Belgium Election Triggers ‘Wave’ of Anti-Semitism
Belgium’s recent local elections triggered “an unprecedented wave of manifestations of anti-Semitism,” according to the country’s organization of French-speaking Jews.
The Oct. 14 election and the campaign that preceded it “were characterized by a flood of anti-Semitic events the likes of which we have never before seen,” Maurice Sosnowski, president of the CCOJB, said in a statement on Wednesday.
In Schaarbeek, a municipality near Brussels, “candidates who belonged to the Jewish community were attacked for their affiliation” and the municipality saw a “hate campaign under the pretext of anti-Zionism,” according to Sosnowski.
On Oct. 8 Belgian Health Minister Laurette Onkelinx complained to police about a pamphlet naming Yves Goldstein, a Jewish member of her party who contended for a seat on the city council of Schaarbeek, an “enemy of Islam.” The Turkish-language pamphlet called him “an active Zionist and an enemy of Islam,” Onkelinx said at a news conference.
The pamphlet was preceded by email warnings to voters to cast ballots against Onkelinx’s and Goldstein’s Socialist Party. Doing so, the email said, would be like “stabbing Palestinians in the back.”
Local politicians have been less resolute than Onkelinx in condemning this “hate speech,” according to the CCOJB statement.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
