This article on Belgium antisemitism was published in yesterday’s edition of the JPost. Mr.Leiber also mentions Dr.Manfred Gerstenfeld’s new book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews.
Anti-Semitism in Belgium reaches new heights
I have devoted numerous columns of late to the tsunami of anti-Semitism sweeping through Western Europe.
I have devoted numerous columns of late to the tsunami of anti-Semitism sweeping through Western Europe, noting that aside from the frenziedly anti-Semitic Islamic extremists, the principal perpetrators are left-wing activists frequently led by those purportedly promoting human rights.
Manfred Gerstenfeld’s most recent book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews, documents evidence of the depressingly high levels of European anti-Semitism, highlighting the frequent employment of Holocaust inversion as a vehicle to incite Jew-hatred. He notes that opinion polls indicate that nearly half of all European adults – close to 150 million people – are today convinced that Israelis behave toward the Palestinians like the Nazis did toward the Jews.
This trend was corroborated in a recent report (published by the Gladstone Institute) exposing an outrageous situation in Belgium, the country of my birth and which thus struck a sensitive personal chord. Had my parents not immigrated to Australia on the eve of the war, they could have suffered the same fate as many members of my family who were among the 50 percent of the prewar Belgian Jewish community deported to and murdered in Auschwitz with the active assistance of the state bureaucracy and collaborators.
The report described an extraordinary Belgian primer for teachers of “Holocaust Remembrance” which appeared on the official central Flanders educational website database. Endorsed and funded by the Education Ministry, the template, designed for teachers of 6-12 year olds, shamelessly promoted hatred of Israel, and anti-Semitism, employing the crudest forms of Holocaust inversion.
It even reproduced a cartoon which had initially appeared in 2009 at the notorious Tehran Holocaust Denial conference, depicting a Jewish concentration camp inmate impaled on barbed wire in the form of a swastika. Entitled “Never Again,” it was accompanied by a caricature of an Arab in the same position titled “Over Again.” The message conveyed is crystal clear – Israelis, descendants of Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust, are treating the Arabs in the same manner as the Nazis treated their forebears.
