‘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.

The mayor of Tehran was welcomed in Brussels

During the Islamic State years, Belgium provided the terrorist regime with more personnel per capita than any other European nation. Four hundred and fifty one Belgian citizens went east to wage jihad, which worked out at 40 per million inhabitants. Denmark was next with 27 per million and then Sweden with 19. The UK figure was 9.5.

Yet despite this alarming development, Belgium is ‘largely in denial’ about its Islamist problem. This, claims the former Belgian senator, Alain Destexhe, is because many politicians, ‘biased towards the centre or the left, have pulled the rug out from under the meagre political attempts to regain control of immigration’.

Also present at Tuesday’s National Conservatism conference in Brussels was Britain’s former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. ‘It’s a real shame that the thought police, instructed by the mayor of Brussels, has saw fit to try and undermine and denigrate what is free speech and free debate,’ she told reporters.

Braverman expressed her puzzlement that Belgium is ‘offended by democratically elected politicians’ but feels fit to roll out the red carpet to Iranian politicians. Last year, the mayor of Tehran was welcomed in Brussels, what his office described as a ‘glorious invitation’; Alireza Zakani, who has close links to the brutal Iranian regime, has been accused of being zealous in enforcing the wearing of the hijab in his city, introducing last year a ‘hijab and chastity plan’.

But that’s Belgium for you, a country that struggles to operate on democratic principles. For many years, a media ‘cordon sanitaire’ has been placed around any politician or party considered ‘far-right’. This doesn’t apply in the same way to the far-left, despite the fact that Belgium’s Marxist PTB party counts among its early influences Mao, Hồ Chí Minh and Latin America guerilla organisations.

In a television interview on 20 October last year, PTB president, Raoul Hedebouw, declared that ‘over the last ten years Israel has been the greater terrorist than Hamas’. One of the PTB’s politicians has also accused Israel of being a ‘colonial state, an apartheid state, which is killing children’…I don’t see the point of watching the [Hamas attack] videos of 7 October…Nothing justifies what Israel is doing today.’

These are acceptable views in Belgium. On the other hand, voices on the right have been shut out of democratic life since 1991. The catalyst was the success in that year’s general election of the nationalist Vlaams Blok party – ‘Black Sunday’ to the Belgian elite – when they took more than ten per cent of the vote and captured 12 seats in parliament and six in the Senate.

In the years that followed, Vlaams Blok, a genuinely far-right party, was ostracised by the French-speaking media and other political parties until eventually in 2004 it was banned by the Belgian supreme court.

Shortly before that ban, the party had won a quarteer of the vote in the regional election in the Flemish-speaking north. The party’s leader, Frank Vanhecke, said ‘what happened in Brussels today is unique in the western world: Never has a so-called democratic regime outlawed the country’s largest political party.’

Vlaams Blok was an extreme party in the 1990s but if it was banned why weren’t parties on the far left targeted too? Fascism and Communism are, after all, as bad as each other, and today in Belgium – as across the West – the rising anti-Semitism is more often found on the left than the right.

It is also the European left that has facilitated the expansion of Islamism across the continent this century, what the French call ‘Islamo-gauchisme’. Its home is in Belgium, specifically Brussels, where British ministers are silenced but Iranian mayors celebrated.