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WORLD
HOW BELGIUM TURNED BRUSSELS INTO AN ISIS POWDER KEG
BY JEFF STEIN ON 3/23/16 AT 3:56 AM
Screams Heard, Debris Scattered In Brussels Airport After Blast
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WORLDISLAMIC STATEBRUSSELS ATTACKSBELGIUMTERRORISM
About a dozen years ago, I stepped into a Brussels taxi and gave the driver a note with an address on it. He took it silently, set the meter and drove off through the city’s bustling, high-end hotel district. The gleaming steel and glass storefronts for Gucci, Tiffany and Dior soon gave way to grittier streets.
I was on a mission to find and photograph a house where a friend’s father, a B-17 pilot, had been hidden by the anti-Nazi underground during World War II. A riveting book about his daring escape from Brussels through France, The Freedom Line, suggested that the neighborhood where he was hidden was populated back then by middle-class burghers living in neat rows of pastel-colored brick townhouses.
“Why are you going there?” my driver asked, his North African, Arab features—dark eyes and wiry black hair—framed by the rear view mirror.
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I told him my story.
“It’s very different now,” I recall him saying. “It’s all Arab.” And then, unprompted, he delivered a bitter lecture on the history of Arabs in Belgium, how they were imported from North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s as cheap labor to work in the factories. Most of those businesses had moved on, he said, leaving the immigrants unemployed with no real future for decades. In January, youth unemployment sat at nearly 23 percent, according to officialestimates. “Although there are no statistics for Muslim employment levels,” the Euro-Islam website says, citing the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “the foreign-born have unemployment rates more than twice that of indigenous Belgians.”
