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The following is an op-ed authored by Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) CEO Sacha Roytman:
I was 14 years old, growing up in Brussels around 1998, when I began noticing something I could not explain at the time.
I was a third-generation descendant of Polish immigrants. Many of the young people around me were second-generation immigrants, particularly from Moroccan families. We lived in the same country, sometimes on the same streets, but something fundamental separated how we saw Belgium.
I felt Belgian. Proudly Belgian. And I still do.
My family embraced Belgium as our country. We adopted its culture, respected its institutions, and felt genuine gratitude toward the country that had welcomed our grandparents. At home, we preserved our Jewish religion, traditions, and history. There was never a contradiction between being Jewish and being Belgian.
But among some of my peers, I encountered a very different attitude. We were ridiculed for embracing Belgian identity and respecting its national symbols. During the World Cup, while we proudly cheered for Belgium, others mocked our patriotism and supported different countries. It was not about football. It reflected a deeper contempt for the country we called home.
The saddest part was that some of these young people made me feel unwelcome in my own country. They mocked us for being white, Jewish, non-Muslim, and proudly Belgian. The irony was striking. I was the grandson of immigrants who had embraced Belgium, yet I was being treated as an outsider by other descendants of immigrants who seemed to reject it.
For years, I struggled to understand what I was witnessing.
These were not terrorists or necessarily religious radicals. They were ordinary young people raised in Europe, attending its schools and speaking its languages. Yet some had absorbed the conviction that their religion and culture were superior to those of the society around them.
Today, I believe this reveals one of the West’s greatest mistakes: we have spent decades searching for extremists while overlooking the normalization of supremacy.
Our institutions learned to identify terrorists, radical preachers, and extremist networks. We invested enormous resources in understanding who might commit violence.
But what about those who reject terrorism while believing that Christians, Jews, and white Europeans are inherently inferior? Who place their religion above democratic law, demand respect for their own culture while showing contempt for others, and openly despise the country in which they were born?
Are we supposed to consider them successfully integrated simply because they have never committed an act of violence?
We have often treated the absence of radicalization as evidence of successful integration. It is not.
We understand this distinction when discussing white supremacy. A white supremacist does not need to join the Ku Klux Klan or commit violence to believe that white people are superior. Such beliefs can be transmitted through families, communities, and everyday social attitudes without becoming organized extremism.
Why have we been so reluctant to examine the same mechanism when it appears as Muslim religious or cultural supremacism?
Supremacy does not require membership in a terrorist organization. It requires only the conviction that one’s group is inherently superior and that others deserve less respect or dignity.
Growing up in Belgium, I witnessed this attitude among some of my Muslim peers. They did not need to be radicals to dismiss Belgian values, ridicule our identity, and show contempt for our way of life. What I could not understand then was how such attitudes had become so normalized that they were barely recognized as expressions of supremacy.
And this raises a fundamental question about integration.
What does integration mean if someone can be born in a Western country, educated there, benefit from its freedoms, and still regard its culture and values as inferior?
Integration cannot simply mean economic participation or citizenship. It must also involve respecting the country’s democratic institutions, its identity, and the equal standing of fellow citizens.
My grandparents did not abandon Judaism to become Belgian. They understood that preserving their identity did not give them the right to reject the identity of their new country.
The Torah teaches, “There shall be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you” (Exodus 12:49). Though written in a different historical and religious context, its principle speaks to a fundamental requirement of coexistence — different communities can preserve their identities while living under a common framework of law and responsibility.
Winston Churchill declared in 1943 that “the price of greatness is responsibility.” For Western democracies, that responsibility includes defending the values that made them free, open, and attractive to generations of immigrants. Tolerance cannot require accepting intolerance, and welcoming different cultures cannot mean abandoning the common principles that allow them to coexist.
Western societies must be willing to confront beliefs that place religious or cultural supremacy above equal citizenship, even when those beliefs are held by people who reject violence entirely. Nearly thirty years after my childhood in Brussels, I finally have an answer to the question I kept asking myself.
The young people who made me feel unwelcome did not need to be extremists to believe they were superior. They only needed to grow up in an environment where contempt for others had become acceptable.
The West cannot confront supremacism by fighting only its most violent manifestations. Nor can it build social cohesion while tolerating the belief that one community is inherently superior to another.
That is the dangerous blind spot Europe’s experience should teach the rest of the Western world to recognize.
