Terror on the doorsteps of Belgium
Hell’s always closer than you think: don’t invite it in
The cool determination and insistence to see the job done that was visible as lookers-on witnessed the horrific murders in broad evening-light in a Brussels street and the lobby of an office building last night say clearly to me, if not to the police, a contract hit. And, if that’s right, the attackers are nowhere in Brussels right now. The house searches and school closures are being done to reassure the general public that the police is “on the job”. Today, I guarantee, the burghers of Brussels will hear police sirens wailing across the town, even as cops go for their lunch break: they also serve who only stand and wait.
And then, there was a dead culprit, discovered in a caff in the outer city, shot dead. Perhaps it was amateurs after all … The question remains: when you kill people on the street—should I go or should I stay?
Last month, in the dead of night, a car packed with people and pistols (war-grade, no less) forced a lone motorist to a halt in Anderlecht, not a stone’s throw from its football team’s stadium, and reduced the man’s car to a tear-off strip at the foot of a order form, such was the peppering of bullets that was designed to ensure with 100% certainty the death of the occupant, in the dead of that night.
There is no comfort in knowing, if know we do, that the assailants in such cases are professional hitmen, hired or trained to exact pounds of flesh from rival drug-runners, and in placing our reliance on the putative accuracy of their aim. For, in the escalation that is surely bound to result from recriminations such as these, someone somewhere is going to get hurt who has nothing to do with any of this.
What if the rival gangs were to discover, all of a sudden, that they are fighting tooth and nail for a market that simply isn’t there? That widgets will outdo wodgets in a marketplace where nobody, but nobody, seeks widgets or wodgets? If they discovered that their complex disguises and smuggling techniques, their mules and their runners, their dealers and their distributors all had nothing to do?
Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there are those who live by the word, and the pen, they say, is mightier than the sword. So, if that be the case: stop taking drugs. Pull their carpet out from under them. Clean up your own life, and help clean up everybody else’s.
Meanwhile, Brussels has been put back in virtual lock-down: travel only if absolutely necessary. We don’t yet have troops on our streets, but the Home Secretary has not ruled them out. In 2016, terror came to Brussels and the borough of Zaventem; my own services would be engaged to lend assistance to the culprits’ prosecution. This year, Belgium put them in prison. And now, here we go again. The causes are probably unrelated to events elsewhere in the globe. But they’re related to something, of that we can be sure.
With alert statuses of max. 4 in the capital and level 3 at my own front door, you, me and all our pens are no match for their shooting matches.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2023/10/17/liveblog-aanslag-brussel/
Click link, above, or pic, below, for live blog on VRT (in Dutch)
