Some time ago, I was contacted, in my capacity as a member of the RRA network (Research network against racism and anti-Semitism), by Fadila Maaroufi, co-founder of the Café Laïque in Brussels, practically the only person in Belgium who fights radical Islam and anti-Jewish hatred and who leads this fight at the risk of his life. Ms. Maaroufi provided me with the testimonies of several Belgian Jewish families who, abandoned by the institutions, ignored by the media, silenced by the political consensus, turned to her to find comfort but also refuge within its establishment, already targeted by fundamentalists of all stripes. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic.
I had the opportunity to directly collect testimonies from these families. Their accounts, supported by the official documents of the institutions which openly abandon them, do not bode optimistically for the future of the Jews in Belgium, but also for the fate of agnostics, atheists and other lay people who no longer dare open their mouths for fear of losing their jobs, remaining without an income and being the subject of social media smear campaigns by Islamists and their far-left allies. It must be added that the Jews are still the target of the Belgian far right, which seems to have denied nothing of its Rexist traditions (Rexism is a political movement of Catholic inspiration, founded by Léon Degrelle, which allied with Nazism during World War II).
The specialists’ findings are clear on the subject of Belgian institutions and their total denial of anti-Semitism. According the study carried out by the Belgian academics Joël Kotek and Joël Tournemenne for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation: “In Belgium, no scientific study has been carried out on the question of anti-Semitism in the school environment. It is true that this question has been a blind spot in Belgium. The subject does not divide, it is simply passed over in silence, as much by the political world as by the media and academia. The massacre that hit the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014 did not change anything, it did not has caused no particular awareness, yet politicians and journalists know that to date only specifically Jewish places – including nurseries, schools and youth movements – are subject to military surveillance. daily life and that supposedly Jewish students were harassed”.
The only Belgian media that echoed this study is The Free. In 2018, Yohan Benizri, the president of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium denounced not only denial, but the “explicit refusal to denounce anti-Semitism”.
Nazi songs and forced conversions
By way of example, here are two significant cases. Claude (1), a Jewish boy, atheist, talks about his origins in the Catholic school where he attended school. He immediately becomes the target of anti-Semitic attacks from some of his comrades. Seeing him, they ask “so it’s gauze?”, make the Nazi salute when they meet him, broadcast Nazi songs on smartphones in the schoolyard. Instead of saying “Degrelle (2) get out of this yard!” the Catholic school “recommends” that parents “change schools” in “the interest of the student”. Note that the school declared itself “inclusive”, but clearly in the style of Saint Paul before Vatican II, that is to say for everyone, except for the Jews.
Claude’s parents find a non-denominational school in a beautiful district of Brussels, where social diversity is guaranteed. And the ordeal begins again, but this time the anti-Semitic entertainments take on a now familiar air, more familiar than that of the extreme right. In this new non-denominational school, the vast majority of students are of Muslim obedience. As soon as the students learn that Claude is Jewish, “the dirty Jew” is glued to his skin immediately. The parents complain, Claude too, but the school must consider that it is a normal expression. After all, the very learned French indigenous sociologist Nacira Guénif has already publicly explained that “species of Jew” does not mean Jew-hatred. Outside of school, Claude is often chased by his “comrades”, insulted, called out as “Jew, Jew, Jew”….
But that’s not all. Claude, apart from the crime of being born a Jew, is a convinced atheist. And he doesn’t hide it, openly criticizing religion, in fact, all religions, in the context of the citizenship course. Students present in class then launch him in the presence of the teacher: “We are going to convert you, child of the devil, miscreant, you are going to burn in hell”. But Claude does not let it go, he insists: “religion is bullshit millennial”.
What does the teacher do during this exchange? He says it is wrong to criticize religions. A specialized educator threatens Claude “to have problems with the law if he continues to criticize religion”. A student threatens to bring his father “to teach secularism to Claude”. Claude is sanctioned by the school for his remarks with a delusional explanation, for us, the French: he gave his opinion on religion despite the “remarks of his educator”. He is then expelled from school for a few days. The parents of this boy end up taking him out of school, because they fear for his physical and psychological integrity.
Another testimony is striking: in another Belgian school, a Jewish boy is “converted” by his classmates in the schoolyard. Connoisseurs know that Islam is an inclusive religion, it is intended for everyone, and any Jew would be a Muslim without knowing it. The elegant solution was found by a charitable pupil, who, to spare his classmate the hell promised to the Jews, “converted” him into a “Muslim”, pronouncing the words of the shahada (profession of faith) in his place. We could smile, after all, children have fun. But this event is an absolute and very naive sign of intolerance, Islamic intolerance with regard to otherness, as well as the fear of Islam felt by Belgian schools. The educational institution is so afraid of him that it prefers to keep a Jew away from school so as not to disturb the peace and respect “for religions”. I insist: the problem is that it is not a question of the coexistence of “religions” but of total submission to Islamic demands through fear. The fear that forces us to make some sacrifices, especially that of the Jews. After all, by sacrificing them, by keeping silent about what happens to them, by turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic insults, we kill two birds with one stone: we satisfy old stock anti-Semites, like Léon Degrelle, and we believe we are coaxing Muslims . Belgians don’t know the Armenian joke: “let’s preserve our Jews!” (because after the Jews always comes the turn of others, history has shown this without ever contradicting itself).
Falsely consensual sheepish “neutrality”
Muslim anti-Semitism has shaped attitudes, as Christian anti-Semitism once did, and instilled fear not only in Jews, but especially in those who must take firm action to protect citizens.
However, in Belgium, we do not like to talk about anti-Semitism, as the study by the Jean-Jaurès Foundation shows. Belgian Jews suffocate and the establishment vigorously encourages and reinforces this stifling because it is “Islamophobic” in the etymological sense, that is, it is afraid of Islam. How else to explain that Belgian institutions are so silent on the uninhibited Muslim anti-Semitism that thrives in schools, in the streets, in universities? How to explain the punitive measures taken against an atheist student by the management of his school, when he criticizes religion? Why is he being punished? Because we must respect religions, said the letter addressed to the parents of this boy.
In the Belgian language, “to respect” means to be silent, not to show critical thinking, to crash into the falsely consensual sheepish “neutrality”. The Belgian non-confessional school, which we are talking about here, has set itself the task of bringing up young people who lack any capacity for analytical reasoning. “Dirty atheist”, “child of the devil”, “dirty Jew”, these are the insults that a high school student criticizing religion in a non-denominational school had to endure. And no voice has been raised in defense of it or in defense of the freedom to criticize religion. The institution is afraid, afraid to say, afraid to think, afraid to question otherness, that of Islam in particular, its foundations, its rejection of the Other, its certainties, its strength and its aspiration to universality. She is afraid of this Other who knows it very well, and who can do what she wants: mimic forced conversions, demand halal meat in canteens, ban any criticism of her practices, because the institution is afraid . The institution slips away, evading its responsibility believing it “has peace”, but what it does not understand is that each act of cowardice such as that of excluding a Jew for “his well-being” does not is just one more sign of its own weakness, of its inability to manage the situation by imposing the common law. Belgium is a country of consensual silence. And this is starting to spread everywhere.
And yet, it is not the warnings that are lacking, the complaints that are lodged, the works that are written on the fall of European humanism and the exposure of its Jews to Islamist vindictiveness. What are the Belgian institutions waiting for? That all Jews leave their land for fear of being attacked daily, as was the case in Arab countries for thirteen centuries, and for twenty centuries in Europe? That they convert to Islam, by the magic of a ritual decreed by a Muslim student? It may happen, the Jews will leave, a Fadila Maaroufi will not be enough to support them, but the Belgians will be next on the list.
1) The first name has been changed
2) Léon Degrelle is the founder of the Rexist movement in Belgium. SS-Obersturmbannführer and Volksführer der Wallonen, he ended his life peacefully in Spain in 1994, without being worried.
*Yana Grinshpun is a linguist and lecturer at the University of Paris III-Sorbonne-Nouvelle. She is also co-founder of the Observatory of decolonialism and identity ideologies.