http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/10/yes-virginia-there-is-famous-belgian.html
Yes, Virginia, There is a Famous Belgian …
… Or, rather, an infamous one.
His name’s Christoph D’Haese. He’s Burgomeester (mayor) of the Belgian city of Aalst in old East Flanders, and a member of the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, which, being translated, means New Flemish Alliance.
Once upon a time, in another city in what is now Belgium, live cats were thrown from a belfry tower to their deaths on a carnival day held during Lent. That vile barbarism, a product of the Middle Ages, apparently persisted until 1817.
In Aalst during Lent there is also a carnival day.
No, they don’t sacrifice cats.
But they do sacrifice all pretensions to human decency by (would you believe this, post-Shoah!?) including hideous depictions of Jews in the carnival parade, depictions that would do credit to Julius Streicher and the rest of the Nazi fiends were those monsters still alive.
Here’s how a senior American academic, Eliot A, Cohen, calling it out for the antisemitism that it is, described the obnoxious spectacle from last year:
“On Sunday, a float rolled down the streets of Aalst, a Belgian town, for carnival. It featured two grotesque caricatures of Hasidic Jews, hooked noses, hands reaching out for money, and a rat sitting on money bags. That’s 2019. A second float … —in Marburg, Germany, in 1936—featured celebrants dressed as Orthodox Jews. The only real difference is that the former was more elaborately and professionally executed, and if anything more grotesque.”
To quote The Independent newspaper at the time:
‘A carnival parade which featured Jewish caricatures standing amid piles of money has been compared to Nazi antisemitic propaganda and provoked fierce criticism in Belgium. One float in the city of Aalst’s annual feast on Sunday was decorated with two huge figures of men with large sideburns, crooked noses and wearing shtreimels, a fur hat worn by some Orthodox Jews. One had a rat on his shoulder.