Professors pen open letter about Aalst Carnival ahead of Sunday parade

Three professors specialised in anti-Semitism have asked the media in Belgium to not spread photos of floats in the Aalst Carnival that depict Jewish people in stereotypical ways without context. They printed an open letter in Flemish daily De Morgen.

Last year, the famous carnival parade in Aalst, about 25 kilometres northwest of Brussels, included a float that depicted Jewish men with giant, hooked noses, sitting on piles of money (pictured). The carnival group that created the float, Vismooil’n, explained that they were going to take a “sabbatical” the following year to save money. That’s how they came up with idea of the float.

Photographs of the parade went viral, leading to criticism both at home and abroad. The carnival group and organisation defended the float, saying that it was in the spirit of carnival, which is all about satirising anything and everything, with nothing being off limits.

Jewish organisations, however, disagreed, immediately filing complaints against the organisation. Unesco soon got involved, threatening to rescind the event’s inclusion on its list of intangible world heritage.

The carnival committee itself requested the honour be rescinded so it would retain its right to what it considered freedom of speech. Unesco officially scrapped the event from the list last December.

Jewish float planned

Aalst has announced that its parade, which takes place next Sunday, will have a similar float, a reference to all the controversy. This prompted the three professors – from Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven – to respond in writing.

“We are not asking for censorship, but we do want to point out the danger of spreading this kind of anti-Jewish caricatures,” professor Klaas Smelik of Ghent University. “These same kind of images had an effect on the general public in the past – in the 19th century but mostly in the period of the Third Reich.”

The exact same caricatures of Jewish people “were widely disseminated to shape people’s mentality about Jews as being bad. Circulating these images today has the same effect. People get a stereotypical image of Jewish people, with their noses and the like. And also the money box, as if they control all the finances. The goal is to dehumanise them.”

The professors are not asking the media to ignore the images, but to put them in context should they choose to publish them. “They should be placed in a historical context of anti-Semitism,” said Smelik. “Otherwise, you’re showing these caricatures without mentioning the consequences that they had for the Jewish people in the past – and now.”

In terms of the carnival’s right to freedom of expression, Smelik points to the Brabant Killers, who murdered random citizens in the 1980s in a reign of terror and who have never been identified or caught. Their bloodiest attack, in which eight people were shot to death in a Delhaize supermarket, took place in Aalst.

“We are supposed to be able to laugh at everything – except the Brabant Killers,” notes Smelik. “That touches on Aalst’s own history. Then suddenly you can’t laugh. It is interesting that an exception can be made there. We cannot and should not forget what happened in Belgium during the World Wars.”