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June 21, 2006

Belgium: Two Islamists Are Jailed For Inciting Racial Hatred

News from Expatica states that today, two workers at the Belgian Islamic Center (Centre Islamique Belge or CIB) were sentenced to ten months jail, with five months of their sentences suspended.

The two individuals, 26-year old Abdel Rahman Ayachi and 30-year old Raphael Gendron, maintained the center's website, Assabyle.com, which contained extreme Salafist propaganda. It also had material which denigrated Jews, denied the holocaust and minimized Nazi war crimes.

The pair were convicted of inciting racial hatred, and were further ordered to pay a fine of 15,000 Euros ($18,998) and to pay a donation of 2,500 Euros ($3,166) to the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism.

The fines and donation are to be seen as compensation for the Jewish community for the damaging content on Abbasyle.com, but also for insulting remarks which had been made by their defense lawyer, Sebastien Courtoy.

20 other people from a "social dialogue collective" will also receive a symbolic compensation of 1 Euro ($1.27).

The background of the case is intriguing. Raphael Gendron is a French citizen who converted to Islam. Abdel Rahman Ayachi is the son of a radical salafist preacher, Bassam Ayachi. When the CIB was raided on the morning of 26 January this year, states the Brussels Journal, two individuals were arrested, but for illegal immigration.

Bassam Ayachi is a French citizen, who had lived at Molenbeek, where CIB is based, since the 1990s. and has been monitored by the police for some time. According to malines.blogspot, Bassam is a firebrand cleric, who is said to run paramilitary scout camps through CIB and to spread radical propaganda. Bassam denies this, but does admit that when the French introduced a ban on the wearing of hijabs in September 2004, he wrote a letter to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French Interior minister, threatening suicide attacks if the ban was not lifted. He believes that jihad must first be waged with words.

The CIB runs a mosque where a Tunisian individual called Abdessatar Dahmane was married in 1999. Abdessatar Dahmane was a close contact of the Salafist preacher. Dahmane's "claim to fame" is that on Sunday, 9 September, 2001, with another Tunisian formerly residing in Belgium, Bouraoui El Ouer, he took part in a suicide attack, mortally wounding an Afghan military leader and opponent of the Taliban.

The pair, apparently acting to provide a "gift" to Osama bin Laden, had posed as journalists, and carried a bomb hidden inside a camera. They were with other real journalists, interviewing Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Afghan "Northern Alliance". The attack happened at Massoud's headquarters in the Panjshir Valley, northern Afghanistan. As well as being linked to al Qaeda and known as a supporter of Bassam Ayachi, Dehmane spent much of his time listening to the sermons of the Swiss Islamic scholar, Tariq Ramadan.

The website of the two men who were imprisoned today, Assabyle.com, has been a source of consternation for some time. The anti-semitic material contained in the site was first exposed by the Belgian press in February 2002 by VIF/l'Expresse, but more than 18 months later, the Belgian deputy Minister of State, Francois-Zavier de Donnea was demanding from the commission for Justice why no action was being taken. A pdf document (in French), in which the minister wants to know why there is a delay in judicial action, is dated 13 November 2003.

The website Assabyle.com is no longer on-line, but various transcripts of sermons by individuals such as Salman ibn Fahd al-'Awdah and Osama Khayyat are available. The latter author, who is imam of the Grand Mosque in Makkah, writes an article entitled "The Virtues of Martyrdom", in which he states (my translation from French):

"Slaves of Allah! The Jews are described in the Book of Allah as those who distort the utterances and the deeds decreed by Allah, and take them out of context. This is exactly what they do in the same way as the tyrants of this world who support them. They use false terminology to lead astray, to confound and to deceive. What your brothers (Palestinian terrorists) do in their battle at Al-Aqsa are not acts of gratuitous violence, but moreover it is a blessed uprising to resist and to diminish the Jewish oppression and is against their aggression."

This is only a segment, and is mild compared to some of the other material. During the early stages of the trial of Raphael Legrand and Abdel Rahman Ayachi, other details were described on March 10 by La Libre.

The case was lodged in 2003 by the Center for Equal Opportunity and others who had been sleighted by the website. The website was hosted from a server in Pakistan. The chief prosecutor in the case, Patrick Carolus, said that in their interviews with police in 2003, the pair had shown no remorse and did not consider that they had done anything wrong. He spoke of the "banality of evil".

On a video on the website, David Levy, a former Foreign Affairs minister of Israel, had been compared to Adolf Hitler. Another text on the site was entitled "The end of the people of Israel, a Koranic truth". It appears that the contempt which had been displayed by the pair's lawyer, Sebastien Courtoy, related to an outburst where he declared the evidence presented in the case to be "fake" and promised to appeal "to Fidel Castro".

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at June 21, 2006 8:30 PM

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