RSS
An Open Call to Murder Jews in a Belgian Magazine
Herman Brusselmans with his partner Lena, with whom he had a son in February 2023, Oct. 15, 2023. Photo: Dirk Annemans via Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – A little less than a year after Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, the Jews in the city of Antwerp—where slightly more than 50% of the country’s Jews lived at that time—were subjected to a pogrom. The violence on April 10, 1941, was carried out by supporters of a Flemish Nazi organization under the approving eyes of German officers. “They attacked two synagogues and a rabbi’s home,” according to an account published by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, “and were not restrained by the fire department or police.”
Paul-Henri Rips, who was 11 years old when he witnessed the pogrom, recalled that the synagogue his father had helped to found was set alight by the mob. “Now, as I stood on the corner, all I saw was a heap of prayer books, Torah scrolls and ark curtains burning on the sidewalk, flames leaping high from the building itself as it burned,” he wrote in a subsequent memoir. “Although the fire brigade was present, members of the Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond (VNV, the Flemish National Union) and German officers standing nearby prevented them from extinguishing the fire.”
The mob in Antwerp had been fired up by a screening of the vicious Nazi Party propaganda film “Der ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”). Shot in the ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw in Poland, the film—directed by the Nazi cineaste Fritz Hippler—depicted Jews as physically grotesque and morally depraved, rats in human form bent on world domination. One year later, the deportation of Jews in Belgium to Auschwitz and other concentration camps began in earnest.
The stench of that noxious, pogrom-stoking atmosphere pervades the latest edition of Humo, a Flemish-language weekly that purports to be a satirical magazine. One of its regular contributors, 66-year-old Herman Brusselmans, published a column that is a strong candidate for the most dangerously antisemitic article to appear online and in print in the 10 months since the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel unleashed a new wave of global Jew-hatred. Because, for all of the horrific content we’ve been exposed to during this period, explicit calls for violence outside of social-media posts have been rare. Not so with Brusselmans, who wrote candidly in a publication that enjoys a healthy circulation in Belgium that the actions of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza made him “so angry that I want to ram a knife through the throat of every Jew I meet.” That must have been how the Flemish Nazis felt in April 1941, as they left the cinema hunting for Jews and brimming with the hatred imparted by Hippler’s film.
Like 99.9% of Americans—and probably, Europeans outside of Belgium—I’d never heard of Brusselmans before his exhortation to murder Jews appeared. Judging by his photograph and his style of writing, he rather fancies himself as a witty raconteur and social commentator proudly unbound by convention. Long, straggly hair frames an angular face that peers at you from behind heavily-rimmed black glasses. I haven’t heard him speak, but I imagine that his voice has been appropriately scorched by the cigarettes he smokes. Hermann may be a baby-boomer, his photo suggests, but he’s down with the kids. And hey, he’s funny, too.
Except that he isn’t. Really, seriously isn’t. Reading the rest of the article, I found myself wondering whether the shortage of decent columnists in Belgium is so grave that they need this guy to fill space. For a start, he’s clearly a misogynist and a homophobe who shares that disturbing European penchant for toilet humor. In the torturous paragraphs leading up to his confession that he wants to stab Jews, he tells us that he’s working on a new “collection” of his writings with the charming title, “Full of poop with an ugly woman.” Next, he describes seeing a poorly dressed elderly man walking down the street and ruminates on whether this unfortunate gentleman had a wife who committed suicide, a daughter who became pregnant at the age of 13, and a son who is “so gay that many other gays said to him, ‘Don’t exaggerate, Alain.’” Turning once more to the man’s appearance, he offers some sartorial advice: “Cut your feet off, you bastard, then you’ll be rid of those stupid sandals.”
Had I not had advance warning of what was coming, I would have stopped reading upon encountering those lines. But I persevered, learning that Brusselmans was worried about an impending World War III. Enter, of course, the Jews. It’s all the fault of a “small, fat, bald Jew who bears the ominous name of Bibi Netanyahu, and who for whatever reason wants to ensure that the entire Arab world is wiped out.” That description of Israel’s prime minister echoes the caricatures of Jews published in Nazi rags like Der Stürmer. At this point, Brusselmans morphs from a mouthy schoolboy immersed in his own sexual anxiety into the Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, raving about the “sh***y Israeli army” murdering Palestinian children. Imagining his girlfriend and his son buried beneath the rubble of Gaza, he declares that such a sight would have him reaching for the nearest knife to drive into the nearest Jew.
Had this article appeared 30 years ago, we would likely have written Brusselmans off as an embittered failure so overwhelmed by his own neuroses that he projects them onto others. After all, antisemitism provides a natural home for sociopaths like this, allowing them to elide the real reasons for their lack of professional success, their inability to form meaningful relationships, their fixation with denigrating those around them and the nagging knowledge that as soon as they leave their barstool, everyone who remains expresses relief that the “asshole” has called it a night. But we are living in different times, in an environment where a call for a pogrom can be recast as a penetrating critique. The pain caused by contemporary antisemitism is partly rooted in the fact that we can’t ignore it. Someone like Brusselmans both understands this and seizes on it.
Since that wretched column was published, the European Jewish Association has announced legal proceedings against Brusselmans and Humo for incitement. As Assita Kanko, a Belgian member of the European parliament, pointed out: “[T]his is not about freedom of speech or satire, it’s a call to violence. It’s a call to murder.” Given their country’s laws against hate speech, one has to assume that Belgian judges have no choice but to agree with her.
Perhaps Brusselmans will land himself a prison sentence, where he can test how his attempts at humor go down with the other inmates. Perhaps he’ll get off with a fine or a suspended sentence. Perhaps his call to slaughter Jews will be ignored completely, for when it comes to punishing antisemitism in the courts, Europe these days encourages the lowest of expectations. In which case, Herman, rest assured that we Jews won’t forget. Sleep tight.
The post An Open Call to Murder Jews in a Belgian Magazine first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram
Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
Meta Platforms, Inc. has banned the infamous Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) anti-Zionist student group from its platforms, a decision that the company says is irrevocable.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD is responsible for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, assaulting Jewish students, and disrupting academic study at Columbia with unauthorized demonstrations and property destruction. Its behavior, among other factors, drove the Trump administration’s cancellation in March of $400 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia.
CUAD first reported that Meta shuttered its Instagram account on Monday, denouncing the measure as being part of “a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people.” Meta later justified the decision to Jewish Insider, explaining that CUAD had forced the company’s hand by ceaselessly transgressing the platform’s terms of use of agreement. Meta forbids groups which advocate violence to operate on Instagram, and CUAD has used its account to call for toppling the Israeli and US governments. Additionally, its Instagram account has been essential for promoting unlawful demonstrations CUAD continues to hold at Columbia University and for sharing resources that have helped its collaborators avoid punishment.
Meta told Jewish Insider that the group won’t be allowed back.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD’s activities have been described as a threat to the civil rights and security of Jewish Columbia University students.
Last April, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unlawful gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted, “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the US-designated terrorist group.
In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In February, CUAD committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts.
Following two occupations of administrative buildings at Barnard College, Laura Rosenbury, the school’s president, denounced the group as a paranoid hate-organization.
“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote in an op-ed published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.”
Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is set to headline a conference that is also hosting a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to documents obtained by The Algemeiner.
The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey will hold its annual conference, titled “Grounded in Action: Exploring the Power of the Palestinian Diaspora,” from Thursday through Sunday. Wisam Rafeedie, a self-admitted member of the PFLP, will address the conference virtually on the 4th day of the event.
According to PACC’s website, the conference “is a call to recommit ourselves to amplifying and supporting the Palestinian voices and advocates who have long been at the forefront of our struggle.” PACC also calls on members of the Palestinian diaspora “to leverage our unique positions and power” to “push for meaningful action.””
Tlaib is scheduled to headline the event’s “Youth Day,” in which she will host a reading and signing for her new children’s book, Mama in Congress, alongside her son Adam Tlaib. According to Harper Collins, the book’s publisher, Mama in Congress will chronicle Tlaib’s journey from Detroit to the halls of the federal government. The book will also detail Tlaib’s supposed efforts in working toward “justice for all” in Congress.
The conference will include several workshops educating attendees on “resistance,” “solidarity,” and “collective struggle.” The event will also feature a session stressing the importance of “centering Palestinian prisoners.”
This is not the first time that Tlaib has come under scrutiny for attending a pro-Palestinian conference tied to terrorists. Last May, Tlaib came under fire for speaking at the “The People’s Conference for Palestine,” which also hosted Rafeedie among other individuals connected to terrorist groups. During that event, Rafeedie praised Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “resistance” against Israel. He defended and downplayed Hamas’s atrocities, saying that “Zionists lie like they breathe.”
“This is not a struggle between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is part of the resistance of the Palestinian people. The core issue is between the Palestinian people and the project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” Rafeedie said.
Rafeedie also called for the complete destruction of Israel and the replacement of the Jewish state with a “democratic” Palestine.
“There is no longer a place for the two-state solution for any Palestinian. The only solution is one democratic Palestinian state on all Palestinian land, which will end the Zionist project in Palestine,” Rafeedie continued.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has positioned herself as a fierce and outspoken critic of Israel. Since entering office, Tlaib has repeatedly accused the Jewish state of implementing an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank and turning Gaza into an “open-air prison.”
In the year following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Tlaib has sharpened her condemnations of the Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, she hesitated to release an official statement acknowledging the mass slaughter, abductions, and rapes perpetrated by Hamas. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Tlaib introduced a “ceasefire” resolution between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. In November 2023, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib over her anti-Israel rhetoric.
The progressive firebrand has also condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing a full-scale “genocide” against the civilians of the enclave. She has also peddled the unsubstantiated claim that Israel has purposefully inflicted mass starvation against Palestinian civilians and urged the Biden administration when it was in power to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Simmering with anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, she refused to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.
Tlaib’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The post Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her
An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A Brooklyn woman who was charged for a car crash on Saturday that killed a Jewish woman and her two young daughters has alleged in the past on social media that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is following her, a claim she also made to first responders after the fatal accident.
Miriam Yarimi, 32, is facing multiple charges, including three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault. Yarimi — a Brooklyn resident and wigmaker who is also a Jewish mother herself – was transported to NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn in stable condition. She was then moved to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, according to reports.
The car crash killed Natasha Saada, 32, and her daughters – 8-year-old Diana and 6-year-old Deborah. Saada’s son Philip, 4, was injured in the crash and hospitalized at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park in critical condition. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested Yarimi, a single mother who has a young daughter, and she is awaiting arraignment in connection to the crash that took place Saturday afternoon at an intersection on Ocean Parkway off Quentin Road in Midwood. Police said she was driving with a suspended license at the time of the crash.
“This was a horrific tragedy caused by someone who shouldn’t have been on the road,” said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “A mother and two young children killed, another child fighting for his life, a family and a neighborhood devastated in an instant. The NYPD sends its condolences to the family of the victims.”
Yarimi, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, reportedly told first responders with the Jewish-led volunteer ambulance service Hatzalah that she was “possessed” and that she believes the CIA was pursing her.
She has made similar claims about the CIA many times on Instagram, a former customer of hers told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, purchased a wig from Yarimi several years ago and has been following her on social media for a number of years. Yarimi has 16,000 followers on Instagram and screenshots of her since-deleted posts, obtained by The Algemeiner, confirm she previously believed that the CIA is tracking her.
“It’s very convenient to plead insanity. But it’s not new. She is actually insane. This is [an] old topic,” the former client told The Algemeiner. “She thinks that she’s been followed by CIA for a long, long time already. She truly believes that CIA is spying on her … But only people who follow her [on social media] and know her for a long time would know this. She’s sick.”
In one since-deleted Instagram post, Yarimi wrote in part about the CIA: “They have control of EVERYONE here in this world BESIDES ME … when I went to Miami, it all clicked … once they knew that I knew, they followed me around the hotel, dressed up as young parents with a doona [stroller] and disco outfits like I was stupid and didn’t know who they were … if anything they stuck out like glue.”
“It was the government, blackjack, and the CIA who manipulated everyone and took control of everyone’s mind but because I was the catalyst and the sacrificial lamb so they did their best to break me,” she wrote in a separate post that has also been deleted. “They experimented (abused) me and that’s when they cloned my daughter and I so when I die, they could reinsert me into the crowd and make me into another person.”
Yarimi previously had a highlight on her Instagram page where she talked about demons and the CIA, but it has since been deleted, her former customer told The Algemeiner. Yarimi also wrote on her Instagram Story once that she believes Hollywood is trying to clone people to look like her.
“Why do you think most of the girls in Hollywood have similar features to me like Rita Ora & Jane the Virgin etc,” Yarimi once wrote on Instagram, as seen in a screenshot shared with The Algemeiner. “Wake up, this is not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening right here in the Jewish community in Brooklyn.”
Not long after she uploaded the Instagram posts, Yarimi was admitted to a psychiatric ward and when she returned to social media, she spoke about the experience, the source told The Algemeiner.
“After the above posts she was locked up for two weeks in a psych ward. She’s very public. She went live when paramedics broke into her house and took her. She came back online two weeks later and spoke about her psych ward experience,” Yarimi’s follower said. “And it was saved in her [Instagram] highlights as well … It was horrible.”
The Algemeiner has seen a copy of Yarimi’s Instagram video that shows police drag her out of bed after she refused their orders to get up by herself. In the clip, three police officers are seen in her bedroom and a fourth is standing by the doorway.
Another longtime Instagram follower of Yamini’s described her as “delusional” when speaking to The Algemeiner, and confirmed that Yamini has spoken online repeatedly in the past about how she believes the CIA is tracking her.
In December 2024, Yarimi won a $2 million settlement from the city of New York after she filed a lawsuit claiming that former NYPD Officer George Mastrokostas repeatedly raped her for several years after falsely arresting her.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor attended the funeral for Saada and her daughters on Sunday in Brooklyn before their bodies were flown to Israel for burial. Saada is survived by her husband, Sidney Saada, her sons Philip and Jacob, her parents and three siblings. Adams called the crash “a tragic accident of a Shakespearean proportion.”
“A mother going for a simple stroll on a sunny day was struck and killed. As we pray for their families and this entire community, the city mourns this loss,” he added.
Police said Yarimi was driving a blue Audi A3 sedan when she rear-ended a 2023 silver Toyota Camry with TLC plates that was carrying four passengers – a mother and three children. NYPD Commissioner Tisch said the force of the crash caused the Toyota Camry to be pushed aside, while the Audi moved forward, crashing into Saada and her children as they were crossing the street before the car overturned. Saada and her two daughters were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Toyota Camry, a 62-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. The four passengers inside his car sustained minor injuries and were also hospitalized, according to Tisch.
Yarimi’s car had 99 parking and camera violations between August 2023 and March 2025, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets, Eyewitness News ABC 7 reported, citing a website that tracks vehicle violations using city data. She had nearly $10,500 in fines and a car with the same license plate as Yarimi’s still has $1,345 in unpaid fines, the news outlet also revealed.
The post Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her first appeared on Algemeiner.com.