How Low Can the Belgian Press Sink in Its Tolerance of Antisemitic Violence

There is a peculiar reflex in parts of the Belgian press that surfaces with grim regularity whenever the victims are Jewish. Where other acts of violence demand immediate moral clarity, antisemitic attacks are greeted with hesitation, semantic acrobatics, and calls for “context.” As if the mere naming of Jew-hatred requires prior intellectual clearance before it may enter respectable discourse.

Recent coverage of a deadly attack on a Jewish gathering abroad once again exposed this reflex in its rawest form. While international authorities and security services described the assault as a targeted act against Jews, De Standaard publicly asked whether the massacre was “really” antisemitic. Not how such violence could occur. Not what it means for Jewish communities worldwide. But whether the label itself was justified.

That question is not an exercise in journalistic nuance. It is a moral decision.

Denial in a Tailored Suit

When violence is explicitly aimed at a Jewish community, at a religious celebration, at people targeted precisely because they are recognizably Jewish, the impulse to problematize the term antisemitism is not intellectual rigor. It is a redirection. Attention is shifted away from perpetrators and victims alike, and toward a debate over terminology.

That debate is anything but neutral. It creates an atmosphere in which antisemitism is no longer a fact to be recognized, but a narrative to be contested. And violence that is not named without hesitation is violence that is never fully condemned.

De Standaard and the Hannah Arendt Institute

What is striking in De Standaard’s coverage is the persistent reliance on the same moral and academic frameworks. The Hannah Arendt Institute appears repeatedly as a source of interpretive authority, frequently invoked to caution against “instrumentalization” or “political exploitation”—particularly when Jewish voices name antisemitism as such.

This is not coincidental. The newspaper and the Institute collaborate structurally, including on joint media projects and podcasts. The Institute presents itself as a center of expertise on democracy, diversity, and social cohesion, yet in the Israel–Gaza debate it has adopted a distinctly normative posture.

That posture manifests in analyses where Israel is consistently framed as a moral perpetrator, while antisemitism in Europe is relegated to a regrettable side effect. The crucial distinction between criticism of Israeli policy and the societal consequences of that criticism for Jews in Europe is rarely guarded with care. On the contrary: the more absolute the moral condemnation of Israel becomes, the more antisemitism is treated as secondary—or worse, as a rhetorical weapon deployed in bad faith.

The Radicalization of Moral Language

When academic and semi-public institutions normalize terms such as genocide in everyday discourse—without legal restraint and without regard for the European context—the moral landscape shifts. Language ceases to be analytical and becomes mobilizing.

In such a climate, Jewish communities are inevitably drawn into a moral conflict in which they are not participants. When Israel is framed as the embodiment of absolute evil, the resulting hostility does not remain confined to policy debates. It spills over, as it always has, onto Jews as a collective. This is not speculative. It is historically established fact.

Woke Ideology and the Exclusion of Jews as Victims

Here we arrive at the core of the issue. Within contemporary progressive ideology, victimhood is increasingly allocated through an ideological grid: oppressor versus oppressed, power versus powerlessness, colonizer versus colonized. Those coded as “Western,” “privileged,” or “powerful” are quietly disqualified from moral recognition as victims.

Jews no longer fit the script. They are recast not as a historic minority but as an extension of an alleged colonial force. In this framework, antisemitism becomes invisible—or worse, explicable.

Jew-hatred is not denied by defending it openly, but by redefining it into something else: “criticism,” “anger,” “context.” The result is the same.

The Greta Thunberg Symptom

The shift from ecological activism to an all-consuming Israel–Palestine narrative illustrates this dynamic with unsettling clarity. Figures who once embodied universal causes have redirected their moral energy toward a geopolitical conflict that, in Europe, has direct consequences for Jewish safety.

The controversies surrounding Greta Thunberg are emblematic. Not because she herself is the problem, but because her trajectory shows how easily moral absolutism loses its capacity for self-correction—and how quickly that blindness produces antisemitic effects, even when intent is denied.

Antwerp: Jerusalem of the North, and Exposed

Antwerp—often called the “Jerusalem of the North” due to its dense Orthodox Jewish population—occupies a uniquely vulnerable position. The community’s concentration, with its own schools, institutions, and media, offers continuity and protection. It also creates isolation.

In a society where public discourse is rapidly hardening, such informational and social insulation carries risks. Not out of stubbornness or indifference, but because threats often become visible only when they have already crossed from rhetoric into reality.

Bart De Wever: Necessary Support, but Enough?

The unequivocal support expressed by Bart De Wever, both as mayor of Antwerp and in his federal role, is sincere and consequential. His clear rejection of antisemitism provides a rare counterweight in Belgium’s political landscape.

Yet a troubling question remains: can one political figure suffice when large segments of public discourse persist in relativizing, reframing, or questioning the legitimacy of Jewish concern? When media, academic institutions, and political actors repeatedly cast doubt on the very category of antisemitism?

The Question No One Wants to Ask

And so the unavoidable question emerges: Is there a future for the Jewish community in Belgium?

Not because Jews do not belong there—on the contrary—but because a society that can no longer name antisemitism without hesitation erodes its own moral foundation. When the mass murder of Jews must first pass through a semantic filter, nuance has given way to decay.

Those who find this exaggerated need not examine slogans, but patterns. Patterns in language. In framing. In silences. In the questions that are asked only when the victims are Jewish.

A society that accepts this does not merely risk losing its Jewish citizens. It forfeits its moral credibility.