A Jewish antisemite returns to the scene

The current row involving the Belgian foreign minister, the Israeli foreign minister and the U.S. ambassador to Brussels over the ongoing Belgian police investigation into three mohels reveals a great deal about how antisemitism functions these days.

In a torrid social-media exchange, both Bill White, Washington’s envoy to Belgium, and Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s foreign minister, told Belgium’s top diplomat, Maxime Prévot, that the episode reeked of Jew-baiting. Prévot responded indignantly, reeling off a list of reasons why Belgium—where more than 1,600 antisemitic incidents were recorded in 2023, most of them after the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel—is actually a safe and welcoming place for Jews.

Largely unnoticed in Prévot’s response was his observation that the police probe into the mohels “was initiated following a complaint by a member of the Jewish community itself, concerning a specific medical practice.” (That practice, incidentally, is known as metzitzah b’peh, and it involves sucking the blood from the penises of newly circumcised baby boys, potentially exposing them to infections like herpes. The Belgian mohels, corroborated by eyewitnesses, deny carrying out this practice at the brit milahs—circumcisions of eight-day-old male infants in accordance with Jewish law—that they performed.)

Who, then, was the Jew who submitted the complaint? What was he trying to achieve by drawing attention—at a time of rising antisemitism rippling across the world—to a ritual long abandoned by the vast majority of Jews and only practised by a small number of Chassidic sects? Is he regarded by his fellow Jews, as Prévot asserted, as a “member of the Jewish community”? The answers to those questions shed critical light on this troubling episode.

His name is Moshe Aryeh Friedman. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., into the Satmar Chassidic community, Friedman has been a resident of Europe for more than 20 years. He pretends to be a rabbi, but there is no record of his ordination.

The headline with Friedman is that, despite his side curls, his kippah and his traditional dress code, he is a vile Holocaust denier. He became briefly famous in 2006, when he attended the notorious Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran and was photographed engaging in what looked like a passionate kiss with then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Standing alongside such luminaries as former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the late French Nazi sympathiser Robert Faurisson, Friedman preposterously claimed that the figure of 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis was in fact a prophecy announced decades before the Shoah by Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. The true figure of Jewish dead, he said, was closer to 1 million.

“Politically and historically, the land of Palestine doesn’t belong to the Jews and should be returned to Palestinians,” Friedman then declared, underlining his anti-Zionist credentials as well as his antisemitic ones.

Less than a year later, he had the temerity to turn up at the site of the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland. While there, he was spotted by a group of Chassidim visiting from Israel. They gave him a good hiding, removing his coat and hat so that he would not appear to others as a devout Jew.

If Friedman possessed an ounce of humility, he would have taken the beating as a sign to remove himself from public life. But his desire to remain in the public eye was overwhelming, as his antics over the next decade demonstrated.

In 2009, he cynically attempted to make amends with the Orthodox community but was rebuffed. He then moved to the Belgian city of Antwerp, where a significant Chassidic community lives, and found himself ostracised. His response, of course, was to lash out again at the Jewish community, levelling an accusation in 2013 that the murder of an Orthodox Jew in the city nine years earlier was the result of a conspiracy by Antwerp’s Jewish leadership.

In an interview the following year, Friedman compared the Orthodox Jewish community to ISIS, claiming that Antwerp’s Jewish schools were churning out graduates to go and fight with the IDF in Gaza. Then, in 2018, he made the headlines again over his close association with Kaoutar Fal, a Moroccan woman deemed a national security risk by Belgian intelligence.

Given this appalling record of lies and fantasies, it beggars belief that, in 2026, the Belgian authorities would deem Friedman’s complaint against the mohels credible enough to launch a police investigation.

The reason for that goes far beyond Friedman himself. Antisemitism has always been a composite of distinct but interrelated elements. One of these is “anti-Judaism,” which recycles Christian and Muslim libels against aspects of Jewish belief and practice deemed uniquely evil.

In post-Enlightenment Europe, it was these aspects that were held up by secular and religious antisemites alike as proof of Judaism’s supposedly backward, anti-gentile essence. Both shechita (the ritual slaughter and koshering of meat fit for consumption by observant Jews) and the commandment of circumcision for infant Jewish males have, as a consequence, undergone regular attacks in public debates notable for the fury directed at those defending halachah, Jewish law.

Commenting on the 2012 call signed by 600 German doctors urging a ban on circumcision as an inhumane practice, Dieter Graumann, the former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, pointed out that the “circumcision debate sometimes turned very hostile, which was not rationally explicable. Nowhere else in the world was this issue debated with such sharpness, coldness and sometimes brutal intolerance.”

Belgium, too, has shown similar levels of intolerance, as evidenced by its effective ban on shechita in 2017, on the grounds that preventing an animal from being stunned prior to its slaughter caused it unnecessary suffering. That decision created an environment ripe for exploitation by charlatans like Friedman, who take advantage of pre-existing suspicions around Jewish law to level their defamatory claims.

It’s therefore not surprising that Prévot accepted Friedman’s charges against the mohels at face value, ignoring the years he spent in attempts to endanger a Jewish community which, rightly, no longer accepts him as a member.

As ambassador White correctly pointed out, circumcision is performed in all “civilised countries” as a legal procedure. “It’s 2026, you need to get into the 21st century and allow our brethren Jewish families in Belgium to legally exercise their religious freedoms,” he emphasised.

The alternative is to allow moral criminals like Friedman to set the terms of the debate, thereby ensuring that Jewish life outside Israel becomes even less secure.