Charles Ducal is Belgium’s new ‘national poet’. In this position, he will be expected to
write poems which concern Belgium. Which
might be new to him. Ducal has not
written one poem on the atrocities committed by Belgians in their former
colonies. However, he had time to dwell
on the crimes of the Jews.
Together with Lucas Catherine, Ducal co-authored “Gaza – The
History of the Palestinian tragedy”.
The book includes his poetry titled “After Auschwitz”, a group
of poems with names like “Tel Aviv 1948–2008”, “Nakba” and
“A Poet in Sderot”. Lest you
think he might actually be sympathizing with the Jews who are constantly being
bombed by their Gazan neighbors, rest assured: the song has a little note that
Sderot was “formerly Najd”, and is all about how ‘we’ kicked out the
rightful owners.
The poems do not mention Jews, Israel, Nazis or Holocaust, and yet
they’re full of accusations against the Jewish people. Not only that, Ducal writes his poems as if
he’s speaking on behalf of the Jews.
For example, in “Let Us Talk” Ducal says:
first, we will count our dead
from the past two thousand years
and justify the beating,
and wipe the spit from our hands
and declare – it’s clear as day;
you want no peace in this land.
Because, really, it’s the Jews’ fault that there’s no peace. We Jews oppressed the Arabs so much, that
everybody can understand why they want to kill us. QED.
In “After Auschwitz 1” Ducal writes:
On memorial days, called to remembrance
my fellow downtrodden roamed in my head.
Beneath the ash, the issue smoldered, unsaid.
But the owner never came. It slowly went dead.
He’s not talking about the Belgians who confiscated Jewish
property. The downtrodden, the owners of
the land, are the Arabs. “We”,
the oppressors, are the Jews, who ‘After Auschwitz’ have nothing better to do
than recreate the Nazi crimes.
This is the man that the powers that be in Belgium decided to appoint as
their National Poet.
