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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| Auschwitz, one of the chain of concentration camps during the Holocaust where millions of Jews were killed for their faith. |
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| Jewish girls identified by compulsory yellow stars. |
