Belgian publisher removes opinion column that described an urge to stab ‘every Jew’ over Gaza

(CNN) — A Belgian publisher has removed an opinion column that has been accused of dangerously inciting antisemitic hatred, in which the writer said that the humanitarian suffering in Gaza made him want to “ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew I meet.” He later defended his words as being protected under free speech.

Herman Brusselmans, who is known for being controversial, recently wrote a column for Humo, a weekly Dutch-language magazine which, according to its publisher DPG Media Group, “provides in-depth background pieces to the news of the day” while doubling as a guide to arts and culture.

In his column on Sunday, headlined: “The Middle East will explode, a Third World War is coming,” Brusselmans described the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “short, fat, bald Jew” who “for whatever reason wants to ensure that the entire Arab world is wiped out.”

He continued: “For every Hamas or Hezbollah fighter killed by that sh*tty Israeli army, hundreds of innocent civilians are killed, and we can’t help but keep repeating that many of those are children, and that we here in the so-called safe West cannot imagine that the same fate would befall our children.”

Brusselmans added: “I see an image of a crying, screaming Palestinian boy, completely madly calling for his mother lying under the rubble, and I imagine that boy is my own son Roman, and the mother is my own friend Lena, and I become so angry that I want to ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew I meet.”

The comments sparked outrage both within and outside the Jewish community, ultimately forcing the publisher to take down the article.

“I understand that people who are not sufficiently familiar with HUMO or Herman Brusselmans’ style and are confronted with this quote without context are shocked. It was of course never the intention to hurt the Jewish community. If that did happen, we would like to apologize for it. That is why we ultimately decided to take the column offline. Anyone who knows HUMO a little knows that it is certainly not an anti-Semitic magazine,” Humo’s deputy editor-in-chief Matthias Vanderaspoilden wrote in a statement.

‘An incitement to murder’

The Brussels-based European Jewish Association (EJA) has described the column as “nothing short of an incitement to murder.”

In a statement on the EJA’s website, its founder and chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin said: “We know this is a shock-jock journalist, who pushes the boundaries. But publicly expressing his desire to stab the throat of any Jew he comes across is psychopathic. Given his popularity and infamy, it is also an invitation for others to do likewise. It is completely and utterly out of all bounds. It [is] nothing short of incitement to murder.”

In a phone interview with CNN on Wednesday, Margolin said the piece had heightened the fears of an already nervous community.

“Jews feel the atmosphere is as it was in the 1940s,” he said. “Now again Jews are asking themselves: has the time come to run away from Europe when we see this kind of article?

“It’s clear incitement and part of a very worrying trend in Belgium and all over Europe, of expression of hatred against Jews,” Margolin continued.

Others beyond the Jewish community have also reacted with horror. Assita Kanko, a Belgian Member of the European Parliament (MEP), said on X on Tuesday that she was “completely flabbergasted and sad” after reading the article.

Describing it as “pure and open anti-Semitism,” she added: “This is not about freedom of speech or satire, it’s a call to violence. It’s a call to murder. Why is @Humo even publishing something like that?”

Reports of incidents of antisemitism have sharply risen since October.

On October 7, Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 people hostage, according to Israeli authorities. Israel’s military response in Gaza has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians and injured more than 90,000, the ministry of health in the strip says.

Regina Sluszny-Suchowolski, chairwoman of The Forum of Jewish Organisations in Belgium, told CNN Wednesday that the number of antisemitism cases reported to the police have risen more than fivefold in Belgium in the 10 months since the war started. The incidence of actual antisemitic acts may be even higher, however, as research by the European Commission has revealed high levels of under-reporting.

Yohan Benizri, president of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium (CCOJB), the leading representative body of Belgian Jews, compared the article to Nazi propaganda.

“It’s exactly the same level as Der Stürmer - it’s the demonization of an entire people,” he told CNN, referring to the Nazi-era German antisemitic newspaper.

What has made matters worse, said Benizri, is the response from Humo and Brusselmans to the backlash.

When asked about the reaction to his column by Flemish newspaper Nieuwsblad, Brusselmans said: “Incitement to violence? In my column I do a thought exercise about how I would react if it were my loved ones who were affected. In the conditional tense. That sentence about the sharp knife is purely figurative, to emphasize the message. And that falls under the right to freedom of expression.”

Meanwhile in a statement sent to CNN, Vanderaspoilden said: “With satirical writers such as Herman Brusselmans, what is written should never be taken one hundred percent literally. That is why the editorial staff did not intervene in the text of our columnist, as we never do.”

He added in a separate statement that the magazine was “bored with the matter” and did not intend to remove the article, a stance that was later reversed.

Brusselmans did not respond to a request for comment from CNN. Vanderaspoilden told CNN that the writer has been “overwhelmed by the reactions and hate, so he doesn’t want to communicate.”

Rick Honings, a professor specializing in Dutch literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, published a monograph about Brusselmans in 2018 in which he examined his life, work and image.

Honings told CNN that the writer “often pushes the limit of what is moral or otherwise.”

He described him as a “shock author,” adding: “Brusselmans has been making politically incorrect jokes his entire writing career (since the 1980s), mostly about racist issues, but they are also often jokes about women.”

He continued: “At the same time, it is mostly meant as satire. In doing so, he manages to draw attention to himself time and again. It is not the first time that he makes jokes about Jews and the Holocaust, but his current comically intended comment goes pretty far even for Brusselmans.”

Research carried out by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in 2022 said that almost half of Jews in Belgium reported that they had experienced antisemitic harassment over the previous 12 months, while around a third said they had experienced antisemitic discrimination over the same period.

In recent years, controversy has erupted over a carnival in Belgium which featured antisemitic imagery on one of its floats. The Aalst Carnival was removed from UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list in 2019 after officials found the “recurrence of racist and antisemitic representations” to be incompatible with its principles.

In 2014, four people were killed when a gunman opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels.

This developing story has been updated.

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