The “Gazette van Antwerpen”, a Flemish daily here, has launched a furious attack on the Jews, alleging in an editorial that all Jews are Communist propagandists, seeking to introduce Bolshevism into Belgium.
The Jewish youth in Belgium is very strongly represented in the Communist ranks, it says, and we Belgians are treated by them to expositions of the rightness and inevitability of Communism. That a certain type of Jew should sympathise with Communism we can understand. Most Jews live by swindling, and swindlers naturally find things difficult during a prolonged economic crisis. Jews have no reserves of moral endurance, so that they quickly jump over to the other extreme, as we often find it recorded in history.
The Belgian people must wake to the danger of these Jews, who are trying to spread the red hand of Bolshevist terrorism over the peaceful Belgian small farmer and small industrialist.
By your swindling and usury you have made a great deal of money, and now you have lost a great deal of it, the paper says, addressing the Jews. As world citizens, with very loose connections with any particular land, you do not feel any real attachment to the countries in which you live. We understand, therefore, that you do not feel that you belong to a particular soil whether things go well or badly there, and that when times are bad, you grow impatient and want to change things in a hurry. But if you feel like that, behave like aliens. Don’t interfere in the affairs of our country.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.