A little less than a year after Nazi
Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, the Jews in the city of
Antwerp—where slightly more than 50% of the country’s Jews lived at that
time—were subjected to a pogrom. The violence on April 10, 1941, was
carried out by supporters of a Flemish Nazi organization under the
approving eyes of German officers. “They attacked two synagogues and a
rabbi’s home,” according to an account published by Yad Vashem, Israel’s
national memorial to the Holocaust, “and were not restrained by the
fire department or police.”
Paul-Henri Rips, who was 11 years old when
he witnessed the pogrom, recalled that the synagogue his father had
helped to found was set alight by the mob. “Now, as I stood on the
corner, all I saw was a heap of prayer books, Torah scrolls and ark
curtains burning on the sidewalk, flames leaping high from the building
itself as it burned,” he wrote in a subsequent memoir. “Although the
fire brigade was present, members of the Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond
(VNV, the Flemish National Union) and German officers standing nearby
prevented them from extinguishing the fire.”
The mob in Antwerp had been fired up by a
screening of the vicious Nazi Party propaganda film “Der ewige Jude”
(“The Eternal Jew”). Shot in the ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw in Poland,
the film—directed by the Nazi cineaste Fritz Hippler—depicted Jews as
physically grotesque and morally depraved, rats in human form bent on
world domination. One year later, the deportation of Jews in Belgium to
Auschwitz and other concentration camps began in earnest.
The stench of that noxious, pogrom-stoking atmosphere pervades the latest edition of Humo,
a Flemish-language weekly that purports to be a satirical magazine. One
of its regular contributors, 66-year-old Herman Brusselmans, published a column
that is a strong candidate for the most dangerously antisemitic article
to appear online and in print in the 10 months since the Hamas pogrom
in southern Israel unleashed a new wave of global Jew-hatred. Because,
for all of the horrific content we’ve been exposed to during this
period, explicit calls for violence outside of social-media posts have
been rare. Not so with Brusselmans, who wrote candidly in a publication
that enjoys a healthy circulation in Belgium that the actions of the
Israel Defense Forces in Gaza made him “so angry that I want to ram a
knife through the throat of every Jew I meet.” That must have been how
the Flemish Nazis felt in April 1941, as they left the cinema hunting
for Jews and brimming with the hatred imparted by Hippler’s film.
Like 99.9% of Americans—and probably,
Europeans outside of Belgium—I’d never heard of Brusselmans before his
exhortation to murder Jews appeared. Judging by his photograph and his
style of writing, he rather fancies himself as a witty raconteur and
social commentator proudly unbound by convention. Long, straggly hair
frames an angular face that peers at you from behind heavily-rimmed
black glasses. I haven’t heard him speak, but I imagine that his voice
has been appropriately scorched by the cigarettes he smokes. Hermann may
be a baby-boomer, his photo suggests, but he’s down with the kids. And
hey, he’s funny, too.
Except that he isn’t. Really, seriously isn’t. Reading the rest of the
article, I found myself wondering whether the shortage of decent
columnists in Belgium is so grave that they need this guy to fill space.
For a start, he’s clearly a misogynist and a homophobe who shares that
disturbing European penchant for toilet humor. In the torturous
paragraphs leading up to his confession that he wants to stab Jews, he
tells us that he’s working on a new “collection” of his writings with
the charming title, “Full of poop with an ugly woman.” Next, he
describes seeing a poorly dressed elderly man walking down the street
and ruminates on whether this unfortunate gentleman had a wife who
committed suicide, a daughter who became pregnant at the age of 13, and a
son who is “so gay that many other gays said to him, ‘Don’t exaggerate,
Alain.’” Turning once more to the man’s appearance, he offers some
sartorial advice: “Cut your feet off, you bastard, then you’ll be rid of
those stupid sandals.”
Had I not had advance warning of what was
coming, I would have stopped reading upon encountering those lines. But I
persevered, learning that Brusselmans was worried about an impending
World War III. Enter, of course, the Jews. It’s all the fault of a
“small, fat, bald Jew who bears the ominous name of Bibi Netanyahu, and
who for whatever reason wants to ensure that the entire Arab world is
wiped out.” That description of Israel’s prime minister echoes the
caricatures of Jews published in Nazi rags like Der Stürmer. At
this point, Brusselmans morphs from a mouthy schoolboy immersed in his
own sexual anxiety into the Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, raving
about the “sh***y Israeli army” murdering Palestinian children.
Imagining his girlfriend and his son buried beneath the rubble of Gaza,
he declares that such a sight would have him reaching for the nearest
knife to drive into the nearest Jew.
Had this article appeared 30 years ago, we
would likely have written Brusselmans off as an embittered failure so
overwhelmed by his own neuroses that he projects them onto others. After
all, antisemitism provides a natural home for sociopaths like this,
allowing them to elide the real reasons for their lack of professional
success, their inability to form meaningful relationships, their
fixation with denigrating those around them and the nagging knowledge
that as soon as they leave their barstool, everyone who remains
expresses relief that the “asshole” has called it a night. But we are
living in different times, in an environment where a call for a pogrom
can be recast as a penetrating critique. The pain caused by contemporary
antisemitism is partly rooted in the fact that we can’t ignore it.
Someone like Brusselmans both understands this and seizes on it.
Since that wretched column was published, the European Jewish Association has announced legal proceedings against Brusselmans and Humo
for incitement. As Assita Kanko, a Belgian member of the European
parliament, pointed out: “[T]his is not about freedom of speech or
satire, it’s a call to violence. It’s a call to murder.” Given their
country’s laws against hate speech, one has to assume that Belgian
judges have no choice but to agree with her.
Perhaps Brusselmans will land himself a
prison sentence, where he can test how his attempts at humor go down
with the other inmates. Perhaps he’ll get off with a fine or a suspended
sentence. Perhaps his call to slaughter Jews will be ignored
completely, for when it comes to punishing antisemitism in the courts,
Europe these days encourages the lowest of expectations. In which case,
Herman, rest assured that we Jews won’t forget. Sleep tight.
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