Popular Belgium writer publicly declares burning desire to murder Jews and world typically ignores
By David E. Kaplan
Clearly, when you kill Jews it’s not murder – something else – but not murder!!
Is there any wonder that when Jews were massacred on October 7, the world quickly lost interest and then comfortably pivoted to blaming the victims not the perpetrators. How insightfully resonant are the poignant words of Booker Prize-winning author Howard Jacobson in his essay on the Shoah and antisemitism:
“The world will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.”
Will the world now also not forgive us for October 7?
It seems that when Jews are murdered, “they had it coming” or “they deserve it”. It’s not murder!
So must subscribe the acclaimed Belgium man of prose and poetry, Herman Frans Martha Brusselmans, who passionately penned:
“I want to push a sharp knife in the throat of every Jew I see.”
It would seem to Brusselmans that killing a Jew is not murder!
A novelist, poet, playwright and columnist, Brusselmans lives in Ghent and is one of the best-selling authors in Flanders. When he expressed to the world his desire to murder Jews, he did so not in a raged tweet (X) but in his regular Flemish HUMO magazine column published in Belgium. Clearly, writing with such murderous intent for this popular Dutch-language Belgian weekly, a magazine first published in 1936, was not a spur of the moment expression but one that he had thought long and hard. He must have known only too well that in the current climate of global antisemitism, his writing would incite violence against Jews. He didn’t care.
Or maybe he did care, he cared to seeing again – metaphorically speaking – smoke rising from the ovens of Auschwitz.
A man of words who only too well knows how his own country succumbed to the words of hate when during the Holocaust in Belgium, saw the systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder of Jews. Out of about 66,000 Jews in Belgium in May 1940, around 28,000 were murdered, mostly at Auschwitz. Is this what this best-selling Flemish writer would like repeated? After all, his words are clear that he wants to push a sharp knife in the throat of “EVERY JEW” he sees.
And of the Israeli army that is doing its best and at great sacrifice to defend all Israelis and bring back the hostages, Brusselmans refers to as:
“that Israeli shitty army.”
Israel’s ambassador to Belgium Idit Abu Rosenzweig rightly questions beyond the hateful writing:
“How did this pass editing?”.
Surely legitimizing violence must have crossed a red line. Asks the
ambassador:
“What if someone said in Belgian press ‘I’m so angry I want to stick a knife in the neck of every Muslim I meet?’ Herman Brusselmans did. In Belgium press. But relax! It wasn’t about Muslims; it was just about Jews. In a country where Jews are attacked daily and 70% report fear for their lives.”
Just browsing recent papers, one cannot escape reading about rampant antisemitism across Europe. On Friday last week, US women’s wrestling gold medalist, 20-year-old Amit Elor revealed that she had received antisemitic messages on social media while at the Paris 2024 Olympics like:
“You belong in the gas chamber”
This is just one of the many comments she says she has received recently.
On Instagram the gold medalist responded:
“Eight years ago, my grandparents survived the Holocaust, but antisemitism is all around us.”
It is, across Europe, including in Leeds in the UK.
A gas fitting company based in Leeds called last month for an attack on “filthy Zionist dogs” and claimed that “occupied people” have the right to resist “by any means necessary”.
Thus, October 7 massacres are quite in order.
On its Facebook page, Lindley Gas Services posted a series of harsh antisemitic statements, including a picture of a person throwing a Star of David into a trash can, with the caption:
“Keep the world clean”
Clearly, Belgium novelist Brusselmans is keen to help with this “cleaning”.
Sadly, Brusselmans is not an aberration but a sick symptom of Europe today, where Jews today have to again ask the same question their ancestors asked in the 1930s:
“Is there a future in Europe today for Jews?”
With such ‘writing’ in long-established magazines like Belgium’s HUMO to kill Jews wherever you see them then surely the message in Europe is clear:
The writing is on the wall!
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