When Joël Rubinfeld, the President of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, wrote an article thanking the “Righteous of our time” for standing up for Jews, it was rejected by the entire Belgian press.
Eventually Marianne magazine did run the article, showing a wider readership that Rubinfeld’s account of developments in Belgium makes for disturbing reading. It shows Belgium’s Jewish community—around 30,000 people—in a state of siege.
Readers are reminded of incidents in the “anti-fascist city” Brussels, where:
- Demonstrators celebrated the first anniversary of the October 7 pogrom with calls to “burn the Jews;”
- The Monument to the Righteous and the Paving Stones was desecrated;
- The Université Libre de Bruxelles, was occupied, renamed after a Palestinian terrorist, and ransacked—along with the beating of the co-president of the Union of Jewish Students of Belgium on the university campus
- The Israeli football team was banned from playing against Belgium’s national team, the Red Devils.
- Under pressure from parents, some schools have refused to participate in Holocaust commemorations;
- Palestinian flags flutter from the balconies of city halls in the capital and from the roof of the Socialist Party headquarters.
- Black-clad nine-year-old schoolchildren wearing keffiyehs are made to dance at the school fair to the Arabic song “My Blood is Palestinian.”
In Antwerp,
- Religious Jews have been insulted, stoned, and assaulted in the street;
- A Jewish school was refused hall rental for its graduation ceremony, citing a “genocide currently taking place in Gaza;”
- A bowling alley’s home screen displays “5 JEWS” to describe some youngsters relaxing there;
- The homes of rabbis who practice circumcision are searched and their instruments seized, while they face judicial demands for a recent list of the boys they have circumcised
- Antisemites meet in a park on November 9th—the main Kristallnacht anniversary— to “mutilate every Zionist.” The official Kristallnacht commemoration ceremony in Ghent (see below) was canceled, amid fear of violece.
In Ghent,
- a boycott of Israeli businesses in the Jewish state is voted on, with federal authorities urged to do the same;
- Israeli athletes are banned from the European Under-17 Ultimate Frisbee Championship.
- The campus of Ghent University is occupied, staff members are assaulted, and cutting relations with Israeli universities is celebrated—confirming the capitulation of the academic authorities to antisemitism.
- A weekly news columnist who publicised his “desire to stick a sharp knife in the throat of every Jew [he] meets” is acquitted.
Elsewhere Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated, swastikas scrawled on graves as Stars of David are torn off, against the backdrop of clearly antisemitics slogans being used on interminable street marches since October 7th.
While Rubinfeld praises colleagues and neighbours who are prepared to stand up to the hatred, he blasts the
collaborators of our time proliferate in the political sphere, newsrooms, judicial bodies, the academic world, artistic circles, community circles, and even in our streets where so-called “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations–“pro-Hamas” would be more in keeping with reality–increasingly recall the SA marches at Nuremberg.
Rubinfeld ‘thanking the Righteous’ reinforces the argument of our own Rod Dreher that “absent action, pogroms in Europe will become the new normal.”
