The Brusselmans saga. In his latest column he talks about how futile he thinks it is to express your anger and he meekly announces he will take a step back from the way of the world. Meanwhile fellow Humo columnist Arnon Grunberg has quit writing for the magazine (readers will miss him so, so, so very much…) because he doesn’t want to write for a magazine that allows someone to repeat lines straight out of SS songs. Brusselmans landed in hot water last week for denouncing the Israeli violence in Gaza and got sued by a Jewish. So for once he took a stand and then one week later he already goes back to writing about sweet little nothings like iced latte… Arnon’s reaction is also typically childish, instead of having a debate, he just quits. He does for once say something interesting: he slams Humo for being a magazine that does nothing else than talk about music festivals and does boring human interest stuff. The first 24 years of my life this magazine found its way to my home on a weekly basis and it had something of a cult status, it was naughty, promoted experimental humor, it was a little provocative and helped to put the topic of sex on the map in Flanders. Now sex is a daily staple of every Flemish newspaper and Humo has become something like a 50 year old who never grew up and keeps trying to be cool at student parties on weekends. It usually only tries to get Flemish ‘celebrities’ to confess something a little kinky about their sex life. So kudos to Arnon for finally stating that in public, because Humo is never criticized. Well, it’s also never praised anymore. It’s simply not talked about.

It took one of its writers to stand up for Gaza and against genocide for a most courageous and heartfelt 5 minutes for Humo to even be mentioned again. I don’t think Arnon will hurt his career by quitting his Humo column, quitting gets him attention, his column doesn’t. Grunberg suggests Humo fills all of its pages with Gaza. If it ever does I will buy this stale derivative of Playboy for the first time in about 20 years.

Am sure the Palestinians will wish to thank Brusselmans for empathizing with their suffering for 5 minutes, in the silliest way possible, because instead of saying he would plunge a knife into a zionist if his son were to end up covered under rubble in Gaza, he used the word Jew, which is of course amateurish, because many Jews oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Am very sure Brusselmans is not an anti-semite, but yeah, probably it’s for the best if he sticks to writing novels in which nothing ever happens.

Am sure he would make a fine connoisseur of iced lattes.

As to Arnon, I once read his book about how he went to Afghanistan, and went to one of his lectures in Gent, somewhere anno 2008, and yeah, I think that the world will be just fine without his Humo column.

Luckily there are amazing voices on what is happening in Gaza, like Abby Martin, Lee Camp, Aaron Mate, Kim Iversen, Max Blumenthal and many others.

If someone wants to find an authority, in Dutch, on this issue they can always turn to Ludo De Brabander, who works for VZW Vrede (NGO Peace). See picture.