Brussels, Paris and the War on the West

Frank Gaffney spoke with Michel Gurfinkiel on Secure Freedom Radio yesterday. Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute and the Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

The focus of their discussion was the recent terror attack in Brussels. Gurfinkiel says that the attacks were expected by many in the security field and that numerous industry publications were predicting such an attack in February.

Gurfinkiel also compared the Brussels attack to the Paris attack of last fall:

“Belgium is a country of about 10 million inhabitants, there were something like 33 to 35 casualties, we don’t know about a few people who are in a very tight situation from hospital, there were at least 150 persons wounded, which means that proportionately to the population of Belgium, this is of the same size as the November 13^th attacks in Paris.”

He also said that the attack turned Brussels into a “ghost city” almost instantly as people took shelter inside and transportation shut down.

An interesting point to note, Gurfinkiel said that Salah Abdeslam who has ties to both attacks, is a man of Moroccan descent who had citizenship in both Belgium and France.

According to Gurfinkiel, the world is viewed by Jihadists in two ways; the Islamic world and the non-Islamic world. Places like Belgium and France, where Muslims are expected to respect the law of the land while enjoying religious freedom are seen as enemies of Jihad for resisting Islam, merely for putting the nation’s laws before Islam.

“In fact there is a very thin difference between the so called moderate and fundamentalist Islam and the Jihadist Islam. The only difference is that while Jihadists say let’s make war to the West right now the moderate fundamentalists say no, we have another option which is to spread peacefully and wage war only in specific instances when somehow the West will resist some of our demands.”

Too many people in the West seem to be in denial about all of this.

We are at war, whether they believe it or not.