The Heritage of Prejudice

Belgian Jews in Shock over Beating of 13-Year-old Girl
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

Five Muslim Moroccan girls in Belgium beat a 13-year-old classmate, called her a "dirty Jew” and told her to "return your country.”

The girl, Oceane Sluijzer, has filed a complaint with police after the anti-Semitic attack at a sports training center. The attackers were identified and questioned by police.

Jewish legislator Viviane Teitelbaum of Brussels denounced the "silence" of political leaders and most of media after this attack.

Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations of Belgium (CCOJB), the umbrella group of Jewish organizations in Belgium, expressed "shock" at the attack and asked that the investigation be conducted without delay. The Jewish group added it is considering filing a civil suit and said the Jewish community is “exasperated” by repeated attacks on Jews, 40,000 of whom live in Belgium.

It also told the Belgian French community's Education Minister he should "introduce appropriate educational programs in schools to prevent unjustified tensions between communities,” the European Jewish Press reported.

The Jewish Consistory, the representative body of Jewish religious congregations in the country, also appealed to authorities to take action.

Tags: Anti-Semitism ,Jews

As published online at ArutzSheva, 23 November 2011

Symbols of primitive societal prejudices, particularly acute among Muslims for whom Kenyans, who were mostly Christian, were barbarians...

Almost all the girls at my primary school had been Kenyans, so I was already more or less familiar with these differences. What was new to me at Muslim Girls' Secondary was that more than half of my classmates were from the Arabian peninsula and South Asia. With these children, too, it seemed every ethnic group was clearly distinct and splintered along lines of class and tribe. The Indians had an inaccessibly complicated system of social classes, all of them unbelievers to Muslim eyes. The Pakistanis were Muslims, but they, too had castes. The Untouchable girls, both Indian and Pakistani, were darker0-skinned. The others wouldn't play with them because they were Untouchables. We thought that was funny - because of course they were touchable: we touched them, see? - but also horrifying, to think of yourself as untouchable, despicable to the human race.

The Somalis divided into clans and subclans, but there was also a new distinction between recent Somali exiles, who were the families of warriors, and older immigrants who had grown up in Kenya and whose grasp of the Somali language was poor. Some of the Arab girls had clans, as we did. If you were a Yemeni called Sharif then you were superior to a Yemeni called Zubaydi. Any kind of Arab girl considered herself superior to everyone else; she was born closer to the Prophet Muhammad.

On the school playground, the Somalis and Yemenis were close, and the Indians and Pakistanis were close. the Yemenis, Somalis, Indians, and Pakistanis played with each other and interacted, but in the hierarchy of Muslim Girls' Secondary School, the Kenyans were the lowest.

"May the Almighty Allah take you away from me! May you rot in a hole! May you die in the fire! What can I ever expect of you? You communist! You Jew! You're a snake, not my son!"

Ayaan Hirsi, Ali, Infidel