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Israeli Ambassador Incensed That Deaf Belgians Can Identify Jews By Their Often Distinctive Noses

Israel’s embassy in Belgium on Tuesday condemned a hook-nosed gesture in a Belgian university’s sign-language dictionary that refers to “Jews”:

“The Embassy of #Israel expresses its shock and dismay following the ugly initiative of creating a new sign in Flemish sign language for ‘Jew’: a hooked nose. Its sole purpose is the promotion of #AntiSemitic stereotypes,” the embassy wrote on Twitter alongside a Times of Israel report on the gesture.

Emmanuel Nahshon, Israel’s ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg and former Foreign Ministry spokesperson, posted a video of the gesture on Twitter Tuesday.

This is sickening. Beyond words,” he wrote.

The European Jewish Association on Monday protested in a statement the gesture’s inclusion in online videos on the website of the dictionary, which was compiled in conjunction with the University of Ghent. In a letter to the rector, it demanded the clips be removed.

The first videos, that function as sign language definitions for Jew, “seem standard,” the Association’s director, Menachem Margolin, wrote in the statement. Both videos show a presenter stroking an imaginary beard.

“The second involving side-locks are borderline acceptable if misleading, and the last two are simply racist and demeaning to Jews, using a gesticulation of a large and hooked nose to define Jew,” he added.

Margolin was told about the videos by a Jewish family who had been looking up sign-language gestures online.

In a letter Monday to the rector of the university Margolin asked that campus authorities remove the two gestures from their dictionary.

“If the aim of this project was to embellish or add to the standard definition, it has certainly managed to so, in the most stereotypical and racist way imaginable, by focusing on side-locks and worse still gesticulating a hooked nose to describe a Jew,” Margolin wrote.

“We certainly hope that such stereotypes do not reflect the policy of the university, nor your students,” he continued.

According to the EJA, the online dictionary of Flemish sign language gestures is nearly a decade and a half old.

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So Jews are not offended by the “stereotype” that Jews commonly have beards, despite the fact that most Jews do not wear beards.  You are much more likely to meet a Jew with a large nose than you are a Jew with a beard, considering not many Jewish women have beards, but a lot of them have, let’s say, “distinctive” or “prominent” noses, so much so that many plastic surgeons have become multi-millionaires by changing their characteristically large and unflattering noses.

The fact that Jewish women and even young girls commonly get nose jobs is proof that they are tacitly acknowledging that their noses are, in fact, large and ugly, yet when was the last time you heard a Jewish woman accused of antisemitism for getting a nose job?  Why are Jews demanding that we don’t see their ugly noses, and that we pretend that Jews themselves don’t think they are ugly enough to get them surgically altered?  Sadly, these arrogant demands for us to ignore reality are far more ugly than their actual noses.

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