Belgium: Virulent anti-Semite has sculpture and street named after him in Brussels

Edmond Picard

The recent events at Charlottesville, the fate of Confederate monuments in the United States and President Trump's reactions have drawn a lot of fire in Belgium - the media whose anti-US bias is no secret have commented very negatively about the events and Trump.  But how does francophone Belgium fare in this respect?  Take the case of the arch-antisemite and socialist Edmond Picard, "inventor of a so-called 'scientific and humanitarian' anti-Semitism".  For Picard Jews are disgusting, the absolute scum of the earth, with no redeeming features. Does it matter?  Not really.  He has a street named after him in Brussels and a statue at the Brussels Court House (see below).  Not only was he an anti-Semite but he was also a racist who compared blacks to apes.  All in the name of science and for the benefit of mankind.

Source: Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance  by Philip Mendes

In Belgium, Senator Edmond Picard, a famous socialist, developed at the end of the 19th century the theory of a so-called 'scientific and humanitarian' anti-Semitism. According to Picard, Jews were unproductive parasites who participated in usury and capitalist piracy through financial means.   

He accused Jews of inventing stock exchange speculation and dominating journalism and political, as well as social,  leadership throughout Europe.  He acknowledged that there some (perhaps many) poor Jews as well as wealthy Jews, but claimed this did not change the fact that Jews were an inferior race.   Picard's anti-Semitism also influenced some Belgian socialists, such as his disciples, Jules Destrée and Léon Hennebicq.  Destrée, a prominent member of the Belgian Labour Party, associated Jews with financial speculation.

Source: Encyclopedia of Judaism

PICARD, EDMOND (1836–1924), Belgian lawyer and antisemite. Picard became an active advocate of socialism, then of antisemitic racialism, and attempted to forge an alliance between the two ideologies. He fought for the socialist cause between 1866 and 1907, when he left the Socialist Party, although he continued to call himself a socialist. 

In 1888 Picard visited Morocco on a diplomatic mission and from then on turned his talents as a writer to outright racialist propaganda. Observing Arabs and Jews there, he concluded that Semites and Aryans were irreconcilable races. 

In the following years he wrote La Bible et le Coran (1888), Synthèse de l'antisémitisme (1892), which was reprinted during the German occupation of Belgium in World War II, and L'Aryano-Sémitisme (1899), a collection of 19 articles previously published in the socialist daily Le Peuple under the bizarre title L'Antisémitisme scientifique et humanitaire. 

Picard abhorred any intermingling of races and urged Aryans to protect themselves from the "Semitic invasion." He presented Jesus as an Aryan and the Jews as Asians. 

Seeing no contradiction between antisemitism and socialism, he believed that brotherhood of the oppressed did not necessarily imply equality between all races. He was influenced by Proudhon 's anti-Jewish ouvriérisme and by Gobineau , as well as by his Catholic education which provided a receptive ground for animosity toward the Jews. He succeeded in infecting the minds of leading socialists like Hennebicq (1871–1940) and Destrée (1863–1936); but thanks to the efforts of E. Vandervelde, L. De Brouckère, and C. Huysmans, the Socialist movement in Belgium officially proscribed antisemitism. Yet the Socialist Party newspaper, Le Peuple, never refused to print Picard's articles. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY: R.F. Byrnes, Anti-semitism in Modern France, 1 (1950), index; Silberner, in: HJ, 14 (1952), 106–18.

Source: Wikipedia (in French)

A bust of Edmond Picard is on display at the Court House in Brussels. In 1994, lawyer Michel Graindorge smashed Picard's bust invoking his anti-Semitism. Graindorge was sentenced in first instance. During the appeal proceedings, the Advocate General stated that "Is the act of overthrowing the bust of a bastard honorable? In that case, there would be so many other statues that could be knocked down at the Court House." On 27 November 1995 the Court of Appeal of Brussels granted him the suspension of the sentence. In 1998, the bust was replaced by the curator of the Palace. 

A Edmond Picard street was created as part of the "General Plan of alignment and expropriation by zones of the Berkendael district" (1902-1904), straddling the municipalities of Ixelles (1-43, 2-52) and Uccle, connecting the Georges Brugmann square with the Vanderkindere street.

If you can stomach the most vile anti-Semitic venom by Edmond Picard click HERE.