilitate preservation and sharing, I compiled that post to pdf format and uploaded it to Scribd. Readers can embed it in blog posts, link to it in comments and attach it to emails.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/220586952/What-s-Wrong-With-Islam-Muslims
When we mention the texts & teachings / ideology of Islam, we should include or link to that file to show the world what makes Muslims our existential enemies.
UNCLE VLADDI says
Truly, nobody is more excruciatingly diligent in citing and linking to the official canon of muslim sources than you are, Dajjal! ISLAM DELENDUM EST!
dajjal says
I wish it was!! Will do what I can to make it.
Debi Brand says
Tops, Hugh. tops.
linnte says
Wow! Maybe he read my email to him! I sure am happy to hear this change of mind in Belgium!
mortimer says
Hugh Fitzgerald wrote: “The problem is Islam, he insists, or more exactly, in the immutable texts of Islam and the negligence of government officials in not taking those texts seriously.”
Agree…however, they do not even know that those immutable texts exist. They would not even know the names of the Sira, the hadiths, the canonical commentaries, the manuals of Sharia law or other books that are the foundational source texts of Islam.
Western elites are making serious, long-term decisions about Muslims in Europe WITHOUT KNOWING THE SOURCE TEXTS OF ISLAM AND THE SUPREMACIST GOALS THAT THEY PORTEND.
They are as naïve about Islam as Neville Chamberlain was about Hitler.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH! Start reading, Mr. Goldstein. Start now…and all your staff and colleagues too.
dajjal says
Office holders, politicians, candidates, aspirants: lend me your eyes!!! Read the most vital information in the canonical texts of Islam, click through the links and delve deeper into the cesspool of demonic inspiration beginning here:
http://islamexposed.blogspot.com/p/islam-101-for-politicians.html
mortimer says
NAIVE Yves Goldstein admitted that “Friends who teach the equivalent of high school seniors in the predominantly Muslim districts of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek told him that “90 percent of their students, 17, 18 years old, called them (the terrorists) heroes”.
Not good enough, Mr. Goldstein. If you had paid attention, you would have know that years ago…that most Muslim youth are ALREADY RADICALIZED with ‘radical Islamic chic’.
But you are un-read in the Islamic source texts and wouldn’t be able to differentiate between gheira and al-baraa.
You wouldn’t even realize that apartheid is compulsory in Islam, rather than an aberration.
Start reading Islam’s source texts, Yves. Start now.
linnte says
I emailed him thus! Just the day before yesterday!
WorkingClassPost says
Next time you’re emailing him, perhaps you might suggest that he employ Hugh as his full time speech writer.
Jay Boo says
Test