Belgium deploys army to protect Jewish sites

Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken on Monday announced that his government would deploy military forces to defend Jewish community sites, following a suspected jihadist attack last week outside a synagogue in Liege.

“To protect our Jewish community, we are deploying military personnel to support security on our streets. The safety of every citizen must be guaranteed. Antisemitism and hatred against Jews will never be tolerated. We will stand firm against it, always,” Francken wrote on X.

The March 9 explosion outside the Liege synagogue was the first of a series of attacks that Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism on Monday traced to a hitherto unknown Islamist terrorist group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya. In videos uploaded online, the group was linked to at least three additional attacks over the past week, outside a synagogue in Rotterdam, a Jewish school in Amsterdam and also a bank in Amsterdam, the ministry said.

No one was hurt in the attacks, which resulted in minor damage to property.

Michael Freilich, a Belgian-Jewish lawmaker in the country’s federal parliament, welcomed the move, telling JNS: “It is good to see action finally being taken following a series of attacks on Jewish institutions.” Freilich has criticized the judiciary recently for what he said was lenient treatment of perpetrators of antisemitic attacks, adding this encouraged attacks.

UNIA, a Belgian public institution whose mission statement is to promote equality, said it had registered 277 reports of antisemitic acts in 2024, leading to 79 confirmed cases, compared with 121 reports in 2023, leading to 59 confirmed cases. The tallies for 2021 and 2022 were, respectively, 96 and 57, and 57 and 31.

© JNS