The Free University of Brussels (ULB) has been making headlines in Europe. Law students decided to name their class after Rima Hassan, a French Islamist politician known for her anti-Semitic positions and her apologetics for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. That decision came against the backdrop of countless attacks and threats targeting Jewish students on the Brussels campus.
Has the ULB become a breeding ground for Islamist and anti-Semitic hatred in Europe?
1. Anti-Semitic attacks
May 2024 – Physical assaults against Jewish students at the ULB campus. Jewish students, including the president of the Union of Jewish Students in Belgium, were attacked by pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The victims were first insulted, then beaten. Israel's ambassador to Belgium, Idit Rosenzweig Abu, shared a video of the attack. Incredibly, campus security removed the Jewish students — the victims, not the aggressors — from the premises "for their own safety", without immediately intervening against the attackers. Hundreds of people then demonstrated to denounce this gratuitous and indiscriminate anti-Semitic violence.
June 2024 – A Belgian Jew in her sixties was attacked on the ULB campus, for being Jewish. Anti-Israel activists physically assaulted her during a campus occupation sit-in. She was wounded and lodged a complaint. "A Jewish woman in her sixties, walking her dogs on the ULB campus, was insulted and threatened in Arabic and French by a dozen anti-Semitic activists, who said "Yahudi ['Jew' in Arabic], we'll smash your head and your dogs' too", "dirty bourgeois", "you're an accomplice to genocide", "you'll pay for the others" recounted Joël Rubinfeld, president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism.
Since October 2023, posters denouncing anti-Semitism on campus have been systematically torn down. Any reference to Judaism or Jewish memory is vandalized within an hour. In April 2025, the Union of Jewish Students in Belgium put up hundreds of posters, all defaced the same day.
February 2025 – Jewish students have reported repeated acts of vandalism, physical aggression and anti-Semitic insults in recent months. The climate of hatred and intimidation is so pervasive that, according to them, it is impossible to be Jewish on the ULB campus. One cannot speak or express oneself as Jewish — or simply be Jewish. Just being a Jew is condemned and subjected to violence.
2. Presence of the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkish Islamists (since the 2010s)
According to an academic analysis published by ULB itself in 2024, the Muslim Brotherhood (an international Sunni Islamist movement, designated extremist and terrorist by several European and Arab countries) and Turkish Islamists (linked to organizations such as Milli Görüş) have infiltrated youth and university movements at ULB.
They exploit issues such as wearing a veil, religious accommodations (such as halal slaughter), and political Islam to promote greater visibility for Islam. They recruit freely on campus through student associations, debates on Muslim identity and attacks on secularism. Their aim appears to be to encourage the most exclusive form of Muslim separatism, in direct contradiction with ULB's founding principles of free inquiry and rejection of religious dogma.
3. Muslim Student Circle (or Muslim Youth) and "clandestine" prayers (since at least 2015, broadened, amplified in 2023)
Groups of Muslim students at ULB, often affiliated with the Federation of Muslim Youth in Belgium (FJM), organize daily collective prayers (salat, the five obligatory prayers: Fajr, Dhuhr, 'Asr, Maghrib, 'Icha), in defiance of ULB's secular rules. These practices are both religious affirmations and identity claims, deliberately contravening the secular foundations of the institution.
For 15 years, prayers have been held in improvised spaces — corridors, staircases of the Solbosch Library, or outdoors — with rugs, veils and invocation texts. In 2023, a video published by the Belgian press revealed a clandestine prayer room inside the ULB. The rector, Annemie Schaus, described them as "spontaneous movements" — a polite way of acknowledging tacit tolerance by the university authorities.
Tellingly, however, ULB has always refused to grant prayer spaces for other religions.
4. BDS-ULB (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) Circle since 2012, active in 2015 and beyond
This pro-Palestinian student group, affiliated with the international BDS movement — whose objective is to boycott to try to eradicate Israel, has been officially recognized at ULB since 2012.
In 2015, BDS installed an "apartheid wall" on Avenue Paul Héger, plastered with slogans such as "Fascists, Zionists – you are the terrorists". Jewish students were directly targeted for being Jews. Despite repeated warnings from Jewish and secular movements, the demonstrators there are allowed to act freely. Their activism has since incorporated openly Islamist demands, including solidarity with Hamas after the October 2023 pogrom, under the guise of "anti-imperialist" rhetoric -- despite Israel having been anti-colonialist, combatting the British Mandate there until Israeli independence in 1948.
5. Université Populaire de Bruxelles (UPB) and pro-Palestinian occupations (since 2024)
This radical student movement, inspired by Marxist and pro-Palestinian rhetoric, maintains links with Islamist groups such as Samidoun (a network supporting Palestinian prisoners, and a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and aligned with Hamas, both classified as terrorist organizations by the EU). Samidoun is designated in Belgium as a left-wing extremist group and a threat by OCAM (Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis). Samidoun is also officially recognized as a terrorist entity in Germany and Canada.
From May 7 to June 25, 2024, UPB-Samidoun occupied Building B of ULB (renamed "Walid Daqqa", after a PFLP terrorist convicted of kidnapping and murder). Their demands: ending ULB-Israel partnerships, denouncing the "genocide in Gaza". Conferences were hosted, featuring figures such as Khaled Barakat and Mohammed Khatib, who are close to the PFLP. Slogans included "From the river to the sea" (explicitly calling for the eradication of Israel) and calls for "intifada".
Jewish students were attacked, with damage estimated at €500,000 to €700,000. The occupation, lasting seven weeks, was ended only by a police evacuation in June 2024. All the same, under pressure, ULB had already suspended its collaborations with Israeli universities in May 2024.
6. Promotion of hatred: Rima Hassan
In August 2025, ULB approved the decision of law students to name their class "Rima Hassan" — after a French Member of the European Parliament who is openly anti-Semitic, a supporter of Hamas after the October 2023 pogrom, and who incites hatred and even violence against dissenting voices, including Muslims opposed to her views.
Finally, when Alain Destexhe, long-time Belgian Senator, sought to shed light on this choice by pointing to demographic developments at ULB, citing around twenty first names — without surnames — the university immediately, the same day, filed a complaint against him for "incitement to hatred". It is questionable how the observation of a demographic evolution — neither good nor bad in itself, but simply factual — could be construed as "hateful". So much for "free inquiry", the motto of the ULB.
Conclusion
Out of conviction or cowardice, the Free University of Brussels seems to have chosen the path of complicity with Islamist anti-Semitism.
Voices are now calling on the Belgian authorities and the European Union (notably within the Erasmus program) to take the necessary measures, including the complete withdrawal of funding.
Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of The Green Reich (2020).
