CNN
—
A Belgian publisher has removed an opinion piece that was accused of dangerously inciting anti-Semitic hatred. In it, the author wrote that the humanitarian suffering in Gaza had led him to “shove a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew I meet.” He later defended his words, arguing that freedom of expression protects.
Herman Brusselmans, known for his controversies, recently wrote a column for Humo, a weekly Dutch-language magazine that, according to its publisher, DPG Media Group, provides “in-depth background reports on the news of the day” while also serving as a guide to arts and culture.
In his Sunday column, headlined “The Middle East is about to explode, a third world war is imminent,” Brusselmans described 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 this shitty Israeli army, hundreds of innocent civilians are killed, and we cannot help but repeat over and over again that many of them are children and that here in the so-called safe West we cannot imagine that our children could suffer the same fate.”
Brusselmans added: “I see the image of a crying, screaming Palestinian boy, completely madly calling for his mother lying under the rubble, and I imagine that this boy is my own son Roman and the mother is my own friend Lena, and I get so angry that I want to ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew I meet.”
The comments sparked outrage both inside and outside the Jewish community and eventually forced the editor to remove 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 happened, we would like to apologize for that. 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,” wrote Humo’s deputy editor-in-chief Matthias Vanderaspoilden in a statement.
The Brussels-based European Jewish Association (EJA) described the column as “nothing less than incitement to murder.”
In a statement on the EJA website, its founder and chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin said: “We know this is a shock journalist who crosses boundaries. But to publicly express his desire to stab the throat of every Jew he meets is psychopathic. Given his popularity and bad reputation, it is also an invitation to others to do the same. It is completely and utterly out of place. It is nothing less than incitement to murder.”
In a phone interview with CNN on Wednesday, Margolin said the article heightened the fears of an already nervous population.
“Jews feel the atmosphere is like the 1940s,” he said. “Now Jews are asking themselves again: is it time to flee Europe when we see articles like this?
“This is clearly incitement and part of a very worrying trend in Belgium and across Europe expressing hatred against Jews,” Margolin continued.
Even outside the Jewish community, people reacted with horror. Belgian MEP Assita Kanko said on Tuesday on X that she was “completely stunned and saddened” after reading the article.
She described it as “pure and blatant anti-Semitism,” adding: “This is not about freedom of speech or satire, it is a call to violence. It is a call to murder. Why does @Humo even publish something like this?”
Since October, the number of reports of anti-Semitic incidents has increased sharply.
On October 7, Hamas militants in Israel killed about 1,200 people and took over 250 hostage, according to Israeli authorities. Israel’s military response in Gaza has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians and injured over 90,000, according to the Gaza Strip’s Health Ministry.
Regina Sluszny-Suchowolski, chair of the Forum of Jewish Organizations in Belgium, told CNN on Wednesday that the number of anti-Semitism cases reported to police in Belgium has more than quintupled in the 10 months since the war began. However, the number of actual anti-Semitic acts may be even higher, as European Commission research has shown that many cases go unreported.
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 on the same level as Der Stürmer – it’s the demonization of an entire people,” he told CNN, referring to the Nazi-era German anti-Semitic newspaper.
What made matters worse, Benizri said, was Humo and Brusselmans’ reaction to the backlash.
When asked about the reaction to his column in the Flemish newspaper Nieuwsblad, Brusselmans said: “Call for violence? In my column I do a thought exercise about how I would react if my loved ones were affected. In the conditional. The sentence with the sharp knife is purely figurative to emphasize the message. And that falls under the right to freedom of expression.”
In a statement In a letter sent to CNN, Vanderaspoilden said: “With satirical authors like Herman Brusselmans, one can never take what is written 100 percent literally. That is why the editorial team did not intervene in the text of our columnist, which we never do.”
In a separate statement, he added that the magazine was “bored by the issue” and had no intention of removing the article, a stance he later reversed.
Brusselmans did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Vanderaspoilden told CNN the author was “overwhelmed by the reactions and hate, so he did not want to communicate.”
Rick Honings, professor of Dutch literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, published a monograph on Brusselmans in 2018, examining his life, work and image.
Honings told CNN that the author “often crosses the boundaries of morality and otherness.”
He called him a “shock writer” and added: “Brusselmans has made politically incorrect jokes throughout his writing career (since the 1980s), mostly about racist themes, but they are often jokes about women too.”
He continued: “At the same time, it is primarily intended as satire. He always manages to attract attention. It is not the first time he has made jokes about Jews and the Holocaust, but his current, comical commentary goes quite far, even for Brussels.”
According to a 2022 study by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, nearly half of Jews in Belgium reported having been subjected to anti-Semitic harassment in the past 12 months, while about a third reported having experienced anti-Semitic discrimination in the same period.
In recent years, controversy has arisen over a carnival in Belgium that featured anti-Semitic imagery on its floats. The Aalst Carnival was removed from UNESCO’s list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2019 after officials found that the “recurrence of racist and anti-Semitic depictions” was 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.
