By CNAAN LIPHSHIZ
At a parade here in March, revelers danced to a song about Jewish greed while standing on a float shaped like an Orthodox Jewish man with a rat on his shoulder holding money.
In August, an op-ed in a major Belgian newspaper called Jews in Israel land thieves with a religious superiority complex and “ugly noses.”
And earlier this month, a local politician presented a painting he made featuring a swastika and the words “And God created A. Hitler” at a prestigious Brussels art gallery.
Such incidents are not unusual in Western Europe, where public displays of anti-Semitism are making a comeback. But their defense by authorities and the responsible parties has prompted concern that anti-Semitism is gaining a level of mainstream acceptance in Belgium that is matched by few, if any, other Western European nations.
“Nothing is unique about the prevalence and nature of anti-Semitism in Belgium,” said Joel Rubinfeld, a former co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament and current president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism. “What is unusual is that recently, we’ve had a string of incidents where officials, opinion shapers and artists are defending anti-Semitism. That is a quite worrisome development, which I think is only happening in Belgium on this level.”
In the case of the parade, an annual affair in the city of Aalst that is recognized by UNESCO as an event of significance to European culture, both the organizers and Mayor Christoph D’Haese defended the display as part of the parade’s tradition of irreverence. The 2013 parade featured a float in which revelers in Nazi clothes held cans labeled Zyklon B, the poison gas used to murder Jews, and walked alongside people portraying Holocaust victims. Organizers defended that display as well.
Elsewhere in Western Europe, expressions of what mainstream Jewish organizations consider anti-Semitism occur fairly regularly. But those responsible rarely defend them with conviction, or at all.
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