Frisbee tournament put on ice in Belgium over Israeli team’s participation
Sporting event’s delay coincides with controversy over a columnist’s confession about wanting to stab Jews over Gaza
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
Following an act of anti-Israel vandalism at a sports venue in Belgium, local authorities on Tuesday paused an international frisbee tournament, preventing hundreds of athletes, as well as 33 Israeli ones, from competing.
The delay in the opening of the European Ultimate Junior Championships Under 17 in De Pinte village in Belgium follows the splashing on Monday of red paint and the scrawling of the words “boycott Israhell now” on a wall of the intended for the pan-European frisbee tournament, De Standaard newspaper reported. The municipality decided it could not guarantee the participants’ safety, preventing the matches from taking place.
The act, whose perpetrators have not been identified, follows agitation in recent days on social networks against the participation of the Israeli team alongside delegations from 10 additional countries. The De Pinte municipality postponed the tournament indefinitely, and it is not yet known whether the event will take place.
The tournament, whose main organizer is the European Ultimate Federation, was already moved to De Pinte from Gent following security concerns related to the Israeli delegation.
A spokesperson of the Israel delegation in Belgium said it is not speaking to the media in order to minimize security risks.
Separately, a Belgian columnist, Herman Brusselmans, is under fire for writing in his Sunday column (in Flemish) that he feels the urge “to shove a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew I see” because of images of children suffering in Gaza. Brusselmans also said that “not all Jews are murderous scumbags” in his column in Humo.
On X, the Transatlantic Institute of the American Jewish Committee called Brusselmans’ column “outrageous incitement to antisemitic violence” and urged “the Belgian police to prosecute him and the entire editorial team responsible” for the text.
Israel is regularly accused of committing genocide against Palestinians at anti-Israel rallies in Belgium following October 7, when Hamas terrorists killed some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted another 251. The onslaught prompted Israel to invade Gaza with the stated goal of dismantling Hamas and retrieving its hostages.
Some 40,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza as a result of the Israeli offensive, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza. The statistics are unvetted and do not distinguish between civilians and terrorists, of whom Israel says it has killed about 15,000.
