Two people have been jailed in Belgium for screening what they described as “funny cartoons that you can find everywhere on the internet”, adding the images were, “Sharp and a little over the edge, but humorous.”
The two men, the owner and manager of a bar in Leuven, showed the memes accompanied by text including: “My generation had Wonder Woman. Your generation has, Wonder if it’s a Woman,” on big screens of the building’s facade during a summer event.
They have each received six months in jail and of fine of €4,000 for the offences, which the judge described as hurtful and stigmatising.
“Due to the severe criminal record of the two defendants, the court considered a six-month prison sentence and a fine of 4,000 euros appropriate,” he said.
The case came after members of the far-left communist party, PVDA, who were in the bar at the time, saw the images and made a formal complaint.
PVDA member Toon Melis said of the offences: “We couldn’t believe our own eyes. We saw the messages appearing on the screens. There were texts like ‘Better cows on the pasture than another asylum seeker in the mixture,’ and ‘My generation had Wonder Woman. Your generation has, Wonder if it’s a Woman.’
“Those messages are downright insulting to a large part of the Leuven population,” Melis added.
The two men admitted they had played the images on the bar screens but asked for an acquittal arguing that the content was not criminal. “We projected the memes on the screens as a change from the duller advertising, to keep our customers interested,” they claimed.
“We laugh at everyone, but nowadays, apparently, you are only allowed to make jokes about good, white citizens,” they added.
Among the images that prompted proceedings were those of a foreign family wearing clothes with anti-theft tags still attached, accompanied by the text: “Yes yes, we went shopping again.” Another showed the Flemish lion with the text: “Black Lions Matter.”
The two men were not convicted for presenting images regarding sexuality and orientation, which if regarded as potentially criminal, fall under a different set of legal interpretations not covered in this case.
One member of the PVDA said the verdict “makes clear that such things have no place in our society”.
However, Conservative politicians expressed concern at the two mens’ sentences.
Following the convictions, former MP Dries Van Langenhove said on Twitter that the two were more harshly punished than some paedophiles and gang rapists had been, referring to a case from 2021 where six men convicted of gang-raping a girl received suspended sentences with a condition that they write an essay about equality between men and women.
Vlaams Belang politician, Sam van Rooy, deemed the two barmens’ verdict “creepy” and said: “We are evolving towards a totalitarian society where the freedom of speech is dead and buried.”
Earlier, the centre-right N-VA party had demanded a “restoration of the freedom of speech” and called for what it described as hate speech to be tried under criminal law.
