A complaint has been lodged against a teacher of a Brussels high school for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks in the classroom.
According to Belgian daily newspaper La Derniere Heure, which broke the story, the 16-year-old Jewish female student complained that the mathematics teacher fixed her in the eyes and said: ‘’ “We should put you all on freight wagons.”
The teacher also reportedly told another student with a Polish-sounding last name to “go back to Poland” while imitating a German accent.
The student, according to the report, told the teacher that “one does not joke about such subjects.” The student's father wrote to the school principal and the teacher was summoned to give an explanation. Four days after the incident, the teacher said publicly at school, “I did not mean to say it, and I apologized to anyone shocked by it.”
But the father considered this insufficient apology and lodged a complaint, with the support of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, to the Police.
'' These words violate the sanctuary that a school should be,'' said Fawzia Hariche, Brussels Deputy Mayor in charge of education. She asked for a report on the incident which might be followed by sanctions against the teacher.