After having been removed from UNESCO's intangible heritage, the carnival of the Belgian city of Aalst persists and signs. The parade showed new caricatures of Orthodox Jews on Sunday, saying they wanted to "laugh at everything."
"Let Aalst be Aalst", had warned in the morning the mayor of the city, the elected Flemish nationalist (N-VA) Christophe D'Haese, pointing the finger at the "disproportionate" critics coming notably from official Israeli voices. "This is not an anti-Semitic parade, Aalst is not an anti-Semitic city", insisted the bourgmestre.
An unprecedented deletion
A huge controversy followed the 2019 edition of this 600-year-old carnival, when a chariot caricaturing orthodox Jews with hooked noses, seated on bags of gold, took part in the procession. It resulted in the removal of the carnival from the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage, a new measure.
The Jews are vermin (vermin full of money that controls the world anyway) and the Nazis are nice guys that the children applaud and with whom we really want to drink a beer. Welcome to the Aalst Carnival in 2020, in Belgium, the heart of the EU. Degenerates pic.twitter.com/svFR1MxxZf
- Raphael Glucksmann (@ rglucks1) February 23, 2020The UN organization castigated at a decisive meeting in December the "recurrent repetitions of racist and anti-Semitic representations" in the demonstration. In his eyes, they are incompatible "with the requirement of mutual respect between communities, groups, individuals ..." On the spot in Aalst, nobody however considers to have disrespected the Jews, according to the testimonies collected Sunday by the AFP. The controversial tank of 2019 would be a simple misunderstanding.
"They never intended to mock the Jews and hurt them, the media attention is completely exaggerated," said a nurse from Aalst hospital, who prefers to withhold his name. With the big bags of cash, the group which had chartered this tank wanted to make an allusion to its own search for funds to take a sabbatical year, ensures this thirty-something in town dress. The image may have been just "awkward," he concedes.
Muzzled characters
In the parade this time, no more traces of gold bags, but the two papillotes falling from a large black fur hat, an accessory characteristic of Orthodox Jews, are visible everywhere. Some have chosen to add to this disguise a faux leather mask resembling a muzzle to symbolize the "censorship" imposed by the "politically correct".
Many banners refer to Unesco, mocked as "Big brother" who watches and punishes. For the mayor, it is necessary to take into account “the global context” of the event, which he compared to a “ritual of inversion”. For three days "the poor become rich, the rich become poor, men of women and women of men," said the elected official.
Freedom of expression or "guilty stupidity"
"Here we laugh at everything, the royal family, Brexit, local and national politics, and all religions, Islam, Judaism, Catholicism", assured Christophe D'Haese. In fact, humor with broad strokes is everywhere: the “fake news” of Jan Jambon (N-VA president of Flanders) on the money of immigrants, or the difficult return to competition of tennis player Kim Clijsters , caricatured in pregnant women with generous shapes.
Each year dozens of floats parade on the first day of carnival, the Sunday before Fat Tuesday, in front of tens of thousands of visitors. For Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès, it will be a question of seeing this year "whether the facts which have taken place break the law". "The use of stereotypes, referents stigmatizing communities, human groups on the basis of their origins leads to divisions and jeopardizes living together," warned this French-speaking liberal with reference to the caricatures of Jews. Some "confuse freedom of expression and guilty stupidity", for his part castigated Johan Benizri, who chairs the Coordination Committee of Jewish organizations in Belgium.
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