Israel on Saturday welcomed a decision by UNESCO to drop a famous Belgian carnival off its heritage list due to grotesquely anti-Semitic displays.
Edited by TJVNews.com
Israel expressed rare appreciation for the U.N.’s educational, scientific and cultural agency (UNESCO) a day after the organization removed the Aalst carnival from its Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
In the past, the festivity included a parade featuring bulbous-nosed Jewish puppets standing on money bags, marchers dressed in Klu Klux Klan costumes, and young Europeans donning blackface makeup. Last year, a float called “Shabbat Year” included two giant puppets in traditional Hasidic fur hats and long side-locks, surrounded by coins and several rats.
“The removal of the carnival sends a strong message that such anti-Semitic expressions have no place in the organization and in the world,” Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement.
Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz also praised the decision to exclude the festival and called on the Belgian government “to come out clearly and concisely against the inclusion of anti-Semitic displays in the carnival.” He added that “the scourge of anti-Semitism threatens not only the Jewish people, but every society and country in which it exists.”
The festival was expelled during an annual meeting of a 24-nation committee in Bogota, Columbia, to review nominations. The Belgian delegates declined to react to the decision, but it was the Belgian government which requested the move.
The ministry said this year’s edition of the parade included “numerous vitriolic displays of antisemitism,” prompting it to lobby for the removal.
Israel and the United States quit UNESCO at the start of 2019, saying the organization was fostering anti-Israel bias.
Last week, the Jewish Voice reported that according to a NY Times report, the city’s mayor, Christoph D’Haese sent UNESCO a letter renouncing Aalst’s place on the list before it could be removed.
D’Haese said last Sunday that city officials “have had it a bit with the grotesque complaints and Aalst will renounce its UNESCO recognition.” On a Belgian television talk show last Monday night, D’Haese added, “We don’t want to be the stage for a racist or anti-Semitic debate about a folk festival that connects people.”
The Times reported that the mayor’s office does not have the authority to leave the agency’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list of its own accord, and such a request would have to come from Belgium’s UNESCO delegation, a spokeswoman for the international group said.
The town said that it is “sick of widespread complaints that this spring’s edition contained blatant anti-Semitism,” as was reported by the AP.
The controversy was nothing new for Aalst, as was reported in the New York Times. In 2013, a group of people took part in the Carnival parade wearing Nazi SS uniforms, marching alongside a float evoking the infamous cattle cars that transported Jews to their deaths in such notorious concentration camps as Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and carried what appeared to be cans of the also infamous Zyklon B poison gas that was used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews in death camps.
AP reported that Aalst is one of Europe’s most famous Carnivals and it is a celebration of unbridled, no-holds-barred humor and satire. Politicians, religious leaders and the rich and famous are relentlessly ridiculed during the three-day festival ahead of Roman Catholic Lent.
UNESCO, Jewish groups and the European Union have condemned the float as anti-Semitic, with the EU saying it conjured up visions of pre-Nazi Europe in the 1930s. (WIN, AP)
