Belgium: Holocaust denier sentenced to 6 months in prison

Via European Jewish Press:

Belgian Holocaust denier Siegfried Verbeke was sentenced to six months in prison after a criminal court in Mechelen found him guilty for proclaiming negationist theories.

The 74-year-old Verbele has been already sentenced several times for negationism in Begium and in sourrounding countries.

This time he sent a DVD to the Holocaust Museum in which he dismissed the historical facts about killing Jews in gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau as ‘’unbelievable.’’

He was given the maxium sentence of six months in prison and a hefty fine of eight thousand euros. The judge did not at any point follow the defense of Verbeke’s counsel, who said that there was no question of any spread of Holocaust denial since the museum staff had not looked at the contents of the DVD.

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Europe: Ours will be the last significant generation of European Jews

Joël Rubinfeld, president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, attended the 6th Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem. Upon his return, Mr. Rubinfeld was interviewed by Radio Judaica in Brussels about the future of Jewish communities in Belgium and in Europe. He declared:

"The few days I spent in Israel have not made me change my optimism or my pessimism about the situation and the way I view it.  I am a pessimist who fights.  I fear - and I sincerely hope that I am mistaken - that our generation will represent, in history books, the last significant generation of European Jews.

In 30 years, in 40 years, in 50 years, there will still be, of course, Jews in Europe but far fewer than today."

read more @ Philosémitisme blog (in French)

On the same topic:
Leading European Rabbi: ‘I have never heard so many concerned voices from my fellow Rabbis at the situation affecting Jewry in Europe’

Belgium counters US cuts with $23 million for UN Palestinian fund

Via The Times of Israel:

Extra cash from Brussels comes as UNRWA launches fundraising campaign after the Trump administration withholds $65 million Belgium has stepped in to help out the UN  

Agency assisting Palestinian refugees with an immediate disbursement of $23 million after the Trump administration suspended $65 million in aid for the international organization.

De Croo said he was responding to a global fundraising appeal from UNRWA in hopes of making up for funding cuts announced by the United States. The money is Belgium’s allocation for three years but because of the group’s immediate need, De Croo’s office said it will be “disbursed immediately.”

The US provides roughly one-third of UNRWA’s budget, and the agency has warned that it now faces the “most dramatic financial crisis” in its nearly 70-year history. The agency provides health care, education and social services to 5 million Palestinians across the Middle East. 

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Europe: 15 years since Durban - the conference that ushered in an era of Israel-demonization

One of the main players at demonising Israel at Durban was Belgian Pierre Galand (Socialist Party, Oxfam, Russell Tribunal on Palestine etc). From NGO Monitor 2004:

Immediately before the notorious UN Durban conference on racism took place in September 2001 Galand’s activities were a central part of the preparations. In a speech disseminated through the website of the Maoist Parti du Travail de Belgique (Workers Party of Belgium), and again at Durban, Galand declared: "Palestine has become the new Vietnam, the symbol of the unjust war. A people deprived of its rights, just like the Vietnamese of 50 years ago, the Palestinians represent in the eyes of a growing number of peoples, … a heroic people, who defend their basic rights and above all their dignity, in the face of an aggressive Israel …."  

Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor @ Algemeiner:

For both supporters and detractors of the state of Israel, no single conference of the past 15 years has had a more enduring impact on the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict than the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa.

The event, which took place in September 2001, was hijacked by many of the over 1,500 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in attendance, as well as by governments that reject Israel’s right to exist. Multiple instances of antisemitic imagery and language were reported at the UN-sponsored NGO Forum, and Jewish attendees were intimidated and excluded. Even the initial governmental draft, prepared at a UN preparatory conference in Iran, sought to demonize Israel, reinstating the antisemitic slander that Zionism equals racism. In the mainstream Jewish community, the overwhelming majority of which professes the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, there were no delusions as to whom was being targeted as a whole when the term Zionist was used in such a derogatory context. [...]

Since 2001, this declaration has served as a blueprint for the well-financed NGO network, aiming to demonize and isolate Israel internationally. The grossly unfounded accusations have exhaustively been repeated by anti-Israel groups, which lobby to influence the foreign policies of Israel’s allies, especially in Europe, and pursue investigations by UN bodies, the International Criminal Court and national justice systems of supposed Israeli “war crimes.”

Likewise, Durban marked , trade unions, media outlets and on many college campuses.

a turning point with the emergence of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaigns, which are rooted in the strategy set out in the NGO Forum’s Final Declaration. The situation has progressively worsened as Israel is obsessively targeted for boycott, prosecution and condemnation in the UN, European capitals

For many observers, the “Durban Strategy” marked the coming out party for a “new antisemitism.”

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Belgium: Feroz Pindiana Gondal, Jew hater and Hitler admirer

Aussie Dave @ Israelly Cool has uncovered another Jew hater who lives in the province of Limburg Belgium, who has family in Pakistan and who is a friend of the SpA (Socialist Party):

Meet Fraz Pindiana Gondal, who lives in Belgium. [...]  he hates Jews with a passion, posting some of the vilest antisemitic garbage you’ll ever see.

Update: Since I published my post, this cowardly Jew hater has removed the offending tweets. I did not take screenshots, but have this one from another tweeter, which should give you an idea of the type of vile trash he has been disseminating.

Since his outing by Israelly Cool, we at New Antisemite did a bit of research about Feroz Pindiana Gondal.  One wonders why none of his Belgian contacts is shocked by a man who has no hesitation in quoting Hitler and praising the Holocaust.  Judge for yourself. On Pinterest:  Feroz is a Hitler admirer.
 

He is kind enough to give us a translation in English and certifies that it a proven "true speech" by Hitler:

"I could have annihilated all the Jews in the world, but I left some of them alive so you will know why I was killing them."   

Fraz retweeted: "9000 refugee children reported to have disappeared in Germany. Organ mafia? Israel?"

On Fraz's Facebook account:

Fraz Pindiana be careful ppl the Jews using social media to send fake message behalf of Muslims about western and behalf of western against Muslims so please be careful read and think properly all message concern to present event if it is true or it could possibly true then comment and share thank you for time 

The truth of Palestine according to Fraz:

Fraz is a scientist: "this is cocacola cow pee and i am sure it is not healthy"

Another tweet by Fraz:

Belgium’s Proximus welcomes visitors to Israel to ‘Palestine’

Israelly Cool reports:

I think most of us are already accustomed to reports of certain companies omitting ‘Israel’ on their websites, and instead having references to ‘Palestine.’ In such cases, there is of course huge insult, but that insult arrives only after one searches the website.

An even worse level of insult is when it is pushed to you, as happened to someone from Belgium – with the mobile service provider Proximus – who arrived in Israel and had this appear on her phone:

You needn’t speak Dutch to see that Proximus’ message is welcoming her to ‘Palestine.’

Someone else with Proximus who had previously arrived in Israel received the following French version of the message, which does refer to Israel.

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This may also interest readers:
Belgium: Crisis center tells Israeli terror victims that Israel does not exist (Update: employee fired)

Belgium: Jewish boy ‘gassed’ with deodorant by classmates in showers to simulate Nazi gas chambers

An illustrative photograph of a school
shower (Wikimedia Commons)

The whole thing started two years ago when the children were 10 - it's frightening to think that, young as they were, they already knew so much about gas chambers and the extermination of European Jews (one and a half million being children).  For them, playing the Nazis and tormenting a classmate, because he is Jewish, was their idea of having fun.  Nothing wrong about that.  It went on and on and nobody cared or noticed. 

JTA reports:

Belgian elementary school students are accused of anti-Semitic bullying of a Jewish classmate, whom they allegedly sprayed with deodorant while he was showering at school to simulate Nazi gas chambers.  The three students told their Jewish classmate they were “gassing” him during the incident, according to his mother.

The Jewish student was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse over the past two years at his elementary school in the Brussels suburb of Braine-le-Chateau, according to a statement Friday by the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism. All the involved students are now 12 years old.

The mother of the alleged victim filed a police complaint last week over the bullying, which she said her son detailed to her. Francis Brancart, an education board official, confirmed Thursday that his office was looking into the matter, which he said may require the opening of an independent inquiry, the news agency Belga reported. He said he could not confirm the veracity of the complaints.

The alleged incident in the showers happened early last year. The three students pressed the deodorant canisters’ nozzles to the boy’s body, his mother said, causing burns and skin irritations on his back. She said it was one of dozens of incidents in which her son was subjected to violence, anti-Semitic jokes and intimidation.

The student complained to faculty but his mother said the teacher in charge ignored the complaints, even after her son asked for and got permission to stay indoors during recess to avoid harassment.  [...]

The principal said the teacher handling the mother’s complaint did not relay the anti-Semitic character of the harassment to her. She said the three students involved in the deodorant incident were reprimanded for their behavior, which they said was part of a game.

LBCA president Joel Rubinfeld told Belga he interviewed other students who confirmed the anti-Semitic nature of the “gassing” incident and the recurrence of jokes and taunts referencing the Holocaust in the student’s bullying by the three other classmates.

The case reported last week is one of several recent anti-Semitic incidents in Belgium, including the bullying of a high school student who was forced to change schools amid alleged inaction by the institution where the harassment occurred. Last year, Belgian media reported on the online shaming by classmates of a pro-Israel high school student who also left the public education system for a Jewish school.

Such cases, Rubinfeld said last year, are turning Belgian schools into “Jew-free” zones.

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Belgium: Antwerp Red Star Line Museum features writer who has posted anti-semitic/anti-Israel material

The President of Israel Reuven Rivlin will be visiting the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp on Tuesday June 21.  The Museum is "dedicated to telling the story of the two million immigrants who passed through Antwerp on their way from Europe to North America".  A large part were Jewish and as a result the Museum attracts many American Jewish visitors whose ancestors fled persecution in Europe before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. 

The fact that a man, Youssef Kobo's (real name Youssef Aouriaghel),  who has compared Israel to the Islamic state, thus implying that Rivlin is on the same moral level as arch-terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and made derogatory remarks about the Jewish community in Antwerp, features on the Museum's website, is deeply disturbing.  All the more so because the Museum will be hosting the President of Israel and is visited by many Jews whose ancestors were victims of European deeply-rooted antisemitism which led to the extermination of six million European Jews. 

This blog has reported on Youssef Kobo's outrageous remarks about Israel: Museum features antisemitic "Israel = ISIS" writer.

Kobo is an advisor on communications and diversity (multi-culturalism) to Bianca Debaets (the Flemish Christian democrat (CD&V) Brussels regional Secretary of State responsible for IT, the digital agenda, equal opportunities, animal welfare, and development aid and road safety).

Youssef Kobo posted this antisemitic cartoon last year.

To stress the point, Kobo added:

JSIL the crazy twin brother of ISIS, aka the Jewish State in the Levant aka Israel.  The evil, murderous Jews, twins of Islamic State, carving up Gaza.   

But there is more.  When two prominent Belgian politicians Bart De Wever and Kris Peeters visited a synagogue in Antwerp, Youssef Aouriaghel (aka Youssef Kobo) was outraged by Mr. De Wever's behaviour.  This is what he posted:

Translation:

Look, this is what I found. Bart De Wever [the Mayor of the city of Antwerp] is wearing a kippah and singing an hymn to Zionism at a synagogue in Antwerp. We now know why the N-VA [his party] stubbornly defends Israel while it perpeptrates one massacre after another in Gaza.

When will this Mayor pay a visit to a mosque in his city, wearing a djellaba? Or is it the case that the Antwerp Muslim community doesn't matter for him? It is much larger than the Jewish community. [The last point made by Kobo is absolutely spot on.  It is estimated that the Muslim population in Belgium stands at 800,000 while the Jewish community barely stands at 30,000.  The Jewish community is ageing and dwindling.]

It is reported that Kris Peeters (Flemish Christian democrat party, CD&V, like Bianca Debaets) addressed the congregation during the same visit at the Chabad Synagogue in Antwerp and also wore a kippah, but this fact doesn't seem to have caused any outrage as far as Youssef Kobo is concerned.

Both Facebook posts were promptly removed by Youssef Kobo after Minister Debaets was apprised of their offensive content by a Jewish media outlet.

The Museum and the city Alderman in charge, Philippe Heylen, have also been made aware of Kobo's remarks but, typically, see no reason why he and his article should not feature on the Museum's website.

In Belgium, this type of talk is acceptable discourse.

Belgium: Holocaust memorial patron is gas chamber negationist!

Drawing lifted from a Holocaust-
denial Portuguese blog

Belgian Jewish on-line magazine Regards reported an antisemitic incident which took place at a Brussels restaurant.

A diner overheard people at the table next to hers calling Jews a "filthy race" and denying the existence of gas chambers.  The lady and her husband drew a swastika on a piece of paper and pinned it above the table where the group of friends were sitting.  They were greatly amused, started laughing and explained that they had  first-hand experience of the war and contested the existence of gas chambers. 

An investigation revealed that the author of the remarks, Mr Jacques Engels, was a member of the resistance during the war and that he is a prominent member of the World War II memorial Kazerne Dossin.   He is a collector of war documents which he entrusted to the museum.  But it turns out that he denies the existence of gas chambers!

A question arises: how can someone be an active supporter of a museum/memorial dedicated to the Jews deported from Belgium and murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and at the same time deny the existence of gas chambers?

Mr Engels has since explained that his words had been taken out of context. People who know him have indicated that it is not the first time that Mr Engels, who is now in his 90s, has engaged in Holocaust-denying.

Belgium: As Jews flee Belgium, a seder marks a family exodus

Cnaan Liphshiz writes @ JTA:

Anti-Israel demonstration in Brussels

I was feeling nervous about coming to Brussels for seder with my family.   Making the 130-mile trip there from my home in Amsterdam meant taking my 5-month-old son on a train that last year saw an attempted jihadist attack, and into a city that is still reeling and on alert from the March 22 Islamist bombings that killed 32 people.  [...]

My family’s “Echad Mi Yodea” this year was a shadow of its former self in what I suddenly realized was a vivid illustration of the absence of relatives from my age group who, like many Belgian Jews, have left their native country because of its anti-Semitism problem. With each passing year, there were fewer of us around the seder table.

My Belgian relatives have said goodbye to nine young seder rioters over the past 15 years. Six enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces and made aliyah. Two immigrated to the United States and one moved to London.

I came to Brussels this year because this seder was the sendoff for a second cousin and his wife, a physician and an architect, who are moving to Florida. His sister and her Belgian Jewish husband already live there.

“This is my last seder as a European,” cousin Mark (not his real name) told me over the phone. We spoke in Hebrew, a language learned by all my Belgian relatives my age at the insistence of aunts and uncles who were born to Holocaust survivors and who always regarded aliyah as a contingency plan in case things went south in Belgium.


“I want you to be there to send me off from slavery to freedom,” Mark said.

He feared for the future of his own two children in a country where Jewish schools are under heavy military guard and where Jewish students are being forced out of public schools because of anti-Semitic bullying.
“Things are bad here and I want a better future for my children,” he told me.

I asked Joel Rubinfeld, the founder of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism and a former president of the CCOJB umbrella of group of French-speaking Belgian Jewish communities, whether my family was unusual when it came to its emigration agenda.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “There is the beginning of an expedited emigration process. Our only statistical view on it is through aliyah, which tells a very partial story in a community with highly educated members who can settle anywhere in Europe and have little trouble getting visas to the U.S., Canada and Australia.”

In 2014, Rubinfeld warned Belgian Jewry was seeing an “exodus” because of anti-Semitism.

Last year, 287 Jews immigrated to Israel from Belgium, which has a Jewish population of about 40,000. It was the highest figure recorded in a decade. From 2010 to 2015, an average of 234 Belgian Jews made aliyah annually — a 56 percent increase over the annual average of 133 new arrivals from Belgium in 2005-2009, according to Israeli government data.  [...]

“Europe is doomed. The bad guys won,” she said. “I’m not going to raise my children in fear just to make a point.” 

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Belgium: Brussels Jewish Museum shooting was the first terror attack by the Islamic State in Europe

Paco Cantero and Ana Pouvreau wrote an article @ Causeur, about the terrorist attacks carried out in Brussels and wonder who had really understood what had been simmering in "Molenbeekistan" (a reference to Molenbeek, a Brussels district known to have become an Islamic terrorist hub).

The authors make the interesting, but generally neglected point, that the Jewish Museum shooting was the first attack by the Islamic State in Europe and "the first anti-Jewish attack in Brussels since the Second World War", as noted by Maurice Sosnowski, the then president of the Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium.

Mehdi Nemmouche at the Museum

They state that the attack perpetrated at the Jewish Museum by French islamist Mehdi Nemmouche in 2014, which left four dead, should have prompted the Belgian people to come out of their lethargy and the political authorities to take appropriate measures to avoir further bloodshed.

What is in no doubt, they argue, is that for many Belgians the attack had targeted a particular community and as such they saw no reason to be unduly concerned.

As in France, where the shooting at the Jewish school Ozar HaTorah-Toulouse, three children and a father were killed by Mohamed Merah in 2012, was the harbinger of a descent into hell, the Brussels anti-Semitic attack should have set alarm bells ringing, all the more so because anti-Semitism had been on the rise for several years, and risen markedly since the second intifada.

Like many of the Paris and Brussels terrorists, Mehdi Nemmouche had  links with Molenbeek where he had been living for six weeks on his return from Syria, and it is assumed that he prepared the killings there. And the horror does not stop here. Ex-hostage in Syria, journalist Nicholas Hénin, revealed that Nemmouche ‘tortured prisoners’ and claimed to have raped and killed young mother before beheading her baby.

read the article in French

Belgium: Jews aren’t safe in Belgium - nor is anyone else

Editorial by Judith Berman @ Algemeiner:

Two victimes of the massacre at the
Jewish museum in Brussels perpetrated
by Mehdi Nemmouche (2014)

Following the terrorist attacks in Brussels, it has been revealed just how incredibly lax and ill-prepared Belgium’s security authorities were. Belgian authorities had accurate advance warnings that terrorists planned to launch attacks at Brussels airport and in the subway system, yet failed to act.  [...]

Nevertheless, the embarrassing details of the show that passes for security around Jewish institutions is shocking in its extreme amateurishness. After the Brussels attacks, Brussels Rabbi Menachem Hadad told Israel’s Army Radio that soldiers, who were posted outside a synagogue and the city’s Chabad House following the terrorist attack in Brussels’ Jewish Museum in 2014, told him that for months, they used to guard the area with no bullets in their rifles. The English language does not contain a fitting combination of words to comment on such a spectacle. [...]

Whether common or not, Belgians at any rate clearly appear to treat hatred of Jews and Israel as perfectly normal and acceptable. In a video captured by French RTL television of a vigil for the terror victims in Brussels at the Place de La Bourse, a hijab-wearing woman can be seen uninterruptedly replacing an Israeli flag with a Palestinian one and then proceeding to tear up the Israeli flag. Throngs of people surround her, yet no one intervenes. Another video of a Brussels vigil shows a man stepping on the Israeli flag and covering it with a Palestinian one, again unhindered by any bystanders.

Source: Joods Actueel

Perhaps this is because their own state authorities teach Belgians that hating Israel is indeed perfectly normal and acceptable. In 2013, the Belgian Education Ministry website featured a virulently anti-Semitic cartoon, which first appeared at one of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad’s infamous Holocaust denial conferences in Tehran in 2009, unbelievably, as part of an exercise for trainee teachers. The cartoon showed a Jewish man impaled on the fence of a concentration camp next to a man wearing a keffiyeh — an Arab headress — their limbs arranged in the form of a Nazi swastika. The caption “never again” appeared above the image of the Jew and the words “over again!” were written at the Arab’s right foot. In the exercise, the teachers were asked to analyze the cartoon with one of three statements: “This is a Palestinian fleeing Jews”; “Jews want the entire area of Palestine back”; or “Jews call Palestine Israel.” This is what Belgium tells its teachers to teach Belgian children and then they feign “shock” when the results play out in the streets.

Abou Jahjah

Similarly, ancient antisemitic tropes and blood libels are featured in the daily Belgian press.  

A leading Belgian daily, De Standaard, claimed in 2013 that Jews “sometimes poisoned Palestinian water wells.” [Abou Jahjah is a political commentaor @ De Standaard] 

Cartoon by Zeon

In Molenbeek itself, also in 2013, a poster for a conference about Zionism titled “Let’s talk calmly about Zionism,” organized by a local chapter of the Socialist Party, featured a caricature of a Jew so vile that it could have been taken straight out of Der Sturmer  [Molenbeek fighting anti-Semitism with viciously anti-Semitic cartoon and Molenbeek 'youths' threatened Jews and drove Jewish shops out of business]

The Belgians are mourning their dead, now that it is too late, but they contributed energetically themselves toward creating an enabling atmosphere of hatred, even right in the “jihadi base” of Molenbeek.

On Friday, antisemitic graffiti was found in a schoolyard in Braine-le-Comte near Brussels. It featured a swastika, a Star of David and the text: “Juden, Arbeit Macht Frei.”

Even if the Belgian police outside the Jewish institutions would have bullets for their rifles, it would make no difference by now. Belgium has already failed on too many levels for it to recover.

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France: Molenbeek dwellers say Zionists behind Paris terrorist attacks

Le Monde reports that Molenbeek Muslim inhabitants, following the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the terror suspect who helped perpetrate the November jihadi massacre in Parirs that claimed the lives of 130, unsurprisingly, say that Zionists and the secret services masterminded the attacks.

All sorts of conspiracy theories fly around - many will, while deploring the violence, ask who is behind it all? 

It is worth reminding our readers that Philippe Moureaux, the former mayor of Molenbeek declared that (the lobby) foments hate of Arabs in the West to justify Israel politics:

Philippe Moreaux, a former Belgian francophone socialist minister, told Maghreb TV, based in Brussels, that there is a sort of contagion of the Israeli-Palestinian problem and that some [the Jewish lobby ?] have an interest in exacerbating animosities here to mirror what happens there.

He argued that it is obvious that in the West it [the Jewish lobby ?] works to spread hatred of Arabs in order to justify the politics of Israel.

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