Law students of the class of 2025 at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) voted last week to name their class after controversial politician Rima Hassan, the rector of the university announced on Thursday.
Hassan is a French-Palestinian politician with the La France Insoumise (LFI) party. She has, on many occasions, said that Hamas’s cause is legitimate and has made statements such as that the Bibas family was not murdered; supporting the October 7 Hamas massacre; and arguing that any European Palestinian should be allowed to join the “resistance.”
Hassan was blocked from entering Israel in February 2025 due to her history of anti-Israel activities. Then in June 2025, Hassan, alongside seven pro-Palestinian activists, was detained aboard the Madleen Freedom Flotilla, which tried to reach the Gaza Strip by sea.
The ULB rector acknowledged that the decision to honor Hassan has sparked a “great deal of emotion, reactions, and even insults and threats,” but stressed that this was not an institutional or faculty-level decision “but a decision made democratically by the students themselves.” Hassan received 42% of the vote.
The rector went on to say that ULB students have been deeply outraged by the “horrific situation faced by Palestinians,” and the “ongoing indifference of our governments and leaders.” While the rector welcomed some of the criticism around the decision, she said other criticisms showed “contempt, ignorance, and at times even overt racism.”
She went on to vaguely condemn the publication on social media of the list of first names of those students who voted for Hassan, saying that this could “jeopardize the future careers of these young graduates.”
What the rector was alluding to here was a post by Belgian politician Alain Destexhe following the announcement about Hassan.
Destexhe put forward a hypothesis on X/Twitter that “the demographic shift in Brussels is partly behind this choice,” adding that “the Arab-Muslim community tends to reflect its identity, values, and concerns.”
To illustrate the trend, Destexhe published the first names of the law master’s students 2023/2024 without surnames. “A very significant portion is now of Arab-Muslim origin, mirroring the Brussels population,” he wrote. “Rima Hassan’s choice is also explained by the composition of the students in the master’s program in law at ULB.”
Antisemitic prejudice more widespread among Muslims in Belgium
Alain Destexhe went on to cite a study by the Brussels-based Jonathas Institute, which found that antisemitic prejudice is more widespread among Muslims than in the rest of the Belgian population.
“Forty-three percent of Muslim Belgians think that ‘Belgian Jews are not really Belgians like the others,’ and 28% of Muslim Belgians believe that there are too many Jews in Belgium,” he said.
Following the post, ULB decided to take legal action against Destexhe for hate incitement and violation of privacy.
Destexhe defended his post: “First names obviously don’t identify people, there’s no stigmatization of anyone in my tweet. To assert the contrary is a totally illogical reasoning. Since 7 October 2023, the ULB has tolerated the worst manifestations of antisemitism on the ULB campus, including, for seven weeks, the occupation of premises in the name of a Palestinian terrorist. It is the ULB that puts Jews in danger on its campus and sends them back “to the worst hours in history.”
In May 2024, the Pro-Palestinian People’s University of Brussels group occupied Free University of Brussels’ Building B and renamed it after deceased Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist Walid Daqqah.
Police did not clear the anti-Israel protest encampments until seven weeks later. On the same day, a Jewish woman alleged that she had been threatened and pelted with objects by student activists.
ULB has suspended its partnerships with Israeli universities – specifically Tel Aviv University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem – but has announced it is strengthening its ties with Birzeit University in Ramallah, where students supported Hamas in student elections.
Several high-profile individuals, such as lawyer Arno Klarsfeld and former minister Bernard Kouchner, published an open letter in Belgian media saying, “Rima Hassan, like her friends at LFI, has never condemned Hamas, which she considers to be the legitimate armed wing of what she outrageously calls (...) the ‘resistance’ of the Palestinians.”
Similarly, Bernard Cohen-Haddad, president of the Etienne Marcel think tank, told CNEWS on Friday that ULB choosing Hassan as patron shows “Antisemitism is no longer a shameful thing, but a normality, even a sign of bravery.”
Hassan herself wrote on X that she was honored to be named patron, adding that “What bothers this small, bourgeois, paternalistic, self-righteous class – who represent no one but themselves and of whom the overwhelming majority have excused and justified the genocide of the Palestinians – is that the person (and through her, the cause) they’ve been trying to silence for two years is now finally being acknowledged and praised for her commitment.”
“That is unbearable for them, and so their pitiful agitation can be understood; their world is crumbling before their eyes. Thanks for the show.”