There seems to be a fair bit of waffle coming out of Belgium these days (not the tasty kind), and now there is more – a minister’s adviser on tolerance being outed as rather intolerant.
A Belgian official who compared Israel to Nazi Germany and the Islamic State is no longer employed as a minister’s adviser on tolerance.
Youssef Kobo, the adviser on diversity for the minister in charge of equal opportunity in the regional government of Brussels, offered to resign after finding he could no longer fulfill his duties, a ministry spokesperson told the HLN news website on Monday.
Last month, Kobo apologized for his vitriol against Israel, which he said was a modern Nazi Germany and “an identical twin” of the Islamic State terrorist group.
The Muslim official said he was “young and stupid” when he wrote the Facebook posts in 2014, which Kobo said he “regrets,” the La Capitale daily reported. The newspaper had contacted Kobo, 28, following criticism by the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism.
However, in recent days the Belgian media discovered earlier tweets in which Kobo proposed to slaughter activists working to prevent the ritual slaughter of animals.
“What if we compromise on slaughtering Gaia-activists instead of sheep?” he wrote, later dismissing the post as an inappropriate joke. Gaia is the mythological spirit of Earth.
Kobo had referenced the Islamic State in posting a caricature of Israel cutting the throat of the Gaza Strip, where Israel in the summer of 2014 carried out strikes against the Hamas terrorist group. Kobo said of a video of Israeli troops: “21st century Nazis.”
He told La Capitale that he was “very emotional” following the strikes in Gaza, which followed rocket fire by Hamas on Israel.
Normally when I hear of these stories, I race to social media to look for the offending tweets and posts, only to find they have been deleted. And this seems to be the case, with the ones that seem to have landed him in trouble.
But perhaps surprisingly, he has left up many other disgusting tweets, especially those in which he makes disgusting Holocaust comparisons.
There’s also this one in which he seems indifferent to the plight of the Jews fleeing the Holocaust.
And another one in which he compares us to ISIS.
So in addition to being a hatemonger, Kobo just doesn’t seem particularly smart. Unless he deliberately left up those tweets because he really is not contrite.
Either way, my advice to him is don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
