Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Belgian Lawmaker Performs Anti-Semitic Quenelle in Parliament

The president of Belgium’s parliament condemned the actions of a lawmaker who said that Zionists were responsible for the Holocaust and performed a quasi-Nazi salute in parliament.

“I would like to reinforce my condemnation of these hateful acts,” Andre Flahaut said on Jan. 23 in reference to the actions of Laurent Louis, who on Jan. 16 said in parliament: “The Holocaust was set up and financed by the pioneers of Zionism.”

The Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, a newly-established watchdog, pledged during its inaugural event to focus much of its activities on Louis — an independent member of the lower house of Belgium’s Federal Parliament.

“We do not wish to offer Laurent a podium,” Isaac Franco, the league’s vice president, said during the Jan. 27 event in Brussels. “But upon consulting the tens of thousands of visitors to his website, we see he represents a threat that needs to be confronted.”

The league’s president, Joel Rubinfeld, told JTA that Louis has a rich history of making anti-Semitic and revisionist statements on the Holocaust.

Recently, he said that Israel was guilty of Nazi crimes against Palestinians. Last year, he posed for pictures outside parliament while standing on an Israeli flag.

The CCOJB, the umbrella group representing French-speaking Belgian Jews, said last week it would file a complaint against Louis, who entered parliament as a representative of the small center-right People’s Party, but he was kicked out of the party and now remains in the body as a non-partisan.

During his address about the Holocaust, Louis also performed the quenelle — a salute which was invented by the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala and which involves folding one’s arm over one’s chest while pointing downwards with the other arm.

Dieudonne, who has seven convictions for anti-Semitism, is currently under investigation by tax authorities on suspicion that he is concealing funds in order not to pay roughly $90,000 in fines imposed on him for the statements.

Police recovered and confiscated nearly $900,000 at his home during a raid Tuesday, according to a report Wednesday by the RTL news network.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.