A healing Brussels needs tourists' support

Natalie Pompilio

is a Philadelphia writer

BRUSSELS - On a warm afternoon one month after coordinated terrorist attacks claimed 32 lives, the city center was bustling with people shopping, eating, chatting, watching street acrobats twist, and listening to a local radio station's live broadcast. An organized city cleanup was underway, and its volunteers - wearing yellow ponchos and carrying sticks to pick up litter - were getting a prework pep talk. I stood behind a family - two parents, two children - who were buying waffles to snack on while they strolled.

Brussels was not "a disaster city, a total disaster" or an "armed camp," as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump described it in March. It was not the "hellhole" he described in January, before the attacks there.

While some visitors may notice that there are more armed officers around the city and in the airport, there is no feeling of being under siege. The misperceptions perpetuated by Trump and others, which were then disseminated by the world's media, have done the city and the country a great disservice.

Brussels is bruised, yes, but healing. It just needs help, tourists like me who spend money and show there is nothing to fear here. To not support the city now will only make its current problems worse.

In a similar way, the Molenbeek neighborhood, a 10-minute walk from the city center, needs to be embraced, not shunned. Since the March 22 attacks, the district has also been unfairly branded. Britain's Guardian newspaper referred to the area as "Europe's Jihadi Central." It's true that people with connections to the neighborhood have been linked to the Brussels bombings, the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people, and the 2004 train bombings in Madrid that claimed 191 lives. But consider that 95,000 people live in the Molenbeek neighborhood, the majority of them Muslim. It's unlikely there are thousands of sleepers just waiting for the chance to strike.

This is not to say there aren't many problems here. The neighborhood is the city's most densely populated. Its schools are subpar, and it has an unemployment rate that regularly hovers around 30 percent. Poorly educated young people frustrated by lack of work are susceptible to jihadi recruiters, who promise them a purpose and give them a chance to get back at a larger society that has seemingly rejected them.

But there are also signs of rebirth. A new contemporary art museum, the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art, features the work of four American street artists. Two new hotels - the Bellevue and the Meininger - have opened within the last five years. My colleague Trudy Rubin visited Molenbeek in March, immediately after the bombings at the Brussels airport and in a metro station. She stopped in a new café, Le Palais de Balks, and noted that it displayed a diversity that the area has recently been lacking. One way to stop people seeing jihad as an option, she wrote, is by offering them a more hopeful future. That includes welcoming them into the community at large.

Which is why Trump's words, basically scaring people away from Brussels, can do harm. They seek to further isolate a place that needs people now more than ever. While doing so, they also hurt the city's economy, people, and outlook.

At one point that afternoon, I walked among the bunches of fresh and wilting flowers at a memorial at Place de la Bourse, reading supportive messages in many languages written in chalk on the ground and a nearby building.

Je suis Bruxelles. Ik ben Brussel. (I am Brussels.)

It was a beautiful display, a touching outpouring of love and support. Groups of people huddled near the memorial while others walked slowly by, taking it all in.

The city is remembering and honoring its dead while remaining very much alive. Go see for yourself.

nataliepompilio@yahoo.com