A 22-year-old Muslim woman from Belgium whose picture went viral after she posed defiantly in front of anti-Islam protesters is under fire for anti-Israel posts she made in 2012 and 2014 on her Facebook and Twitter pages.
Zakia Belkhiri’s took a selfie picture against the backdrop of far-right demonstrators in Antwerp last week and was heralded as a symbol for peace and anti-racism.
However, it has now emerged that Belkhiri posted a series of anti-Semitic messages on social media in the past. In a tweet posted in November 2012, she wrote: "Hitler didn't kill all the Jews, he left some. So we know why he was killing them."
In a Facebook post from March 2014, she used a swear word to describe Jews before adding: "I hate them so much."
As news of her anti-Semitic rants spread online, Belkhiri deleted all her accounts, but later returned to Twitter to justify her remarks: "My opinion many years ago was meant on the Zionist back then, that spread hate instead of love, so to all the other Jews peace be upon you!"
Belkhiri told the BBC that she wanted to stage the photo at the rally not as “a protest at all” but to “share joy and peace." She added she wanted "to show that things can be different. And that we can live together, not next to each other but with each other".
