Messages, feared to be from Isis recruiters, sent on Sunday after video online apparently showed young people celebrating attacks 
 
 Young men in the Molenbeek district of Brussels were sent messages over the weekend calling on them to “make the right choice” and “fight the westerners”. 
 
 
 
 The texts were sent on Sunday night from a prepaid account that could not be traced or replied to. It followed a video distributed on Facebook, since removed, apparently showing local youths celebrating the attacks in Brussels last week. The death toll from the bombings has risen to 35, Belgium’s health minister said on Monday. 
 
 The short SMS message written in French, which the Guardian has seen, says: “My brother, why not fight the westerners? Make the right choice in your life.” 
 
 The text reportedly sent to young men in Molenbeek. 
 
 The rapid use of technology to spread propaganda after the attacks will stoke fears that Islamic State is trying to use the heightened tension to recruit more disaffected youths. 
 
 It is not known how the recipients’ phone numbers were obtained, but community activists believe Isis handlers download all contacts from the phone books of new recruits and select young men of north African origin to follow up. 
 
 Jamal Ikazban, the local Socialist party MP, told the Guardian that the communications were stoking tensions in the community. “These people are trying to take our youth by storm,” he said. 
 
 “It is like having a big-time drug dealer outside the school gates. We feel the same. They have to be taken off the streets. They are predators and our youths are the victims.” 
 
 For jihadis to be brazen enough to put out propaganda during a police crackdown after the attacks was “cheeky”, Ikazban said. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police stand guard outside court where Salah Abdeslam, wanted over Paris attacks, was appearing last week after his arrest in Molenbeek. Photograph: Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA 
 
 There are multiple reports of similar Facebook messages and emails being sent to young Muslims around Brussels, although those who receive them often do not wish to be identified. 
 
 Jamal Zaria, the imam at Molenbeek’s Arafat mosque, said fears among parents in the area’s Belgo-Moroccan community were growing. 
 
 “They are being exposed to something like a cancer at a metastasic stage,” he said. “It is really spreading very quickly. We have to race against time to develop an immune system for the children in our community so that they reject the message of Daesh [Isis].” 
 
 Belgium has been criticised for a slack response to the rise of Isis, and Ikazban said political authorities and security services had not reacted to past warnings from him about locations used by jihadi groups. 
 
 Radicalisation in Molenbeek: 'People call me the mother of a terrorist' Read more 
 
 A mother of two sons who went to fight in Syria told the Guardian that one of them was subjected to a barrage of intrusive messages before his departure. “In the 10 days before he left home, his recruiter called him 140 times,” she said. “If that is not harassment, I don’t know what is.” 
 
 The police refused to intervene when warned that her son was about to depart for Istanbul, she said. 
 
 Molenbeek is one of Belgium’s most deprived and stigmatised districts with high levels of poverty and a youth unemployment rate of about 50%. Youths complain that some employers will not hire anyone with a Molenbeek postcode. 
 
 “Joining Daesh is a form of suicide,” Ikazban said. “They understand that there is a despair here which could be used to indoctrinate and recruit these people. I’m very angry that we have not done enough about that.” 
 
 There are concerns that the polarisation Isis feeds off could be amplified by an “expel the Islamists” demonstration planned in Molenbeek next Saturday by a far-right group. 
 
 The march has been banned but after nationalists successfully defied a prohibition on marches on Sunday, community leaders said they were anxious about the risk of more violence. ||||| ISIS Recruiters Feed On Working-Class, Heavily Muslim Molenbeek 
 
 The Molenbeek district of Brussels is the home to many of the terrorists behind last year's attacks in Paris and last week's Brussels bombing. We find out why it's fertile ground for radical Islam. 
 
 RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: 
 
 The terror attacks in Brussels last week killed at least 38 people, including the attackers. That's according to the Belgian Health Ministry. More than 300 were wounded. Many people are asking how this could've happened since police presence in the Belgian capital had been high since the Paris attacks in November. And the chief suspect in those attacks, Salah Abdeslam, was arrested in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek. Neighborhoods like Molenbeek have been seen as fertile recruiting grounds for radical Islamist groups. In part, many experts say, because Muslim communities haven't integrated into the mainstream European society. NPR's Melissa Block has been reporting in Molenbeek, which has come to be known as the jihadi capital of Europe. 
 
 MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: It's just a quick walk from the center of Brussels with its gilded towers and shops selling fine chocolates and lace, a walk across a canal that used to be the industrial heart of the city and into a densely populated neighborhood lined with halal butchers and shops selling head scarves, hijabs. Molenbeek is a sprawling district, home to a large Muslim population mostly of Moroccan descent. It was also home to a number of the terrorists responsible for last week's suicide bombings in Brussels and the November attacks in Paris. And this is where I've come to find an entrepreneur named Ibrahim Ouassari. 
 
 IBRAHIM OUASSARI: I grew up in this house. It's the house of my father. So it's my area here, yeah. 
 
 BLOCK: Ouassari is 37, a second-generation Belgian, his parents from Morocco. He grew up next to the Molenbeek City Hall, not far from where two of the Paris attackers also lived. 
 
 OUASSARI: People think it's jihadi land here, you know? But it's really not like that. It's just some stupid people without a perspective for the future. 
 
 BLOCK: And that future can look bleak indeed. Parts of Molenbeek have a 50 percent unemployment rate. The Muslim community here is marginalized in ways large and small. Ibrahim Ouassari takes me back to the canal, a symbolic, psychological border between the two divided communities. He recalls crossing this canal to go to the Brussels City Center for the first time on his own when he was 16. And for the first time, he felt discrimination, felt like an outsider in his own country. In a cafe, someone told him, you 're not Belgian. 
 
 OUASSARI: It is like you're not really a Belgian guy, you know? It's a little bit like schizophrenia because in my mind I feel like Belgian guy. The other guy, he tell me, no, you are not. So what I am? 
 
 BLOCK: Ibrahim says his first name alone is an instant signal of identity. It even kept him from renting an apartment. 
 
 OUASSARI: I gave my name, Ibrahim. The guy he tell me no, it's not possible because we don't want Muslim. 
 
 BLOCK: ISIS recruiters have had an easy time finding foot soldiers in Molenbeek to join the fight. The recruiters feed on a population with few prospects for their future. Both Ouassari and his colleague, Morad Chahboun, know of young men from Molenbeek who have gone to fight in Syria. Chahboun tells me young professionals like him hope they can turn the Molenbeek narrative around. 
 
 MORAD CHAHBOUN: My feeling is that we are 99 percent the same. And though we think that our 1 percent different will lead us to kill their people, it's not the case. And definitely we try to change the perception on this. 
 
 BLOCK: I go to see Molenbeek's mayor, Francoise Schepmans, in her elegant, chandeliered office. 
 
 When you hear Molenbeek described as a jihadi capital, how does that strike you? 
 
 FRANCOISE SCHEPMANS: (Through interpreter) It's false, absolutely false. 
 
 BLOCK: But Schepmans does rattle off the names of the known terrorists from this neighborhood - Abdeslam, Abaaoud, Abrini - a web, she says, of people who knew each other from childhood, became delinquents, were radicalized, or as she puts it, contaminated together. 
 
 SCHEPMANS: (Foreign language spoken). 
 
 BLOCK: "That's the path," she says, "thugs, gangsters, radicals, terrorism." Last fall, a month before the Paris terrorist attacks, Belgium's federal office that coordinates threat analysis sent Schepmans a list of 80 residents of Molenbeek suspected to be Islamic militants. Local police did an investigation. And I ask her, what happened then? 
 
 SCHEPMANS: (Through interpreter) We transmitted that information to the federal police. 
 
 BLOCK: And then? 
 
 SCHEPMANS: (Through interpreter) That's up to the federal police to take care of. Everyone has their role. Everyone has their responsibility. 
 
 BLOCK: And that illustrates a problem that many here are furious about - dots that weren't connected before last Tuesday's attacks, siloed intelligence information, a fractured government divided into many parts that simply don't communicate with each other. Melissa Block, NPR News, Brussels. 
 
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– In the troubled Molenbeek district of Brussels, extremists have spied opportunity in the wake of last week's attacks. Over the weekend, young men in the heavily Muslim neighborhood were sent text messages, reading (in French): "My brother, why not fight the Westerners? Make the right choice in your life," the Guardian reports. The district, which was home to extremists involved in the Paris attacks as well as the Brussels bombings, is seen as fertile ground for extremists because many residents from North African backgrounds have failed to integrate with Belgian society, NPR reports. The youth unemployment rate is around 50%, and young people complain that employers refuse to hire people from Molenbeek. An imam at a local mosque tells the Guardian that parents are alarmed by how extremists are targeting local youth through social media. "They are being exposed to something like a cancer at a metastatic stage," he says. "It is really spreading very quickly. We have to race against time to develop an immune system for the children in our community so that they reject the message" of ISIS, he says. Belgian authorities, meanwhile, say the death toll from last week's attacks has risen to 35, not including three suicide bombers, the Washington Post reports. After the release of a suspect on Monday, authorities are still seeking the "man in the hat" seen on surveillance video before the airport blasts.