Avuncular American

Brussels' Jewish Museum

It seemed fitting, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, to visit the Jewish Museum of Belgium.  Not quite a year ago, this museum was itself the site of an anti-Semitic terrorist attack.

I couldn't help thinking that the victims - an elderly volunteer, the receptionist, and a couple visiting the museum - were like the people there to welcome me to the museum.  A quieter, more peaceful place would be harder to imagine.  Only the Belgian soldiers at the entrance hint at the ongoing need to protect the museum.

Dedicated to recounting the long history of the Jewish presence in Belgium (the timeline on the wall starts in the Middle Ages), the museum provides illustrations of daily life of Jews over the centuries.  Their religious beliefs, related feast days, the economic life of the community.

An exhibit on Jewish bookbinders and other craftsmen leads to a small room on the impact of the Shoah in Belgium.  A poster announcing, just months after the fall of Belgium and France in May/June 1940, the requirement for Jews to register "by order of the military authorities."  The announcement is in French, and there's no need to mention whose order it is.

The displays include the usual documentation of the bureaucracy of extermination - ID cards marked "Juif," ugly antisemitic posters preparing the way for the roundup of Jews - but also heroic stories of Belgians who successfully hid Jewish children during four years of Nazi occupation.  And the stirring account of the Nazi train to Auschwitz where resistance fighters freed Jewish captives.

There's a reminder that "Palestinian" was once a synonym for Jews: a letter from the "Office Palestinien en Suisse," a branch of the Jewish Agency in Switzerland, helping Jews find refuge in British Mandate Palestine from the horrors in Europe.

Elsewhere, a photo from a previous German occupation, that of the First World War.  German soldiers (!) celebrating Yom Kippur in Brussels, 1915.  A reminder that German Jews fought loyally in the German army, a fact which meant nothing to the Nazis a generation later.

And yet another occupation, the "Spanish Netherlands" period of the late 16th to early 18th century.  Jewish "marrano" refugees from the Spanish Inquisition had found refuge in Belgium, and the museum displays a book of the period by a captain in the Spanish army, himself a secret Jew.

The Jewish Museum of Belgium is a low-tech, traditional museum.  It is light years away from the sophistication of, say, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.  But because it was the target of terrorism, and because Jews and Jewish institutions in Europe need the support of their host countries at this tense time, it should itself become a place of pilgrimage.  

Cartoonists as the Footsoldiers of Democracy

If ever there was a time to watch this 2014 film, it's now.

If ever anyone doubted that political cartoonist is a high-risk occupation, yesterday's Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris is devastating proof.

"Les Caricaturistes: Fantassins de la Démocratie" is the definitive documentary on political cartoonists from every part of the world.  It's a chance to discover an NGO which helps defend their efforts on behalf of free speech, "Cartooning for Peace," begun in 2006 under the auspices of then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Le Monde's "Plantu" is the star of both film and NGO, never missing a chance to explain the art behind the message or to share the spotlight with his cherished colleagues throughout the world.  Last night he was on the TV news, with his same message of perseverance in the face of the terrorism perpetrated in Paris.

This short (1.5 hours) documentary sketches sympathetic portraits of this diverse group of heroes, who all face, in varying degrees, the threat of violence (or at a minimum, exclusion) in their countries.  A Syrian cartoonist whose hands are broken by Assad's thugs.  A Venezuelan journalist who's called a whore and a lesbian for daring to ridicule Chavez & Co.  Russia's premier political artist, who can't publish anything in Putin's Russia, and drives a night taxi to earn a living.

 

http://www.bedetheque.com/

In the early '90s in Algeria, I remember cartoonist "Slim" taking on the establishment and the reigning social (dis)order, even before he took on the rise of Islamism (which eventually led to his exile).  In a former one-party state, Slim's cartoons were of an amazing candor, and really funny: in a country where orphans of slain moujahid freedom fighters from the 1950s and 60s were provided great advantages (which led people to invent a heroic forebear), he had a 1990s baby in carriage saying, "some day, I'll be the son of a moujahid."  Today, in Algeria, Ali Dilem in Liberté continues to wield his pen, and is appropriately biting about the assassination of the Charlie Hebdo journalists.

Caricaturistes of course can't include every political cartoonist; Steve Bell, the often outrageous and sometimes unfathomable (he was very clear on the Paris killings) Guardian veteran, isn't featured, nor is our own Brussels favorite, Pierre Kroll of Le Soir (here's Kroll on yesterday's murders, Morts de Rire).

Belgian-Israeli cartoonist Michel Kichka believes that political correctness, even more than censorship by authorities, is the greatest threat to the freedom of expression practiced by his profession.  For his part, Plantu paraphrases Franklin Roosevelt's admonition to Americans after Pearl Harbor: "we have nothing to fear but fear itself."  Plantu, like his slain counterparts at Charlie Hebdo, fears nothing, except this: "I am afraid of the fear of others."

That's the wonderful thing about the wave of solidarity shown in the face of this assault on the freedom of expression, and it's the uplifting message of Caricaturistes: those in power (and those who would like to wield power at the point of a gun) fear ridicule, and the Cartoonists are there to show that the (fill in the blank) has no clothes.

Mideast Christians Beyond Christmas

Chances are that last week, as Christmas was being celebrated, your TV news included a segment on the Christians of the Middle East.  It's an annual staple, and provides jarring images like Santa confronting Israeli troops at a checkpoint near Bethlehem.

Throughout the Middle East, ancient Christian communities are being uprooted, if not extinguished.  Pope Francis, in a letter addressed to the Christians of the Middle East, wrote of their "leavening" effect:

You can help your Muslim fellow citizens to present with discernment a more authentic image of Islam, as so many of them desire, reiterating that Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and favours peaceful coexistence on the part of all.

William Dalrymple, the Scottish author of From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, in a recent Guardian article, sees the exodus of Christians as the end of secular Arab nationalism.  He quotes the late Lebanese AUB professor Kamal Salibi who detected a "fin de race" fatalism among eastern Christians, a net loss for the Arab world: "It is Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world 'Arab' rather than 'Muslim'."

In his recent Foreign Policy report on Alexandria Egypt (my home for two years in the Eighties) "The Lighthouse Dims," James Traub sees the end of the cosmopolitan ideal:

North Africa used to be a civilizational crossroads in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews not only lived alongside one another but also shared one another's language and culture. This mingled society, formed from many intense particularities, is what we call cosmopolitanism. It was born in the Middle East, and it now seems to be disappearing there, including from the one place where the cosmopolitan ideal reached its supreme realization: Alexandria.

Recently I renewed ties with an old friend, a Palestinian Christian who was a fellow volunteer at a Boy Scout center in Ramallah in the early Seventies.  He and his family are now exiles from their home in Jerusalem, victims of what the Israelis call the "center of life" policy, which renders stateless Palestinians who have the temerity to go abroad on a work assignment.  His wife recounts their ordeal in this article.

Whether it's Israeli policies of harassment and land seizures (which of course affect all Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christian), or flight in the face of ISIS terrorism (William Dalrymple refers to the ISIS "Christian-free zone"), Mideast Christians face what could be, in the very lands where Christianity was born, the end of their long history in an entire region.

The instability which has afflicted the region in recent years - the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Syrian revolution and the ensuing ISIS onslaught - has meant the flight of Christians from countries where they had been protected minorities, with sizable populations.  The Arab world's loss - Christian Arabs were the intellectual founders of many of the modern nation-states - will likely be permanent.  As Professor Salibi said, "Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place..."