Belgium: Rampant anti-Israel activity on campuses has Jewish students desperate to make their voices heard

As reported (20 March) on this blog Belgium: Four universities invite Palestinian terrorist to speak as part of BDS week.

Benjamin Fischer makes an important point (see last paragraph) - in the face of so much hatred Jewish students are powerless and do not get help or sympathy.

Salah Hamouri, a frequent guest at Israel-bashing events in Belgium.

Via The Algemeiner:

The head of Europe’s Jewish students umbrella group told The Algemeiner on Wednesday that rampant anti-Israel activity on Belgian campuses has Jewish students desperate to have their voices heard. 

Catholic University of Leuven (KUL)

Benjamin Fischer, president of the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS), said four universities turned down appeals to cancel events featuring Palestinian terrorist Salah Hamouri, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine arrested in 2005 for plotting to assassinate Israel’s former Sephardic chief Rabbi, the late Ovadia Yosef. Despite a letter-writing campaign to university directors, spearheaded by EUJS and the Belgian Union of Jewish Students (UEJB), Hamouri was allowed to speak throughout February and March — during “Israeli Apartheid Week” — on the topic of Palestinians’ treatment in Israeli prisons at the University of Antwerp, the Free University of Brussels, the Catholic University of Louvain and the Catholic University of Leuven. 

“The directors told us that it was a matter of free speech, and they would permit the programs to go forward as planned,” Fischer said, noting that EUJS “took the unusual step of asking an event to be shut down, because we thought, in this particular instance, the campuses had gone too far.” (...) 

Fischer said the trials met by Jews on Belgium campuses are not comparable to those facing their US and UK counterparts, as radical Belgian student groups — specifically the Marxist COMAC youth movement and Een Andre Joodse Stem (Another Jewish Voice) — reflect the extreme anti-Israel and atheistic rhetoric found regularly in public and political discourse. 

“Being a student in Belgium means that there are campuses where you have to hide your Jewish identity,” he said. “The students here aren’t less active about responding to Israeli or Jewish issues, but they don’t have the numbers or the necessary support and resources of the international anti-BDS movement.”  

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