An influential Belgian author is being sued by the European Jewish Association after he wrote that Israel’s bombing of Gaza made him want to “ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew” he meets.
Herman Brusselmans, a popular novelist and public intellectual who appears regularly on television, sparked turmoil in Europe’s Jewish community with his weekly column in the Belgian magazine Humo on Sunday. The satirical piece describes Brusselmans’ vengeful sentiment toward Jews in response to the death of Palestinians in Gaza.
“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,” wrote Brusselmans, who has a reputation for provocative and obscene language.
He added, “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.”
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza following Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7 has killed close to 40,000 Palestinians. Palestinian health authorities, the United Nations and the World Health Organization say the majority have been civilians; Israeli officials say they believe the casualties have been half combatants and half civilians.
The high death toll has drawn criticism from world leaders, inflamed global opinion against Israel and triggered a surge in antisemitic incidents across Europe. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights found 400% increases in antisemitic incidents reported by various Jewish umbrella organizations.
Prominent rabbis and Jewish groups have accused Brusselmans of normalizing violence against Jews under the cloak of satire.
“We know this is a shock-jock journalist, who pushes the boundaries,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, who heads the EJA. “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.”
The EJA, which represents hundreds of European Jewish communities, has announced it is suing Brusselmans for “incitement to murder” and demanding his suspension from Humo.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis and the exiled chief rabbi of Moscow, likewise decried both Brusselmans and Humo for “creating a toxic environment that can lead to real-world violence.”
“While, of course, the government and military of Israel are their own distinct entities and have no official link to Jewish communities outside of Israel, we object to this author’s desire to stab a Jew in the throat for that murderous image alone, not for mixing Israelis and Belgian Jews together,” Goldschmidt said in an op-ed for the Jewish News Syndicate.
Brusselmans called the accusations “completely crazy” and argued that his imagery of taking a knife to Jews’ throats was metaphorical.
“With my column I wanted to say that when something is done to your loved ones for no reason, you are filled with total anger,” he said to the Belgian news service VRT.
His editors have also defended the column. “With satirical writers such as Herman Brusselmans, the writing should never be taken 100% literally,” said Humo’s editor-in-chief. “That is why the editorial staff did not intervene in the text of our columnist.”
But that defense wasn’t enough for Unia, an anti-discrimination public institution in Belgium, which joined the EJA in filing a complaint against Brusselmans.
“Boundaries have been crossed,” said Unia’s spokesperson Carol Poncin. “In our opinion, what he wrote is clearly antisemitism.”
