Brussels Mayor Hopes To Ban ‘Anti-Semite Summit’
A mayor from Brussels said he would like to block organizers from holding an event that Jewish groups called a “summit meeting for anti-Semites.”
Vincent De Wolf, the mayor of Etterbeek — one of 19 municipalities that make up the Brussels autonomous region of the federal Belgian state — has asked the governor of the Arrondissement of Brussels-Capital for permission to issue a ban on the May 4 event, the news site www.deredactie.bel reported Wednesday.
The event is being organized by Laurent Louis, a Belgian lawmaker with a record of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements. In January, he said in parliament that “the Holocaust was set up and financed by the pioneers of Zionism.” Last year he posed for pictures outside parliament while standing on an Israeli flag.
He said the event he was planning in Brussels was a “European Congress of resistance.” One of the speakers invited is the French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, who has seven convictions for inciting racial hatred against Jews and whom French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has termed a “professional anti-Semite.”
Other speakers include Alain Soral — the author of several anti-Semitic books and several people who collaborate with Dieudonne.
The Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, or LBCA, said that if the event, which it defined as a “summit meeting for anti-Semites,” goes through, “it will be the worst gathering of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semitic propagandists that Belgium has seen since World War II.”
LBCA urged authorities to prevent the event from taking place because “it represents a grave danger to democracy.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
