A sociology professor and expert on migration and integration has claimed that the riots in Brussels which saw cars flipped over and set alight, shops looted, and police attacked following Sunday’s World Cup match between Morocco and Belgium were largely motivated by a “hatred of the West,” echoing statements made by AfD MEP Joachim Kuhs earlier this week at the European parliament.
Ruud Koopmans, a Dutch sociologist, professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, and researcher on migration, social integration, and transnationalization at the Berlin Social Science Center told the German press earlier this week that the Moroccans who rioted in Brussels and several Belgian and Dutch cities were driven by and large by their “hatred of the West.
As The European Conservative reported, following the Moroccan football team’s victory over Belgium in the World Cup on Sunday night, large mobs of Moroccan men took to the streets of Brussels, Liége, Antwerp, and some Dutch cities to celebrate, but those celebrations quickly devolved into riots. The mob attacked police officers, flipped over cars, started fires, looted shops, and damage public property before they were eventually disbursed with tear gas and water cannons.
According to Ruud Koopmans, who also serves as the chairman on the Board of Trustees of the German Center for Integration and Migration Research in Berlin, the riots are “part of a larger phenomenon that can be observed among people from Muslim countries all over Europe.”
“Many of them grew up in a culture of hatred of the West,” he added.
Koopmans suggests that the worldviews of many of those who participated in the riots have been “shaped by anti-Western propaganda in mosques or by politicians and their media in their Arab home countries and therefore see the West as the enemy of Islam, which wants to destroy everything Muslim and oppress Muslims.”
“Many young migrants develop a hatred for the West and see it as an enemy,” he continued.
The professor went on to assert that the Moroccan community in Belgium, which is quite substantial, is greatly divided. “One part is well integrated, another part hardly. The riots in Brussels show that.”
“Many young people of Moroccan origin do not identify at all with the country in which they live: the rioters have torn Belgian flags from balconies and attacked police officers,” Koopmans said, adding that this shows “a deep hatred of the state.”
“The well-integrated part of the Moroccan community, on the other hand, is shocked by the riots. Many people have distanced themselves online.”
Professor Koopmans thinks that similar outbursts of violence are also possible in Germany, with its large Turkish community. Some migrants also feel “hatred toward the state in which they live and feel like victims, for example in the large Turkish community,” he said, adding that Turkish President Erdogan feeds into the “story of oppressed Muslims” over and over again in his speeches.
Days ago, during a speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, AfD MEP Joachim Kuhs said the riots were a “sign of the failure of European political elites and the media that support them.” He referred to the deteriorating security situation in much of western Europe as a “self-inflicted problem” caused by “inept” liberal elites.
“Politics have allowed such parallel societies to form; an unbridled immigration policy combined with lavish social benefits and a lack of self-assertion on the part of locals has provoked such conditions,” Kuhs began:
The violent excesses in Belgium and the Netherlands were clearly ethnically shaped. The perpetrators came from Moroccan parallel societies: young men, originally from North Africa, showed their host countries how things work.
Echoing Professor Koopmans’ statements, Kuhs asserted: “They are united by their hatred for the country that has given them and their ancestors shelter and which largely feeds them. Moroccans are the largest group of immigrants here in Brussels, and the riots demonstrated abundantly clear the state of their integration.”
