Belgium Teacher Makes 'Freight Wagon' Jibe at Jewish Student

[Behind the Aegis]

A Brussels high school teacher was summoned to appear before a local school board for telling a Jewish student, “We should put you all on freight wagons.”

The incident occurred at the Belgian capital’s Emile Jacqmain school and involved a 16-year-old female student and her mathematics teacher, the La Derniere Heure magazine reported Friday.

The teacher, who was not identified, was summoned to appear before the board following a complaint filed against him for inciting racism and anti-Semitic hatred. The student, according to the report, told the teacher that “one does not joke about such subjects.”

Tens of thousands of Belgian Jews, along with countless other Jews from across Europe, were transported by the Nazis to deaths in cattle and freight wagons.


Read more: http://forward.com/articles/214461/belgium-teacher-makes-freight-wagon-jibe-at-jewish/#ixzz3RKJJquP5

[hr]

Wow, talk about class! Anti-Semitism...just because!

[Exhibit A]

1. OMG, what is WRONG with people?? n/t

[sheshe2]

2. It wasn't the first incident and will not be the last.

Time for him to go BtA. His words are incredibly ugly and cruel.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. No, it won't be the last, for sure.

Belgium Jews before the Holocaust: 65,000
Belgium Jews after the Holocaust: 25, 000
Dead Jewish Belgians: 40,000

That's 62% of the entire Jewish population murdered and yet, some have no problem invoking Holocaust references in regards to Jews.

[sheshe2]

4. those stats.

the numbers that died? heartbreaking BtA.

we are a very ugly world in so many ways. we have caused so much pain and suffering, and yes death. we have been doing it for centuries. i hope that we can change that, on my good days i believe we can. on my bad days, i don't believe we ever will. i just don't know anymore.

[Kber]

10. There were some who fled right before, or survived but chose to live elsewhere after.

My grandmother was one.

She was 16 when the Nazis invaded.

She made it to the US at 19.

The intervening years were, well...

Indeed, One does not joke about such things.

[Vic Tree]

5. Fire him

Doesn't get more clear-cut than this!

[Hekate]

6. That's so ugly I have no comment. It's this kind of incident ...

... that ensures my husband will always be grateful his parents upped stakes and left Belgium in the early 1950s while he and his brothers were still little.

"One does not joke about such subjects" is the understatement of the year.

[WinkyDink]

7. Yes, because Jews are so dangerous to Belgians.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/15/belgium-security-idUSL6N0UU4VB20150115

[leftynyc]

8. Teacher should be fired

Would any minority parent want this piece of crap in the business of shaping their child's mind?

[vlakitti]

9. There's an encouraging side to this, actually

First, this was a sixteen year old kid telling off an authority figure, a teacher, which takes guts like I never had at that age.

Second, antisemitism has been endemic there for more than a thousand years, and while younger Germans have repudiated all this stuff, many other West Europeans haven't, and probably can't. But this young person did.

Naziism and extreme and murderous antisemitism in western Europe was popular in the 30s and 40s, people. It went underground when Naziism was crushed during the war. But a lot of it's there, and won't go away until a lot of younger people take it on.

[Enthusiast]

11. We must remain vigilant.

[DFW]

12. Belgium is not all chocolate and waffles

I'm there once a week. That country is a seething cauldron of hostile groups packed into an uneasy peace. It boils over all the time. Corruption is rampant, and at the highest levels of government and law enforcement (Dutroux was just the tip of the iceberg). "Tolerance" toward Moroccan immigrants made them untouchable for decades by law enforcement, and the resulting crime wave by Moroccans has had the very predictable result of giving rise to several nasty extremist right-wing movements, to which more Belgians (mostly Flemish-speaking) belong than anyone wants to admit.

This incident doesn't surprise me in the slightest. What IS encouraging is that is got publicized and something was done about it.