200 in March 2003 to about 1,000 now. A new office has opened in France, and last summer, the league deployed a new political wing, the Muslim Democratic Party, to represent its views in European Parliamentary elections this year.
For its adherents, the AEL offers a united platform and an amplified voice. This is especially true for the second- and third-generation children of immigrants who came here — primarily from Turkey and Morocco — as guest workers in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, kids struggling to define their identity in a post-9/11 and increasingly nationalistic Europe. The children and even the grandchildren of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants are still considered “Turkish” or “Moroccan,” rather than Dutch or Belgian. To these boys, Jahjah is a role model, a hero; for girls, he is a star. One newspaper quoted a young girl saying to Jahjah’s bodyguards outside a talk he gave in Holland: “I just want to see him in the real.”
In person and via the league’s Web site, Jahjah speaks directly to these disenfranchised youth. He is deeply mistrustful of the Western press, arguing that no matter what he says, he will be misquoted or that his words will be twisted by “the Zionist lobby” in an effort to turn popular opinion against him. Non-Muslim reporters are barred from Jahjah’s lectures and speeches, and he pointedly ignored Salon’s several attempts to reach him. Other AEL officers rarely speak to non-Muslim members of the press.
However, Jahjah’s Belgian lieutenant, Azzuz, agreed to an interview in December, after a series of protests that led to the arrest of 10 league members — including some who hung the Palestinian flag over the Dutch Parliament building in The Hague and Azzuz’s own television caper. Speaking by phone from Antwerp, the 27-year-old Belgian AEL leader, the son of Moroccan immigrants, was cordial but direct. The deaths of 9/11 were “collateral damage” — a term, he says, that Muslims learned from Americans. “Finally, something had happened to those who kill our women and children,” he said of the terror strikes that have reshaped world politics. “But America still blames others. They didn’t learn their lesson at all.” What lesson is that? “Stop supporting the terrorist state of Israel,” Azzuz replied. George Bush “doesn’t hold the strings,” he says, the Zionists do.
I’ve been a regular visitor to Antwerp for a number of years now (my wife is from there). Nothing gets the Flemish going as much as the topic of immigration; I’ve got so used to the complaints about the Moroccans (it’s always “the Moroccans”) that I’ve tended to block it out and change the subject, even though the moans have recently become even more anguished. “Nice people”, I think, patronisingly, “but what a shame about their racism.”
Yesterday my wife met an old school friend, still living in Antwerp: difficult to classify her as the usual bourgeoise scared by change: she hates the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Blok party, and does voluntary work for a Gay Rights group. Her take on Antwerp: there are now whole areas of the city she’s scared to go alone, and, yep, it’s all down to the Moroccans. My smug dismissal of these people as racist is beginning to look a bit threadbare.
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