Belgium: Right-wing politician "not accusing" Jews of Stalin's purges in anti-Zionist op-ed

Jean-Marie Dedecker is a Belgian Flemish politician and head of the right-wing LDD party.  Last year he was awarded the Prize for Liberty by the Flemish classical-liberal thinktank Libera!.

In a recent op-ed in the Belgian magazine Knack Dedecker supposedly 'criticizes Israel' - warning Europeans not to accept 'Israelis crimes' just because Palestinians are killing Israelis.  But as Jewish journalist Hans Knoop responds, the entire article is antisemitic.

Dedecker accuses Jews of using Western guilt for the Holocaust to whitewash their crimes against humanity in Palestine.

He brings quotes (not necessarily authentic ones) from right-wing and left-wing Israelis to demonstrate the vile nature of Jews and to demonize the Jewish people.

He even uses Stalin's purges in order to demonize Jews.  Blaming the Palestinians for the Holocaust, he says, is as perverse as blaming the Jews for Stalin's purges.  After all, Dedecker claims, many gulags were headed by Jews.  He accuses "the Jew" Uritzky of turning the secret police into a "real murder machine".  He says that "the Jew" Genrikh Yagoda was Stalin's most effective executioner and was responsible for millions of deaths, and points out that "the Jewish mass-murderer Lazare Kaganovitch" starved millions of Ukrainians.

It is indeed incorrect to blame the Palestinians for the Holocaust in Europe, but it is a fact that the Palestinian leadership pushed for a genocide of all Jews in Muslim countries including Palestine.
 Dedecker can claim that he said that it's 'perverse' to blame Jews for Stalin's purges, but this is in fact what he's doing.


Knoop points out that the big Stalin purges happened long before the State of Israel was founded and the Jews were the one group who suffered most from Stalin's terror regime.  Bringing the purges up as nothing to do with "criticizing Israeli policy".  Dedecker simply wants to show that Jews are despicable.


In fact, Dedecker points out that Orthodox people of all religions are all the same, and does so by denigrating Judaism:

"Ultra-Orthodox Jews men man only touch their wives, the others are apparently infectious.  As compensation for the discrimination, the rabbis decided that one may pick his nose on the Sabbath.  This isn't seen as work but rather fits the motto 'you should scratch where it itches'."

Dedecker concludes his indictment of Israel, the Jewish lobby and the Jews in general, by claiming that Israel recently adopted a law that bans people who criticize the "Promised Land".  Though Israel doesn't need to worry, Dedecker also says that he doesn't want to ever visit Israel again.

Knoop says that Dedecker denies being an antisemite, since it's banned by law, and that as usual in such cases, he will mention his Jewish doctor or that last year he helped a Jewish neighbor with his car.   However, if he's not an antisemite, he surely sounds like one.