Belgium Suspends Tax Treaty Talks with Saudi Arabia

Belgium remains on high-terror alert following the November 13 attacks in Paris, as a number of the perpetrators, including the “mastermind,” Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and current fugitive Salah Abdeslam, were citizens or residents of the country.

Earlier this week, Belgian socialist MP Dirk Van der Maelen, as well as the LaRouche-affiliated movement Agora Erasmus in Belgium, put the government on the spot: either you are against terrorism or you’re in favor of it. If you’re against it, you should review all economic and financial relations with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states which are promoting terrorism and radical forms of Islam such as Salafism and Wahhabism.

That message hit the highest levels of government. On Friday, the Flemish daily De Standaard reported that Belgian Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt suspended tax-convention negotiations between Belgium and Saudi Arabia. “In light of current events it seems appropriate to re-evaluate that convention on its desirability,” the newspaper quoted van Overtveldt’s cabinet as saying. The talks are delayed “till later.”

Sputnik International notes that “the decision comes after the Belgian opposition called on authorities to review the country’s relations with Saudi Arabia in light of Riyadh’s support of an “ultra-conservative” interpretation of Islam.

Friday morning, De Standaard reports the statements of another socialist MP, Yamila Idrissi, who said the government should end Saudi control over the Great Mosque of Brussels, “a propagation center of extremist Islam in Brussels, Belgium, and Europe.”

As underscored by an article on the website of Agora Erasmus posted early this week, already in 2012, under pressure from the Belgian state security, Saudi Arabia was forced to bring back to Saudi Arabia a rector of the Brussels Mosque, due to his inflammatory speeches and preaching. The Mosque is, and has been for decades, a notorious center used by diplomats and imams to spread feudal Wahhabism.

In 1967, King Baudouin of Belgium gave a 99-year contract to the Saudis to own and run the Mosque. That contract should immediately be scrapped, and the Mosque should become a “Modern center for a New Islam,” said MP Idrissi Friday.