Belgian society becoming more polarised, report finds

Belgian society is fragmenting and worried, according to the annual report from Unia, Belgium’s Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunities.

Citing the "importation" of international conflicts, homophobia, and a rise in populism, Unia warns that increasingly polarising discourse, accelerated by social media, is causing Belgian society to fragment.

The Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunities received a total of 7,577 reports of discrimination, hate speech or hate crimes in 2024, compared to 6,706 in 2023 and 7,310 in 2022.

The reports led to the opening of 1,831 cases. Unia generally only opens a case when the person reporting the incident requests help or information.

The majority of cases concerned discrimination in employment (651 cases), followed by goods and services (468) and community life (221).

Overall, the number of reports received in 2024 returned to a level similar to that of the period before 2019, after a peak in 2021.

An estimated 357 of individual alerts about the same incident concerned comments made by MR president Georges-Louis Bouchez on Radio Judaica. At the end of September, he described an Israeli operation that targeted thousands of Hezbollah members in Lebanon by detonating beepers as a "stroke of genius".

Herman Brusselmans' highly controversial column published last summer in Humo magazine also generated a significant 82 reports.

In it, the Flemish writer claimed that the image of a Palestinian child screaming for his mother buried under rubble in Gaza, while thinking of his partner and his own son, made him so angry that he wanted to "put a knife to the throat of every Jewish person [he] meets".

Unia then received 43 reports from people unhappy that the organisation had opened an investigation into the matter.

The resurgence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since Hamas' attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the Israeli government's devastating response in the Gaza Strip has fuelled anti-Semitism in Europe, the report notes, which is facing a rise in anti-Jewish and Holocaust denial acts.

“Criticism of Israel is not in itself anti-Semitic,” the report emphasis, “but calling for violence against Jews undoubtedly is.”