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Brussels • Just across the canal from the chic cafes, businesses and elegant buildings that define the heart of Belgium's capital is the neighborhood of Molenbeek, a largely Muslim area that has become one of the world's main breeding grounds of violent Islamic extremists.
Belgian police conducted raids in the area Saturday night and early Sunday morning and arrested seven people suspected of knowledge or involvement with the bloody attacks in Paris, not the first time people from Molenbeek have taken part in international terrorism. A Belgian car used by the attackers led police to Molenbeek, where they arrested one of three brothers; a second brother was killed in Paris and a third is the target of a massive manhunt.
"The terrible attacks that were directed against us on Friday were prepared abroad by a group of individuals based in Belgium who, as the investigation will show, benefited from accomplices in France," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in Paris on Sunday.
"There is almost always a link with Molenbeek. That's a gigantic problem, of course," Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said on Belgian television Sunday morning. Asked why his government wasn't doing more, he said it "has already taken a number of initiatives at the preventive level. But in addition, there needs to be more repression. We're going to work hard on that."
People who have studied Molenbeek say that the seeds of violent Islamic extremism were planted long ago.
"It doesn't surprise me because radical and political Islam in Belgium is something that grew up through the years," said Bilal Benyaich, a senior fellow at the Itinera Institute, a think tank, and coordinator of studies on radical Islamists there.
Belgium, on a per capita basis, has become the biggest exporter of fighters from Europe to the Islamic State in Syria. Nearly 500 people have left Belgium to fight for the Islamic State. About 130 have come back, 77 have died fighting, and more than 200 remain in Syria.
They emerged from an unusual social clash that has prevented Molenbeek from becoming a Belgian melting pot. Fifty years ago, a wave of immigrants came from Morocco and Turkey. Later, exiles from Libya and Egypt arrived. But in the 1970s, Benyaich said, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries sent funding for rigid religious schools, setting up tension between Wahabbi mosques and the more moderate and largely Moroccan tradition.
Today, the neighborhood has more than a dozen mosques. In some cases, more hard-line Muslims took over the boards of existing mosques, Benyaich says.
Many jobs in Brussels require knowledge of French, Flemish or Dutch, and now sometimes English, while most immigrants speak mostly Arabic and some French, which has blocked integration.
Benyaich says that the Saudi message has played well to the children of immigrants who were suffering an identity crisis. But now, the Islamic State has stepped in and caught on.
Yannick Bochen, who runs a community center in Molenbeek, says that the neighborhood has never been treated equally. She said that while new subway stops are drilled underground in other parts of the city, the ones to Molenbeek were built by digging up the streets, which were disrupted for many years.
Bochen says that the violent extremists don't represent Molenbeek. "It saddens me that it's Molenbeek again," she said.
"I've been working in this community center for six years," she said, "and a lot of people are really sick of this association. Since we heard about this, people are a little bit down about it. For years and years you try to change this overgeneralized image of this neighborhood."
The latest arrests have dealt that effort a heavy blow.
"In Molenbeek, we do not have things under control at this moment," said the Interior Minister Jan Jambon said on the television talk show called "De Zevende Dag" or The Seventh Day. "There we need to make an extra effort."