Belgium: the BBC reports that the Belgian government and banks have agreed to pay 5,000 Holocaust survivors, their family members and the Jewish community 35m euros, plus another 75m euros to a trust fund. The money is to compensate Belgian Jews whose property or goods were looted during the German occupation of WWII.
A couple of questions, then.
Firstly, 5,000 claimants are getting an average of euro 7 thousand each. A flat in central Brussels costs around a million euros. In what way is this compensation?
Second: if they weren't paying everyone what they lost, what is going on here? have they just found a low figure, where no one managed to prove they had lost a flat or house but some claims for missing kitchen equipment were accepted? Or did they ignore most of the claims and just paid out a figure they thought was large enough to let them get away with?
Third: the second world war ended 63 years ago. If this money was due why wasn't it paid after all the courts, enquiries and so on?
Fourth: 25,000 Belgian Jews were murdered during the war, not counting the hundreds of thousands who went through in transit, consigned to death by the then Belgian government. Nothing for their families in this amount , I suppose
Fifth: almost all Belgian taxpayers were born after the war ended. In what way are they guilty? Why do they have to pay?
This amount is either not nearly enough, or far too much. In my view there should have been a statute of limitations of at most 25 years. There is no case for the Second World War coming back to haunt us in this way.
And, I've mentioned before, it never seems to be the Germans or Japanese who are guilty, have you noticed?
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