Paul Belien

“In this day and age, when opponents of the individual Second Amendment civil right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms attack the right as something out of date in modern society, it is most significant when a modern scholar and international man of letters sees our American Second Amendment precisely as most necessary in our modern world,” says John M. Snyder, CCRKBA Public Affairs Director. “Paul Belien, who designates the Second Amendment a ‘pillar of freedom,’ is such an individual. It is because he presents his gun rights position so well that he most certainly deserves to be named CCRKBA Gun Rights Defender of the Month for December.”
Paul Belien is Editor of the Brussels Journal. He also is an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.
In a recent Washington Times column outlining the international threat to individual freedom presented by rising Islamization, Belien wrote that, “The citizens of Europe are extremely worried by this Islamization process, but their political leaders impose it on them against their wish. Europe is in worse shape than America because European democracies lack two pillars of freedom that America still has – solidly enshrined in the First and Second Amendments to its Constitution. In many European countries, freedom of speech no longer exists. It has been restricted by laws intended to curb so-called ‘hate speech.’ These laws forbid people to express their worries about massive immigration and the Islamization of their nations.
“Europe, with few exceptions, such as Switzerland, is also unfamiliar with the second pillar of free societies: the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. In countries such as Belgium even pepper spray is an illegal weapon. The result is that the law-abiding citizens are at the mercy of criminals, many of them of foreign extraction.”
In his column, Belien went on to discuss the results in societies which do not have something like our beloved Second Amendment or otherwise respect and insure the right of law-abiding citizens to arm themselves for their own protection and, indeed, for the good of society at large.
He noted that when delegates at a counter jihad meeting, “who had been invited to the European Parliament by one of Europe’s so-called far-right parties, discussed strategies to counter the spread of Islamization, EU bureaucrats convened at a meeting room two floors below. On the fifth floor of the parliament building, they discussed the ‘harmonization’ of self-defense legislation in the 27 EU member states. This means that, if the EU gets its way, the citizens of all member states will soon be submitted to Belgium’s strict rules and that pepper sprays will be banned everywhere.
“Meanwhile, as became clear from the country reports given at the counter jihad meeting, Europe’s no-go zones are multiplying. These are areas where the police no longer dare to venture and where Islamists hold sway. Every night since the beginning of last year, immigrant youths have been torching cars and clashing with police in Amsterdam’s Slotervaart district. The incidents started October 14 when a policewoman shot dead a 22-year old ethnic Moroccan while he was stabbing her and a colleague with a knife. Senior police officers compare the current situation in Amsterdam to the 2005 Ramadan riots in Paris. Media outside the Netherlands, however, hardly mention the riots, which aim to drive the police from Slotervaart and turn the neighborhood into a no-go area – yet another pocket of Eurabia on Europe’s soil.”
Born in 1959, Belien has a law degree with specializations in Social Security Law and European Law and a doctorate in International Studies. He worked as a professional journalist in both Belgium and the Netherlands. He was one of the nine “founding fathers” of the Flemish liberal party VLD in 1991-1992. He is married to Dr. Alexandra Colen, a former lecturer in linguistics at the universities of Ghent and Antwerp, and a Member of Parliament for the Flemish-secessionist party Viaams Blok since 1995. The couple home schooled their children.
After the murder of an Antwerp bus passenger, Dr. Paul Belien wrote that, “The Belgian state is no longer able to guarantee the security of its citizens. Belgians do not have a constitutional or legal right to bear arms…With the government and police failing to protect law-abiding citizens the latter are totally unprotected. Saturday’s murder has shocked bus drivers and train conductors, but they stress they are not in the least surprised. Violence on public transport has become a fact of life.”