Belgian writer muses about ongoing Gaza war and his antisemitic murder fantasies, longing to stab Jews to death and condemning Prime Minister Netanyahu as a ‘small fat bald Jew.’
By David Rosenberg, World Israel News
A Belgian satirist is under fire this week, after he penned a column on the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in which he described his own antisemitic murder fantasy.
Herman Brusselmans, 66, a novelist and columnist for the satirical Flemmish-language magazine HUMO, dedicated his weekly column to his own anxieties fueled by conflicts in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the war between Hamas and Israel.
In the article, published on Sunday, Brusselmans admitted that the current conflict and coverage of the war had caused him dramatic “mood swings,” impacting his personal feelings towards Jews, towards whom he felt alternating senses of pity and murderous hatred.
“For every Hamas or Hezbollah fighter who is killed by the shitty Israeli army, hundreds of innocent civilians are killed, and we can do nothing but keep repeating that many of them are children, and that we here, in the so-called safe West, cannot imagine that the same fate would befall our children,” Brusselmans wrote.
Imagining civilian casualties in Gaza or Lebanon as his own family, Brusselmans opined that he at times felt a murderous urge to murder “every Jew” he comes across with a sharp knife.
“I see an image of a crying and screaming Palestinian boy, completely out of his mind, calling for his mother who is lying under the rubble, and I imagine that boy is my own son Roman, and the mother is my own girlfriend Lena, and I get so angry that I want to ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew I meet.”
“Of course, you always have to remember: not every Jew is a murderous bastard, and to give shape to that thought I imagine an elderly Jewish man shuffling down my own street, dressed in a washed-out shirt, fake cotton trousers and old sandals, and I feel sorry for him and almost get tears in my eyes, but a moment later I wish him to hell, and yes, that is a mood swing, and my upcoming bundle will unfortunately be full of it.”
Pinning the blame for the ongoing war on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Brusselmans described him as a “small, fat, bald Jew.”
Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, President of the Conference of European Rabbis, castigated Brusselmans for the column, condemning his comments as “murderous incitement” against European Jews.
“The published words of the well-known Belgian author and public figure Herman Brusselmans, that ‘he wants to ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew he meets’, is murderous incitement. Declaring his intent to murder is a shocking criminal offense. His heinous writing cloaked in free speech and legitimate political opinion must be dealt with by utter condemnation and harsh legal action.”