Belgium Drops Case Against Cafe Owner Who Welcomed Dogs, But Not Jews
Image by adogslifephoto/iStock
(JTA) — Prosecutors in Belgium dropped criminal complaints against a Turkish café owner who put up a sign banning Jews.
A café in the town of Saint-Nicolas had displayed a sign saying dogs are welcome at his business, “but Jews are not.”
The La Dernière Heure newspaper on Friday reported that the Prosecutor’s Office in Liege dropped discrimination charges filed in 2014 against the owner, who was not named in the report.
Joel Rubinfeld, the president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism told the paper that he was “disgusted and deeply disappointed” by the decision, which a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office confirmed to the newspaper but declined to explain.
The sign prompted protests internationally and in Belgium, where an Islamist had killed four people at Brussels’ Jewish museum just weeks earlier.
The Turkish text of the offensive sign reads, “Dogs are allowed in this establishment but Jews are not under any circumstances.” The French text replaces “Jews” with “Zionists.”
The window display, put up while Israel was fighting Hamas in Gaza, also included a Palestinian flag, an Israeli flag crossed out with a red “X” and a kaffiyeh, or Palestinian shawl, draped around it.
Saint-Nicolas Mayor Jacques Heleven dispatched police to the café when word of the display got out. He said that such anti-Semitism is “unacceptable.”
But Rubinfeld told La Dernière Heure that the case’s closing shows that “the fight against racism, including anti-Semitism, remains in the rhetorical realm.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
