Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called on an upcoming Belgian carnival to remove anti-Semitic caricatures from the carnival’s parade.
Greenblatt tweeted on Feb. 19, “In a time of rising #antiSemitism, perpetuating these stereotypes is dangerous and wrong and it is well past due for the organizers of this carnival to remove them.”
He linked his tweet to a Feb. 18 an Algemeiner article that cited an op-ed written by three Belgian academics who warned that such anti-Semitic imagery has been associated with genocide against Jews throughout world history.
These #antiSemitic caricatures should not be part of this carnival to begin with. In a time of rising #antiSemitism, perpetuating these stereotypes is dangerous and wrong and it is well past due for the organizers of this carnival to remove them. https://t.co/kSnVaRm2XL
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) February 19, 2020
In March 2019, the Aalst Carnival had a float featuring “effigies of grinning Jews holding money, one carrying a rat on its shoulder,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. Aalst Mayor Christoph D’Haese defended the effigies as satirical and said they will be used in the Feb. 23 carnival.
One of the academics, Ghent University’s Klaas Smelik, told Belgium’s Radio 1 on Feb. 18 that the media should not show the effigies. “Especially in the time of the Third Reich of Hitler Germany, this kind of caricature became widespread in order to change people’s mentality, and to teach that the Jews are something bad,” Smelik said. “Spreading these images now works in the same way as before.”
In December, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizational (UNESCO) removed the Aalst Carnvial from its Intangible Cultural Heritage list due to the effigies. A UNESCO spokesperson said in a statement at the time, “The recurrence of racist and anti-Semitic representations is incompatible with the fundamental principles of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.”
