Blog-ette on Anti-Semitism

 Aalst Carnival.#
I am unsure if inclusion here as illustration, compounds the crime.

This is a hasty addition to the normal blogs because I have found difficult to believe three examples of gross anti-Semitism displayed in, of all theatres, carnivals in three different countries. My interest, not to say, disbelief and repugnance, were aroused because the first instance I read about was in Aalst, a little town between Brugge and Ghent which looks like an ordinary Flemish small town. However, small though it is, its annual carnival is highly popular, attracting tens of thousands of visitors, and famous throughout Flanders. During last year’s three-day carnival, floats depicted Orthodox Jews with hooked noses standing on gold coins. Israel Katz, Israel’s Foreign Minister, then called for the authorities to ‘condemn and ban this hateful parade in Aalst.’ Belgium, as a Western democracy should be ashamed to allow such vitriolic antisemitic display, he tweeted. However, Belgium’s Prime Minister, Sophie Wilmes, described the parade as an ‘internal affair.’ But Unesco removed the Aalst carnival from its list of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ saying the festival had been guilty of ‘recurring repetition of racist and anti-semitic representations.’ Unbelievably, following that serious censure, the offence was repeated in the carnival from February 23-26 this year by the unrepentant organisers who dismissed criticisms as ‘politically correct censorship’. The town’s mayor, Christoph D’Haese, said, ‘Here we laugh at everything, …..Islam, Judaism and Catholicism.’ Commission spokesman, Adalbert Jahnz, said that the anti-Semitism on display in the Aalst carnival was incompatible with the values and principles on which the E.U. was founded.

 Carnaval de Campo de Criptana.

Meanwhile, a huge parade in the Carnaval de Campo de Criptana, near Madrid, was apparently intended to commemorate those who died in the Holocaust. However, the Israeli Government and the Auschwitz Museum both accused the Spanish carnival of vilely and repugnantly trivialising the Holocaust after a troupe danced through the streets dressed as Nazi officers and concentration camp prisoners, accompanied by a float bearing a menorah and two crematorium chimneys. The Auschwitz museum tweeted: ‘Hard to describe: memory upside-down, far beyond vulgar kitsch, without any relevance, without reflection & respect.’ The town council of Campo de Crispana said that permission for the act had been granted on the understanding that it would honour the dead of the Holocaust. The mayor of Campo de Criptana agreed that it had not been a carnival-type theme and suggested that it would not happen again.

Sao Paulo.

It seems that carnivals all take place in February; at the same time as those in Aalst and Campo de Crispana came the world-famous Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, one of the world’s largest multi-day celebrations. This year, 100 dancers of the Vai-Vai Samba School wore costumes featuring swastikas on their backs, with a thin black line, unseen from a distance, scored through the swastikas. Israel Katz of the Sao Paulo Jewish Federation said, ‘To us Jews, it’s always shocking to see a swastika but to non-Jewish eyes, it is an historical fact.’ He gave his approval to the Vai-Vai costumes which had been used in 1999 when they were slammed by Jewish groups.

I think that the E.U. has laws against a variety of hate crimes based on religion, sex, age, race and wonder if these would apply to what were claimed to be light-hearted items in local carnivals. I feel pretty certain that such anti-Semitic presentations in public entertainments, could not happen in the

 Auschwitz, one of the chain of concentration camps
during the Holocaust where millions of Jews were
killed for their faith. 

UK because of anti-discrimination laws but I am not a lawyer. And there have been prolonged accusations against the British Labour Party over anti-Semitism in its ranks. But I remain shocked and saddened to see the carnival examples and also amazed that many of the Flemish to whom I have mentioned these carnivals’ anti-Semitism, have just demurred that it is all light-hearted, not serious, just a bit of fun. It is, in fact, ugly and dangerous to openly portray racist and anti-Semitic representations in this way, in the name of entertainment. Small wonder that Jews in Europe are reportedly feeling progressively unsafe and one reads that there has been an upsurge in anti-Semitism world-wide.

 Jewish girls identified by compulsory yellow stars.