Molenbeek Through the Looking Glass

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After the terror attacks in Paris, the world’s attention turned to an inner-city district of the Belgian capital, Brussels, where several of the attackers came from. Molenbeek has been notorious for many years as a breeding-ground for Islamist extremism – and the Belgian government vowed to “clean it up”. But do the authorities really have any plan to prevent the radicalisation of young Belgians? Tim Whewell has been travelling back and forth to Brussels since the Paris attacks to talk to local people as they hold up a mirror to themselves and search for explanations – and attempt to have a dialogue with a sometimes dysfunctional state.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a BBC podcast.
0:02.3	You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use
0:04.9	at BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:10.6	Lutrechons on the other 10 years ago.
0:13.0	P-a-t'n'a-t'a,
0:16.0	P'a, if you're good,
0:19.0	we are coming all of Europe, Hello and the song goes, the Europiano. Hello and welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service.
0:28.0	I'm Tim Hewell and the song goes,
0:31.0	bloody hell, or perhaps something something slightly more offensive than that.
0:35.2	Great that we're all Europeans together.
0:38.5	You may only recognize that if you're Belgian, in which case you'll know that it's an iconic punk anthem of the 1980s, sung by Arno,
0:47.0	the francophone answer to Iggy Pop, a man whose voice reeks of cigarette smoke. We're all Europeans is a song that's a song that's
0:59.0	we're all Europeans is a song that's sent sweaty concert halls over Europe into frenzied pogoing,
1:06.0	among them the Batakong in Paris, where Arno has performed many times,
1:11.0	and where, on a Friday night last November 89 Europeans having a night out were
1:16.4	gunned down by fellow Europeans.
1:20.3	Though that's not how we tend to think of them.
1:23.0	And that's why when I bumped into Arno a few days later,
1:27.0	he wasn't in the mood to sing anything,
1:29.0	except rather mournfully, a ditty you probably will recognize from his childhood.
1:35.0	I'm Henry Day I'm.
1:38.0	He got a car next door.
	...

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