Security is tight in Brussels following two terror attacks March 22 at the Belgian capital’s main airport and in the metro system that killed 32 people and injured more than 200.
According to media reports, armed soldiers are checking bags at the entrance to the city’s train station and many office buildings have set up secure entrances with guards. Jewish schools and other institutions in Brussels and Antwerp went into lockdown and Purim street festivities were put on hold.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks. Belgian prosecutors confirmed on March 23 that they had been able to identify two of the three suicide bombers at the airport as Belgian brothers Khalid and Ibrahim El Bakraoui. The third suicide bomber has not yet been identified. As of mid-week, a national manhunt was underway for the fourth suspect, Najim Laachraoui, a 24-year-old Belgian national who was born in Morocco.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel linked the attacks to terror attacks in his country and elsewhere.
“The chain of attacks from Paris to San Bernardino, from Istanbul to the Ivory Coast and now to Brussels, and the daily attacks on Israel, this is one continuous assault on all of us,” Netanyahu said March 22 in an address via satellite to the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington. “In all these cases, the terrorists have no resolvable grievances.
“What they seek is our utter destruction,” he said. “We won’t let that happen.”
The deadly attacks in Brussels came two days after a suicide bomber detonated himself near a group of Israeli tourists at a restaurant in Istanbul. Turkish reports said the bomber targeted the Israelis, and three of the four fatalities were Israelis.
Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, sent a condolence letter to King Philippe of Belgium.
“Terrorism is terrorism is terrorism, whether it takes place in Brussels, Paris, Istanbul or Jerusalem,” Rivlin wrote. “I want to emphasize that this struggle that we all share is against this violent terrorism that continues to kill and maim so many, it is not a fight against Islam.”
Belgian authorities have come under criticism in the wake of revelations that the bombers were well known to the security services and collaborated with one of the planners of the November 2015 attacks in Paris, Salah Abdeslam, who was arrested March 18 in Brussels. Nonetheless, they still managed to evade police and enter the airport terminal on March 22 with large explosive devices and blow themselves up.
Israel’s minister of science, technology and space, Ofir Akunis, said in a Facebook post that European officials have been wasting their time worrying about labeling products produced in Israeli settlements instead of worrying about the growth of Islamic extremism in Europe.
“Many in Europe have preferred to occupy themselves with the folly of condemning Israel, labeling products and boycotts,” he wrote. “In this time, underneath the nose of the Continent’s citizens, thousands of extremist Islamic terror cells have grown. To our sorrow, the reality has struck the lives of dozens of innocent people, powerfully and fatally.”
Shortly after the attacks, the Antwerp World Diamond Center canceled a Purim party planned for March 23 “out of respect for the victims and their families,” the center’s CEO, Ari Epstein, told Joods Actueel. Another Purim party by the European Jewish Association was canceled in Brussels, said the group’s director, Rabbi Menachem Margolin.
Recess was canceled March 22 at dozens of Jewish schools in Antwerp and children were instructed to stay inside the buildings, according to Rabbi Pinchas Kornfeld, a community leader from Antwerp.
Kenneth Bandler, director of media relations for the American Jewish Committee, linked the attacks to the slaying of four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in May 2014. “What began with the jihadist fatal attack on the Jewish Museum nearly two years ago has now reached the airport and metro,” he wrote in an email.
The spokesman for the Palestinian Authority’s security services, General Adnan Damiri, said the attacks are an example of Europe reaping what it had sowed.
“While we condemn acts of terror acts everywhere in the world, we the Arabs are the ones who have been burned worst in the fire of terror that was made and exported by Europe and America,” he wrote in a Facebook post, invoking “the exportation of Jewish terrorism to Palestine, which they supported and justified,” and implying that Islamist terrorism was a product of European colonialism. — jta & j. staff