Why is the mayor of Tehran welcome in Brussels but not Nigel Farage?

‘How do you think this looks to the rest of the world?’ asked Nigel Farage as police attempted to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels on Tuesday. Belgian politicians won’t care what it looks like. This is the most undemocratic country in western Europe. And while the mayor who tried to ban the conference obsesses about what he calls ‘the far-right’, Islamism continues to thrive in Belgium’s left-wing eco-system.

For a decade, France has regarded its neighbour as the ‘home of radical Islamists’, and nowhere more so than in Brussels, from where sprang the Islamist terror cell that murdered 130 Parisians in November 2015. ‘Molenbeekistan’ was how the French media rechristened Molenbeek, a suburb of the Belgian capital where the attack was planned and where, in the months afterwards, the sole terrorist survivor took refuge before police finally caught up with him. That they did was only because of the assistance from France and Britain; Belgium has long been considered by other intelligence services as the weak link in the fight against Islamic terrorism.