Motorist who drove around with license plate ‘7 Oktobr’ causes indignation: « This is deeply outrageous »
A car that drove around until last week with the license plate ‘7 Oktobr’, apparently a reference to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, causes indignation in the Wetstraat. « This is outrageous. We are going to encourage the Minister of Mobility to find out how this could happen, » responds MR chairman Georges-Louis Bouchez.
The French -speaking newspaper La Dernière Heure Know that the Brussels-West police zone was already preparing an official report about the offensive license plate at the end of April. According to our information, the license plate would also have been withdrawn. However, this cannot prevent the mention of 7 October causing a fuss, because that date goes down in history as the day on which the Palestinian extremist organization Hamas killed around 1,200 people at the Israeli Supernova music festival and other Israeli places near the Gaza Strip. The attack was therefore the largest mass murder of Jews since the end of the Second World War. The date also marks the start of the bloody war between Israel and Hamas, with more than 50,000 Palestinians being killed according to figures from Hamas.
MR chairman Georges-Louis Bouchez in particular expresses his indignation that the application for the registration number plate has received the green light from the Registration Service (DIV). « This is deeply outrageous. Normally, personalized number plates are not allowed to justify terrorism. That is entirely the case here, » Bouchez responds to the colleagues of La Dernière Heure. “We are going to the Minister of Mobility (Jean-Luc Crucke from Les Engagés, ed.) Encourage to find out how this got along the DIV. «
Georges-Louis Bouchez. – © Belga/Belpress
“This is deeply outrageous. Normally, personalized number plates are not allowed to justify terrorism. That is entirely the case here”
Georges-Louis Bouchez
Chairman MR
According to the liberal, the number plate in question is a striking example for the way in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is imported to our country. « Of course you can criticize a government, but I always urge a distinction between the current Israeli government and the Jews in our country, who should be able to live in complete safety. And it is clear that you should think a bit about how a Jew would be able to take a car with registration number ‘7 October’, says Bouchez, who also points out several MR-Mersmers.
Double control
Personalized number plates have risen sharply in popularity in recent years, despite the cost of 1,000 euros. However, if you want to personalize a license plate, you must take into account a number of limitations. There is also a blacklist of combinations that are prohibited. For example, a license plate may not be offensive, discriminatory, xenophobic or racist in nature, contain an open political reference or glorify terrorism, not even indirectly or implicitly.
The latter, however, seems to be the case with ‘7 Oktobbr’. However, the DIV has a double control mechanism for filtering inappropriate license plates. Firstly, a number of combinations, such as ‘Hitler’ or ‘Nazi’, are automatically refused. In addition, there is also a human control on the applications that the computer system does not stop.
Whether that human control was inadequate in this case is not entirely clear, since the FPS mobility does not go into individual files and cannot indicate whether the license plate was already registered before 7 October 2023. It is also difficult to find out the intentions of people driving around with an ‘inappropriate’ license plate, it sounds to the FPS. The holder of the license plate will get a new number plate and must hand in the old one, which would have happened according to our information.
