Islamist terrorism threat in Western-Europe

[pjotr]

Published on Jun 15, 2016 by John!

ISIS fighters en route to Europe for attacks on Belgium & France – security sources




Belgian and French security forces have received an anti-terror alert about a group of Islamic State fighters who recently left Syria and are heading to Europe. They are allegedly planning attacks in Belgium and France, according to security sources cited by Reuters and AP.

The Belgian crisis center has said the alert was sent to all police forces in the country.

However, there were no immediate plans to raise the security level to the maximum showing an imminent threat of an attack, the source added.

The terrorists in question "left Syria about a week and a half ago to reach Europe via Turkey and Greece by boat without passports," Belgian newspaper DH reported, quoting the alert.The latest news comes just days after an Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighter attacked a French police commander and his partner at their home outside Paris.

Tensions are also running high over the Euro 2016 football championship in France. Some 90,000 police and private guards have been mobilized to manage events in the face of the terror attack threat, and dual steel rings have been set up to ensure the maximum protection at venues.

Both Belgium and France have come under attack in the last few months. Belgium was hit on March 22, when 32 people died in coordinated bombings at Brussels’ Zaventem Airport and a Metro station, and last November, 130 people were killed in a series of suicide bombings and a mass shooting in Paris.

[pjotr]

Pieter's (Pjotr's) reaction:

Dear John,

We are all in the same boat over here in Europe. You could add the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Norway to Belgium and France. To be honest I expect Amsterdam Schiphol, the Dutch Raylways, the Amsterdam subway and tourist attractions in Amsterdam like the Anne Frank House, Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum with Rembrandts Nightwatch, the Jewish Historical Museum, The Hague (Den Haag) with the Dutch parliament and the American, Russian and Israeli embassies, and Rotterdam to be legitimate targets. But also Copenhagen, Stokholm, Oslo, Malmö, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Munich, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Vienna or Salzburg could be targets. I have seen these Salafist guys in Arnhem South- and Arnhem North, both in Afghan Taliban style or fashion and in Arab or Northern-African fashion. Fanatical guys, pure Sunni-Muslim fanatics (because they made me clear they hate Shia Muslims). The group I encountered was later gone (to Syria I persume). These guys had long black beards, fanatical looks in their eyes, long white clothes and some sort of square Muslim kippah on their heads. I heard their anti-Western statements, they were quite open about it. A local Labour politician asked questions about them in the city council of Arnhem.

These guys are all over Western-Europe. They hit France and Belgium, but we might be next. Our Intelligence agencies, secret services, police forces, special forces and others are on hight alert. I often see lines of police officers in our Arnhem Central station. The situation is different than a year ago. You see more security and thus police everywhere where a lot of people are. Central stations, airports, bus stations and etc. The government is watching and somehow is prepared. Ordinary citizens aren't aware, but I look with the eyes of an observer. We journalists have a sixth sense for security measures. I also hear some things sometimes from colleages of the regional broadcast corporation (Omroep Gelderland), from people of my national NRC Handelsblad newspaper (the Dutch Gazeta Wyborcza), the Gelderlander newspaper (my local/regional newspaper) and friends of mine from Amsterdam and The Hague.

www.omroepgelderland.nl/
www.gelderlander.nl/
www.nrc.nl/

I want to state that I have nothing against the religion of Islam and against Muslims, but I have to repeat again, our politicians, employers, unions, teachers and social workers have made terrible mistakes in the sixties, seventies and eighties when the first Muslim migrants (called guestworkers or foreigners [Buitenlanders in Dutch, Ausländer in German, Udlænding in Danish and Cudzoziemiec in Polish) came to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They came here to work as contract workers and our leaders and educators demanded nothing from them. No integration, no lessons in European languages (the country they lived in), no assimilation and no critical view or approach to their behavior and how they raised their children. Moroccans raised their children as Berbers or Arabised Berbers, Turks raised their children as Sunni Muslim Turks and Nationalistic Turks, many Kurds raised their children as conservative Sunni-Muslims (many of them, only part of them are Kurd nationalists, liberals or moderate Kurd Patriots, many of them are as strict -read fundamentalist or Orthodox Muslims like many Sunni Muslim Arabs or North-African Arabized Berbers, Berber North-Africans and Black Muslim Africans who follow radical Islamist movements in Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, Chad, Niger and Eritrea.

We have to distighuis between the Moderate, decent and law abiding integrated Muslims and the dangerous radical minority who target all of us indiscriminately; Chrisitans, jews, Muslims, Hindu's, Buddhists, Zoroatrists, Bahai people, atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, Yezdi's, Shia, Allawites and Sufi Muslims. Everybody who doesn't follow their extremist, fundamentalist, islamist version of Islam (Islamic State or Al Qaida) is a target.

I am sorry to say so, but that is the situation.

Cheers,
Pieter

P.S.- And next to my Dutch newssources in Check the BBC worldservice, France 24, the Economist, CNN, Fox News, SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONA, Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, Press tv, RT, Polish news (Radio), VRT (Felmish Dutch Television), NOS (Dutch National Broadcasting Corporation), VPRO (Dutch liberal), RTL-Nieuws (commercial Dutch tv station), I24 (Israeli news chanal), the Jerusalem Post, the New York Times and Euronews. And the Dutch magazines Vrij Nederlands, Groene Amsterdammer, Elsevier (rightwing to center right to counterballance my leftwing intellectual Groene Amsterdammer and Vrij Nederland magazines and VPRO-guide [VprO Gids]), the Jewish NIW ( www.niw.nl/ ) which I buy regulary and love to read (news about the Dutch Jewish diaspora and Israel) and Dutch News ( www.dutchnews.nl/) for the foreign perspective on the Netherlands and the world and my VPRO-gids, because I am a paying member of the cultural VPRO broadcast corporation. Next to that I buy New Eastern Europe (a bimonthly news magazine dedicated to Central and Eastern European affairs) and Foreign Affairs Magazine every now and then. I am fond of New Eastern Europe, because I am half Polish and it contains a lot of high quality essays and articles about Polish political history, Polish politics, the Polish economy and for instance Polish geopolitical stance and situation in Central- and Eastern-Europe in relationship to the Russian Federation, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Germany. But also about the Polish relationship with the EU and the USA.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrij_Nederland
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Groene_Amsterdammer
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPRO
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier