Well-known television journalists Dafna Liel and Amalya Duek from Israel’s Channel 2 were shaken on Wednesday evening, when a cab driver in Brussels launched into a profanity-laden tirade, calling them “dirty Jews” and other anti-Semitic slurs.
Just over a week after Chief Rabbi Avraham Gigi’s controversial remarks about the lack of a future for Jews in the small western European nation, the pair, alongside an unidentified third woman, boarded a cab in the Belgian capital and were immediately asked if they were Israeli.
“We were frightened. He started to curse us for a couple of minutes” before demanding three times the normal rate for the trip, Liel told by phone from Brussels on Thursday.
“I was so scared I said ‘okay we will pay you’ and I really felt that he might attack us. He looked so angry, he had this crazy look,” she recalled.
The anti-Semitic incidents did not stop there, however.
Later that evening one of Liel’s traveling companions was approached by a man at a bar who asked her where she was from and angrily told her that he refused to sit anywhere near an Israeli.
Several Palestinians in the mixed Jewish-Arab group have also complained of what they characterized as “anti-Muslim hate” and a “tense atmosphere.”
“We are only here for four days. Actually, before it happened I didn’t think anything like could happen,” she added, noting that a religious member of their group has stopped wearing his kippa in public after the cab incident.
“Until you meet it you don’t imagine. We have all been around to Europe [but] you don’t think it exists until it hits [you] in the face. I can’t tell you [what I think about the future of European Jewry] because I don’t live here but we have two incidents in four days and we are small group. It’s not a good feeling.”
A 2013 study released by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights reported that a third of Jews polled in a number of EU countries refrained from wearing religious garb or Jewish symbols out of fear, and 23% avoided attending Jewish events or going to Jewish venues.
While 66% reported anti-Semitism as having a negative affect on their lives, 77% did not bother reporting abuse or harassment.
Following the recent terrorist attacks in Paris Belgian authorities raised their own terror alert levels, advising synagogues to stay closed as law enforcement officials conducted raids and sweeps.
