This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The Belgian interior minister on Wednesday denied stigmatising Muslims after he said many of them danced in celebration after the Brussels terror attacks.



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“Everyone knows that these things happened. Do we have to wait for an official police report to confirm the existence of these facts,” Jan Jambon told parliament during tough questioning from the opposition.

Jambon, the senior member in government of the main Flemish nationalist party the New Flemish Alliance (NVA), denied he was stoking tensions with Belgium’s Muslim community, which numbers about 600,000 out of a population of 11 million.

“I don’t have the police report. There was [dancing], but not much ... several services have confirmed to me that these weren’t rumours and that they saw this on the ground,” he said. “What do you think, that I am going to stigmatise them by naming streets and districts?”

Jambon’s comments echoed those by US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump who claimed Muslims celebrated the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Jambon made the initial comments in an interview with the Flemish-language De Standaard newspaper published on Saturday.

“A significant section of the Muslim community danced when attacks took place,” Jambon told the paper, following the deadly airport and subway suicide bombings in which 32 people were killed.

He also accused Muslim residents of Brussels’ largely immigrant Molenbeek neighbourhood of attacking police during an operation in March to arrest a suspect in connection with the deadly attacks in Paris in November 2015.

Islamic State claimed both the Brussels and Paris attacks.

Jambon, whose party has accused previous governments of failing to tackle radicalisation, said: “I am not going to turn away, to bury my head in the sand. My duty is to identify problems, to name things and to take actions.

“We cannot stigmatise a whole community. I have said hundreds of times that we have to work with the Muslim community, to win back their hearts, some of which are turning against our society, even if it is just three people.”